"Pleasure, sex, and politics belong together": Post-holocaust memory and the sexual revolution in West Germany

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 393-443

  Herzog, Dagmar ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 4243729903     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448879     Document Type: Article

References (176)

1. Arno Plack, Die Gesellsclaft und das Bose: Eine Kritik der herrschenden Moral (Munich, 1967), p. 309
2. hereafter abbreviated G; and Volkmar Sigusch, "Editorial," Sexualität Konkret 5 (1984): 4
3. The best recent English-language histories of the West German New Left are in Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton, NJ., 1991)
4. Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green, and Beyond (Cambridge, 1993)
5. and Sabine von Dirke, "All Power to the Imagination!": The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln, Nebr., 1997)
6. See also William David Graf, The German Left since 1945: Socialism and Social Democracy in the German Federal Republic (Cambridge, 1976)
7. Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will, Protest and Democracy in West Germany: Extra-Parliamentary Opposition and the Democratic Agenda (New York, 1988)
8. and (the rather hostile) Julian Becker, Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang (London, 1989). Interesting German-language histories can be found in Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden: Studentenrevolte -zehn Jahre danach (Reinbek, 1977), and CheSchahShit: Die Sechziger Jahre zwischen Cocktail und Molotov, ed. Eckhard Siepmann et al. (Berlin, 1984). CheSchahShit is an exception to the general rule; many of the essays engage in detail with various dimensions of the sexual revolution. Two other valuable beginning efforts to write histories of the sexual revolution are Ulrike Heider, "Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion: Zum Sexualitä tsbegriff der 60er und 80er Jahre," in Sadomasochislen, Keusche, und Romantiker: Vom Mythos neuer Sinnlichkeit, ed. Heider (Reinbek, 1986)
9. and Ulf Preuss-Lausitz, "Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden Körper," in Preuss-Lausitz et al., Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder: Zur Sozialisationsgeschichte seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Weinheim, 1989)
10. There is now so much literature on the politics of post-Holocaust memory that there are already excellent English-language metahistories analyzing the evolution of the scholarship. For some outstanding recent examples, see Michael Geyer, "The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany," in Radical Evil, ed. Joan Copjec (London, 1996), pp. 169-200
11. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York, 1996)
12. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Oxford, 1994)
13. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
14. and Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990). Meanwhile, although in this context sexual politics per se have not been studied, the relationship between the politics of memory and gender politics is starting to come into focus. Two superb recent examples on the immediate postwar period are Atina Grossmann, "Unfortunate Germany: Victims, Victors, and Survivors at War's End, Germany 1945-1950" (Working Paper: Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1995), and Elizabeth Heineman, "The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany's 'Crisis Years' and West German National Identity," American Historical Review 101 (Apr. 1996): 354-95
15. See Heinz Bude, Das Ahern einer Generation: Die Jahrgänge 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt, 1995), esp. pp. 17-22 and 41-42
16. Most scholarly efforts thus far to analyze the cultural moments in which the themes of sex and Holocaust have been brought into connection have involved a critique of the grotesque ways Holocaust imagery has been put to use for titillating effect (both in ventures explicitly self-defined as pornographic, and in a broader array of both mass and high cultural documents like films and novels which style themselves as having a morally weighty message to convey); the need to think about the conjunction of these themes also in other ways forms the subject of this essay. See especially Joan Smith, "Holocaust Girls," in Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice (New York, 1991), pp. 42-60
17. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "The Fascination of Abomination," in Imagining Hitler (Bloomington, Ind., 1985)
18. Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York, 1984)
19. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, "Smut and Anti-Semitism," in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History (New York, 1977), pp. 216-24
20. and (for a contrasting perspective) Jean-Pierre Geuens, "Pornography and the Holocaust: The Last Transgression," Film Critìcism 20 (Fall-Winter 1996): 114-30. For crucial efforts to think through the problematic relationship between self-understood antifascism and sexualized representations of fascism (though not the Holocaust), see Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford, Calif, 1996)
21. Linda Mizejewski, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, NJ., 1992)
22. Silke Wenk, "Hin-weg-sehen oder: Faschismus, Normalität, und Sexismus," in Erbeutete Sinne: Nachlräge zur Berliner Ausstellung "Inszenierung der Macht, asthetische Faszination im Faschismus," ed. Klaus Behnken and Frank Wagner (Berlin, 1988), pp. 17-32
23. For a compelling attempt to begin making sense of the pornographization of the Holocaust in Israel, see Bartov, "Kitsch and Sadism in Ka-Tzetnik's Other Planet: Israeli Youth Imagine the Holocaust," Jewish Social Studies 3 (Winter 1997): 42-76
24. For a particularly classic example of a survivor memoir widely read in West Germany at the time and conveying precisely this message, see Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them, trans. Heinz Narden (1947; New York, 1975)
25. see esp. the chapter on "The Psychology of the SS," pp. 258-71.
26. For a flavor of the kind of titillating messages about the perpetrators' virility put out in the mainstream media, see Heinz Höhne, "Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf: Die Geschichte der SS," Der Spiegel, 14 Nov. 1966, pp. 94-107
27. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, "Vorbemerkung," Das Argument 32 (1965): 30-31
28. Reinhart Westphal, "Psychologische Theoriern über den Faschismus," Das Argument 32 (1965): 31, 34, 37, 38
29. See Heider, "Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion," pp. 92-109, esp. p. 94
30. Compare for example Haug, review of Society and Evil, by Plack, Das Argument 56 (1970): 49-53
31. Another variation on this theme was to present sex as being as bad as murder. A classic instance of this rhetorical strategy was offered by the Christian Democratic politician Hermann Kraemer in 1964. Kraemer declared that a movie containing a few moments of masturbation and sexual intercourse (Ingmar Bergman's The Silence) reflected "the same spiritual stance" as "the concentration camp Auschwitz." Referring explicitly to the trial of Auschwitz perpetrators taking place in those days in Frankfurt, he contended that "the degradation of the human is nowhere so clear at this moment than in this trial. This degradation of the human finds its continuation in the sexual acrobatics of the Swedish filmmaker" (quoted in Heinz Ungureit, "Bernkastels Landrat vergleicht 'Das Schweigen' mit Auschwitz," Frankfurter Rundschau, 24 June 1964, p. 22)
32. Siepmann, "Genital versus Prägenital: Die Grossväter der sexuellen Revolution," in CheSchahShit, p. 101
33. Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden, p. 159. On Reich's extraordinary significance for the 68ers, and on how his ideas were interpreted, see also Reimut Reiche, "Sexuelle Revolution-Erinnerungan einen Mythos," in Die Früchte der Revoke: Über die Veränderung der polilischen Kultur durch die Studentenbewegung (Berlin, 1988), pp. 55-57
34. Dietrich Haensch, Repressive Familienpolitik: Sexualunterdrückung als Miltel der Politik (Reinbek, 1969), pp. 14, 12, 66, 67
35. Haug, "Sexuelle Verschwörung des Spätkapitalismus?" Neue Kritik 51-52 (1969): 87
36. and Dieter Duhm, Angst im Kapitalismus: Zweiter Versuch der gesellschafilichen Begründung zwischenmenschlicher Angst in der kapilalisίischen Warengesellschaft (Lampertheim, 1972), p. 100
37. hereafter abbreviated AK. Compare also the self-evidence with which these ideas about "the relationship between deformed sexuality and fascism" and how "specifically the petty bourgeois are receptive for the insanity of fascism due to a repressive sexual morality" are presented in Karl W. Pawek, "Im Dritten Reich der Sinne," Konkret (Aug. 1978): 44
38. Strikingly, the brilliant and respected left historian Detlev Peukert would make a similar move in his influential Inside Nazi Germany, drawing on Theweleit (who else?) to buttress his suggestion that there was a direct connection between Himmler's early sexual hangups (including a deep-seated distress in the face of pornography and a profound hostility to premarital sex) and his leadership role in the machinery of genocide. That this was only one facet of Himmler's sexual persona and that later he would be known as a key Third Reich spokesman for the notion that every ("Aryan") man deserved more than one woman, is left out entirely. To mention this would not necessarily have contradicted the sexual liberationist message Peukert intended implicitly to communicate, but it would surely have complicated it. See Detlev Peukert, "Order and Terror," Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, Conn., 1987), pp. 197-207
39. See, for example, Henryk Broder's glowing review in Konkret, which not only effused in classic 68er fashion about Deschner's findings on "the connection between sexual abstinence . .. and the tendency to violence,. . . 'between. .. self-denial and barbarism,'" but also raged particularly against Rome's attitude during the Third Reich, in which "'the evil of the time'" had been located in divorce, unchaste fashions, and bordellos rather than "'the concentration camps or the persistent persecution of the Jews.'" Broder declared that this was the sort of book that "in the best case is written once every twenty years" (Henryk M. Broder, "Das große Verbrechen war immer der Geschlechtsverkehr," review of Das Krenz mit der Kirche: Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christenlums [The Cross of the Church: A Sexual History of Christianity], by Karlheinz Deschner, Konkret [May 1975]: 51)
40. Quoted in Deschner, Das Krein mit der Kirche: Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christentums (Düsseldorf, 1974), pp. 385, 390-91; hereafter abbreviated KK
41. Deschner is quoting the postwar commentator F. Pittet, one of the contributors to the Catholic sex advice manual Gesundes Geschlechtsleben: Handbuch für Ehefragen, ed. Franz Xavier von Hornstein and A. Faller (Olten, 1950)
42. Grossmann, "Questions of Jewish Identity: A Letter from New York," in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York, 1986), p. 176
43. As Preuss-Lausitz observed in the early 1980s, by that point it had become hard to imagine that the former "battle cry" of the sixties-"Whoever sleeps twice with the same woman, already belongs to the establishment" (Wer zweimal mit derselben pennt, gehört schon zum Establishment) could ever have been considered progressive, but he assured his readers that it most certainly had been. "An incredibly chauvinist, heardess, indeed reactionary sentence, I would say today; the astonishing thing is that almost no one but the 'old moralists' questioned its progressiveness (which was taken as evidence for its progressiveness)" (Preuss-Lausitz, "Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden Körper," p. 98)
44. Gunter Amendt, "'... dann meinen die auch Gewalt...,'" Konkret (May 1978): 14. Amendt is quoting approvingly Jutta Wilhelmi's comments in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Amendt is probably best known for his bestselling "sex enlightenment" books for teenagers, Sexfront (Frankfurt, 1970) and DaSeBu (Das Sex Buch) (Dortmund, 1979)
45. Amendt, "Die gesunde Lehre über die Geschlechtlichkeit," Konkret (May 1976): 36
46. On the importance of both the churches and the attempts to restore the patriarchal family and sexual conservatism in the postwar years, see also Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995)
47. and Maria Höhn, "GIs, Veronikas, and Lucky Strikes: German Reactions to the American Military Presence in the Rhineland-Palatinate during the 1950s" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995)
48. See Peter Kuhnert and Ute Ackermann, 'Jenseits von Lust und Liebe? Jugendsexualität in den 50er Jahren," in "Die Elvis-Tolle, die hatte ich mir unauffallig wachsen lassen": Lebensgeschichte und jugendliche Alltagskultur in den fünfzigerJahren, ed. Heinz-Hermann Krüger (Opladen, 1985)
49. See Dagmar Herzog, "Making Sense of the Past: Antifascist Protestants and the Lessons of the Third Reich, 1945-1965" (paper delivered at the Mellon Faculty Forum, Harvard University, 4 Apr. 1994). Comparable versions of progressive Catholicism existed as well. The relationships, indeed continuities, between antifascist Christianity in the 1950s and the student rebellions of the 1960s remain to be more fully explored
50. Johannes Leppich, "Thema I," in Pater Leppich Spricht: Joamalislen hören den 'rolen Pater, ed. Günther Mees and Gunter Graf (Düsseldorf, 1952), p. 44
51. The significance of the Christian churches in establishing the parameters of debate on sexual matters throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s was also evident, for example, in the way newsmagazines like Der Spiegel, eager to advance more liberal attitudes toward sexuality, rushed to review in enthusiastic detail books on sex by reformist theologians. The felt need to break the hold of the churches using the churches' own discursive framework was apparently quite strong. See "Freude im Haus," Der Spiegel, 22 Aug. 1966, pp. 54-56
52. Preuss-Lausitz et al., "Einleitung," Kriegskinder, Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder, pp. 15, 16, 22
53. On these double continuities presented as ruptures, see also the important essayby Robert G. Moeller, "Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany: Women and Social Policy in the Federal Republic, 1949-1955," Feminist Studies 15 (Spring 1989): 137-69
54. as well as Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, 1993)
55. Preuss-Lausitz et al., "Einleitung," Kriegskinder, p. 24
56. quot;Wort der ausserordentlichen Landessynode der Evangelisch- Lutherischen Kirche in Oldenburg an die Gemeinden Oktober 1945," and "Kundgebung der Landessynode der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern in Ansbach, 9.-13. Juli 1946," in Kirchlkhes Jahrbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Deulschland 1945-1948, ed. Joachim Beckmann (Gütersloh, 1950), pp. 43, 45, 48
57. Yet another statement, announcing that the German people were "sinking into a swamp of vice and shame," complained particularly of the way "purity and marital fidelity are being trampled on among us" ("Wort an die Gemeinden der ausserordentlichen Rheinischen Provinzialsynode vom 20. September 1946," in Kirchlkhes Jahrbuch für die evangelische Kirche in Deulschland 1945-1948, pp. 56-57)
58. Robert Grosche, "Der deutsche Katholizismus 1945-1950," P. Audomar Scheuermann, "Abriß des kirchlichen Eherechts," and Pope Pius XII's remarks to Berlin Catholics (17 June 1949)
59. in "Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters," in Das katholische Jahrbuch 1951/52 (Heidelberg, 1951), pp. 133, 161-75, 210
60. See also the related remarks made by the pope in 1950 in "Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters," pp. 217-18
61. For the remark about Goebbels, see Leppich, "Thema 1," p. 46
62. See Hans Peter Bleuel, Das saubere Rekh: Theorie und Praxis des sitllichen Lebens im Drìtten Reich (Bern, 1972), pp. 176-204
63. Maria Jochum, "Frauenfrage 1946," Frankfurter Hefte 1 (June 1946): 24, 25
64. Hanns Lilje, "Zerfall der Familie?" Sonntagsblalt, 7 Feb. 1954, p. 24
65. For a fuller and more sensitive exploration of the doubleness of Nazi reproductive policies (brutal, forced sterilizations, abortions, and ultimately murder on the one hand; systematic denial of abortion rights to those deemed "desirable" on the other), see Gisela Bock, "Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State," Signs 8 (Spring 1983): 400-21
66. Hermann Frühauf, "Paragraph 218," Frankfurter Hefte 1 (Oct. 1946): 590. On the persistence of these sorts of explicit comparisons between abortion and concentration camps (including Auschwitz) into the 1950s
67. see Angela Delille and Andrea Grahn, "Es ist verboten ...: Empfangnisverhütung und Abtreibung," in Perlonzeit: Wie die Frauen ihr Wirtschaftswunder erlebten, ed. Delille et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 124
68. See Helga Timm and Renate Lepsius, "Ohne uns keine Reform des Paragraph 218," in Frauenpolitik ab Beruf: Gespräche mit SPD-Parlamentarierinnen, ed. Lepsius (Hamburg, 1987), pp. 113-15
69. The sentiment of a "hothouse atmosphere" appears to be pervasive. The specific term comes from Michael Schneider, "Nicht alle sind tot, die begraben sind: Versuch über eine Nachkriegskindheit," in Trümmer, Träume, Truman: Die Welt 1945-49, ed. Gabrielle Dietz et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 103
70. Uli Puritz, "Schreiben über Sexualität: Oder Wie fische ich das Salz aus der Suppe," Ästhetik und Kommunikation 40-41 (Sept. 1980): 16
71. Michael Schneider, "Nicht alle sind tot, die begraben sind," p. 102
72. and Heider, "Freie Liebe," p. 93
73. Peter Schneider, "Die Sache mit der 'Männlichkeit': Gibt es eine Emanzipation der Manner?" Kursbuch 35 (Apr. 1974): 121, 122
74. Eberhard Knõdler-Bunte, "Verlängerung des Schweigens," Aslhetik und Kommunikation 51 (June 1983): 45, 44
75. Hermann Peter Piwitt, "Liebe unterm Nierentisch," Sexualilät Konkret 2 (1980): 36, 37
76. Piwitt, "Autoritär, betulich, neckisch und devot," Konkret (May 1979): 33
77. The charismatic Leppich was fiercely anti-Communist, but due to his commitment to "the social question" he was known at the time as the "red" or "workers' priest." In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his open-air speeches drew crowds of tens of thousands. See the full text of his speech on the dangers of untrammeled sexuality, "Thema 1," and a discussion of his popularity and impact in Pater Leppich Spricht, pp. 43-53, 5-15
78. For a perceptive and nuanced analysis of some of the contradictory developments in West Germany's sexual politics in the 1950s, see Uta G. Poiger, "Rock 'n' Roll, Female Sexuality, and the Cold War Battle over German Identities, "Journal of Modern History 68 (Sept. 1996): 577-616. For a wonderful set of memory-documents that capture both the effectiveness of the constraints placed on women and girls in the fifties, and their various attempts at subversion of the expected sexual norms, see Perlonzeit. Compare also the important testimonies in Kuhnert and Ackermann, 'Jenseits von Lust und Liebe?"
79. quot;Die gefallene Natur," pp. 50-69
80. See Wolfgang Metzger, "Liebe, Ehe und geschlechtliches Leben," in Krise derEhe? ed. Johannes Schlemmer (Munich, 1966), p. 84
81. For a more detailed analysis of the differences (and, more importantly, the similarities) between the sexual behavior of workers and students in the mid to late 1960s, see Gunter Schmidt and Sigusch, "Patterns of Sexual Behavior in West German Workers and Students," trans. Fred Klein, Journal of Sex Research 7 (May 1971): 89-106
82. For example, contrast the Spiegel reports from 1966 with "Thema Eins," Der Spiegel, 3 Aug. 1970, pp. 33-46
83. This poster is evident in a photograph in Sabine Weißler, "Sexy Sixties," in CheSchahShit, p. 98
84. C. H., private conversation with author, 1996
85. Flyer text reprinted in Sibylla Flügge, "Der Weiberrat im SDS," in CheSchahShii, p. 174
86. Useful histories of the women's movement in West Germany include Der grosse Unterschied: Die neue Frauenbewegung und die siebziger Jahre, ed. Kristine von Soden (Berlin, 1988); Autonome Franen: Schlüsseltexte der Neiien Frauenbewegung seit 1968, ed. Ann Anders (Frankfurt am Main, 1988); So fing es an!: 10 Jahre Frauenbewegung, ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne, 1981)
87. and Kerner schiebt uns weg: Zwischenbilanz der Frauenbewegung in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Lottemi Doormann (Weinheim, 1979)
88. See Susannah Heschel, "Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology," Tikkun 5 (May-June 1990): 25-28, 95-97
89. and Judith Plaskow, "Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,"Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (Fall 1991): 99-108
90. See the photograph in Ele Schöfthaler, "Zweierlei Maß: Die evangelische Kirche und der Paragraph 218," in Das Krenz mit dem Frieden: 1982 Jahre Christen und Poliiik, ed. Peter Winzeler et al. (Berlin, 1982), p. 145
91. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, "The Battle for Orgasm Equity: The Heterosexual Crisis of the Seventies," Re-making Love: The Feminìzation of Sex (New York, 1986)
92. And by the late seventies/early eighties they were starting to go public with this. For some classic examples, see Barbara Sichtermann, "Der Mythos von der Herbeiführbarkeit: Zur feministischen Diskussion um den Orgasmus," Freibeuter 2 (1979): 94-100
93. Peggy Parnass, "Ich bin Peggy Parnass," Sexualität Konkret 1 (1979): 94-95
94. Maria Wieden, "Wider den Linken Moralismus von Sexualität, " Ästhetik und Kommunihation 43 (Mar. 1981): 113-17
95. For details on the clitoris debates, see Anders, "Chronologie der gelaufenen Ereignisse," in Autonome Frauen, p. 26
96. Michaela Wunderle, "Lust und Liebe: Die feministische Sexualitätsdebatte," in Der grosse Unterschied, pp. 20-24
97. Renate Schlesier, "Die totgesagte Vagina: Zum Verhãltnis von Psychoanalyse und Feminismus: Eine Trauerarbeit," in Weiblich- Männlich: Kulturgeschichtliche Spuren einer verdrängten Weiblichkeit, ed. Brigitte Wartmann (Berlin, 1980)
98. Nushin, "Frauenfolter," Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. d
99. Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexüinus: Über die Abtreibung der Frauenjrage (Munich, 1978), pp. 539 and 295; trans. Verne Moberg, under the title Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History and Thought (New York, 1982)
100. Hermann L. Gremliza, "Normalität der Perversion," Sexualitäl Konkret 3 (1981): 8
101. See here also two satiric interventions: the special issue of Pardon on "Lust ohne Frust: Die neue Erotik" (Aug. 1979)
102. and "Verein gegen schädlichen Geschlechtsverkehr e.V.," Sexualität Konkret 3 (1981): 30
103. Gernot Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau zieht sich aus," Àslheíik und Kommunikation 40-41 (Sept. 1980): 91
104. Ende der matriarchalischen Έmanzipations'-moral," Pflasterstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, pp. 20-22
105. Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau zieht sich aus"; and "Wutgeheul aus Männerseelen," Der Spiegel, 25 May 1992, pp. 68-84
106. See "Eine Welle von Nazi-Drohungen gegen Feministinnen," Emma (Dec. 1983): 5
107. Margarete Mίtscherlίch, "Die Unfähigkeit zu kãmpfen," Emma (Apr. 1991): 28
108. Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach, "Die Luge von der Stunde Null," Courage (June 1982): 34
109. and Annemarie Troeger, "Die Dolchstoßlegende der Linken: 'Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht gebracht,'" Frauen und ÌVissenschafl: Beiträge zur Berliner Sommeruniversität für Frauen, Juli 1976, ed. Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen (Berlin, 1977), p. 324
110. Annette Kuhn, "Der Antίfeminismus als verborgene Theoriebasis des deutschen Faschismus: Feministische Gedanken zur nationalsozialistischen 'Biopolitik,'" in Frauen und Faschisìnus in Europa: Der faschistische Karper, ed. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda Stuchlik (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), p. 39
111. Die Frankfurter Stadthexen et al., in Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.-early Feb. 1978, p. 1
112. quot;Der Aufstand der Frauen: Am 6. Juni 1971 ging es los!" Emma (June 1991): 18, 20-21
113. See FIL, "Sieg Macho," Emma (Dec. 1987): 6, and Ingrid Strobl, 'Justine und Justiz," Emma (Feb. 1988): 33
114. See also the section on "Playboy bis TAZ," in Schwesternlust und Schwesternfrust: 20 Jahre Frauenbewegung, ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne, 1991), p. 129
115. See Ute Bechdolf, '"Das Schlimmste waren die Schreie,'" Em/na (Aug. 1989): 33, 35
116. Broder, "Ich bin ein Chauvi," Konkrel (Oct. 1979): 55, 57
117. Scott D. Denham, "Schindler Returns to Open Arms: Schindler's List in Germany and Austria," German Politics and Society 13 (Spring 1995): 138
118. Berndt Nitzschke's lecture before sexologists in Salzburg, 5 Nov. 1988; excerpted in Emma (Feb. 1989): 29
119. Reiche, Sexualilät und Klassenkampf: Zur Abwehr repressiver Entsublimiening (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 155; hereafter abbreviated SK
120. Quoted in Heinrich Mehrmann, "Erobern Kommunen Deutschlands Betten? Mehr Sex mit Marx und Mao," Pardon (Aug. 1967): 17, 22.
121. The most moving analysis of the Kommune's significance is in Klaus Hartung, "Die Psychoanalyse der Küchenarbeit: Selbstbefreiung, Wohngemeinschaft und Kommune," in CheSchahShit, pp. 102-6
122. Quoted in "'Wir fordem die Enteignung Axel Springers,'" Der Spiegel, 10 July 1967, pp. 32-33
123. See, for example, the comic and the angry remarks in the retrospective photo essay on the New Left, "Das umstrittene Erbe der Apo," Konkret (June 1977): 11; the psychoanalyzing and sociologizing interpretations of post-68 privatization in Johann August Schülein, "Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende oder der Rückzug ins Private: Eine sozialpsychologische Analyse," in "Zehn Jahre Danach," the retrospective special issue of Kursbtich 48 (June 1977): 101-17; the eloquent and earnest introspection of a participant, Peter Schneider, "'Nicht der Egoismus verfälscht das politische Engagement, sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,'" Frankfurter Rundschau, 25 June 1977, p. III; the agonized rage at neoconservative mockery of 68ers in Walter Boehlich, "Bürgerkrieg als Sexschnulze," Konkret (Dec. 1980): 62-63
124. and, as well, three important obituaries: (on Ulrike Meinhof) Gremliza, "War sie denn unser?" Konkret (June 1976): 4; (on Herbert Marcuse) Gaston .Salvatore, "Trãumen entsprang ein Augenblick Geschichte," Der Spiegel, 1979, pp. 148-49
125. and (on Rudi Dutschke) Michael Schneider, "Sanft war er, sanft, ein bißchen zu sanft-wie alle echten Radikalen," Konkret (Feb. 1980): 23-25. Note also the simplistic psychologizing on post-68 depressiveness (along with some condescending remarks about former 68ers' sexual unhappiness) in Ursula Nuber and Heiko Ernst, "Die traurige Generation," Psychologie Heute (Apr. 1989): 20-27. A more balanced and sensitive interpretation of seventies melancholia is Michael Schneider, Den Kopf verkehrt aufgesetzt oder Die melancholische Linke: Aspekte des Kulturzerfalb in den siebziger Jahren (Darmstadt, 1981)
126. quot;Editorische Notiz der Herausgeber," in Jos van Ussel, Sexualunterdrückung: Geschichte der Sexualfeindschaft, ed. Heinrich Brinkmann et al. (Gießen, 1977), p. [1]
127. On the state campaign of repression against the Left, see Margit Mayer, "The German October of 1977," New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 155-63. On the complex interactions between external repression and internal problems within the Left, see Hartung, "Versuch, die Krise der antiautoritären Bewegung wieder zur Sprache zu bringen," Kursbuch 48 (June 1977): 14-43
128. Schülein, "Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende oder der Rückzug ins Private," p. 101, and Mehrmann, "Erobern Kommunen Deutschlands Betten?" p
129. See also Kommune 2, Versuch der Revolutionierung des bürgerlichen Individuums: Kolleklives Leben mit politischer Arbeit veτbinden! (Cologne, 1971). For another characteristic example of the late seventies discussion of the notion that without working on the personal-in this case working through fears of abandonment acquired in earliest infancy-"a real political practice of liberation is impossible," see Reiner Gogohn and Mario Magiera, "Angst-Das Tabu unserer Gesellschaft," taz, 10 May 1979, p. 9
130. Peter Schneider, "'Nicht der Egoismus verfälscht das politische Engagement, sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,'" p. III
131. Stefan Hinz, "Die Kunscht des Liebens," Konkrel (Apr. 1981): 50
132. quot;Sexualität: Wenig Fortsetzung...," Pflaslerstrand, no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 19; hereafter abbreviated "S."
133. Drei aus der Redaktion, "Von Feen und Faunen," Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. 4
134. quot;Intern," Sexualität Konkrel 1 (1979): 4
135. quot;Kontroversezum'Stammheim-Fick,'".Pflasterstrand, no. 22,12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23
136. Dany, in Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.-early Feb. 1978, p. 3
137. Puritz, "Schreiben über Sexualität," p. 13; "Gedanken eines Sauriers," Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 40
138. and "Vögeln," Pflasterstrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 28
139. Harry Oberländer, "Notizen aus der Provinz," Pflasterstrand, no. 23, late Jan.-early Feb. 1978, p. 3
140. Drei aus der Redaktion, "Von Feen und Faunen," p. 5
141. and Micky, "Warum ich mich an dieser Diskussion nicht beteίlige...," Pflasterstrand, no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. a
142. Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau," pp. 84-85
143. Rudolf Augstein, "Frauen fliessen, Manner schiessen," Der Spiegel 52, 1977, p. 132
144. Lothar Baier, "In den Staub mit alien Feinden der Frau," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 Apr. 1978
145. Bazon Brock, "Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte: Ein wichtiger Beitrag linker Theorie zur Faschismusdebatte," Die Zeil, 25 Nov. 1977, p. 11
146. and "Blut und Widerstand: Der Traum vom Terror," Pflasterslrand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 19
147. Thomas Kühne, "Männergeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte," in Männergeschkhte -Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Kühne (Frankfurt, 1996), p. 16
148. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1987, 1989), 2:212
149. Theweleit is very uneven on homosexuality. He certainly means to be hip, and was received that way in at least one gay text that I could find; but he is confused and offensive as well, claiming to find similarities between gay men and fascists (precisely in the context of trying to refute the old canard that all Nazis were gay!) that suggest that homosexuals, like psychotic children, might be incompletely "born"; see MF, 2:314-18
150. It was recently discovered that the author of The Men with the Pink Triangle was Josef Kohout; he lived until 1994. His pink triangle is "the only one known to have been worn by a prisoner who can be identified"; it is now in the possession of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (David \V. Dunlap, "Personalizing Nazis' Homosexual Victims," New York Times, 26 June 1995, p. Al)
151. Michael Rogin, "Fascist Fantasies," review of MF, in The Nation, 18-25 July 1987, p. 65
152. It is notable that also in a much more recent essay, Theweleit is still preoccupied with the pleasure-evil nexus. On the one hand, Theweleit makes this (really rather compelling) remark about Guatemalan torturers (while explicitly comparing them to Nazi torturers and referring to his own scholarship on Nazis): They enjoy the ritualized knowledge of being allowed to act in the regions of the utmost transgression of human laws. The biggest joy on earth is acting in total criminality, and not being punished for it. On the contrary: being a criminal in the name of justice, sheltered by the power of THE LAW. That seems to be the (boyish) sensation at the heart of all torture actions all over the world ... being the absolute criminal and being a good boy at the same time, teaching lessons about "Good and Evil." Also compare this remark: "Guatemalan soldier-kids,.. . Gestapo people or SS men: we see them teaching, correcting, lecturing on 'the Truth,' that means torturing, killing, loving their miraculous powers, giving death while starting to live, feeling happy, having fun." On the other hand, Theweleit is still quite attached to the idea that these men can be explained as suffering within their own bodies. The torturer, Theweleit asserts, "transforms the other person into a part of his own body; a part of his body he wants to get rid of. The tortured thus are treated as parts of the body of the torturer: parts of his body the torturer doesn't have under control; parts of his body the torturer hates; parts of his body the torturer feels himself forced to kill." As in Male Fantasies, so also here, torturers/soldier-men are like some psychotic children, who achieve bodily wholeness through destructive acts. "The elimination of threats within one's own body is pure pleasure: killings are a pleasure that leave no room for any other feelings. . .. Inflicting pain on others diminishes the pain in the torturers' bodies" (Theweleit, "The Bomb's Womb and the Genders of War [War Goes on Preventing Women from Becoming the Mothers of Invention]," in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott [Princeton, NJ, 1993], pp. 305, 303, 300, 303)
153. See, among other things, Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany, trans. William Templer (Oxford, 1992);
154. Auschwitz ab Herausfordemngfürjuden und Christen, ed. Günther B. Ginzel (Heidelberg, 1980);
155. Eberhard Bethge, "Shoah (Holocaust) und Protestantismus" and Kurt Meier, "Die Judenfrage' im historischen und theologischen Horizont des deutschen Protestantismus seit 1945: Ein Literaturbericht," in Der Holocaust und die Protestanten: Analysen einer Verstrìckung, ed. Jochen-Christoph Kaiser and Martin Greschat (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 1-37, 241-69
156. Heschel, "Anti-Semites against Anti-Semitism," Tikkun 8 (Nov.-Dec. 1993): 47-53
157. On these and related points, see Broder, "Ihr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern.' Έuer Jude von heute ist der Staat Israel': Die neue deutsche Linke und der alltägliche Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, 27 Feb. 1981
158. Die Verlängerung von Geschichle: Deutsche, Juden, und der Palästinakonfiikt, ed. Dietrich Wetzel (Frankfurt, 1983)
159. Rabinbach and Benjamin, "Germans, Leftists, Jews," and Marion Kaplan, "To Tolerate Is to Insult," in New Gentian Critique 31 (Winter 1984): 183-93, 195-99;
160. many of the essays in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust; Corinna Coulmas and Friedlander, "German Leftists Come to Grips with the Past, a Case Study," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): 33-44
161. Grossmann, "Feminist Debates about Women and National Socialism," Gender and History 3 (Autumn 1991): 350-58
162. Elisabeth Domansky, "'Kristallnacht,' the Holocaust, and German Unity: The Meaning of November 9 as an Anniversary in Germany," History and Memory 4 (Spring-Summer 1992): 60-94
163. Heschel, "Configurations of Patriarchy, Judaism, and Nazism in German Feminist Thought," in Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. TM. Rudavsky (New York, 1995).
164. One of the very best of the autocritiques, one which is both personal and broadly relevant, rigorously self-critical without any self-pity, is Hartung, "Errinyen in Deutschland: Uberlegungen zur Ήistorikerdebatte', zum Faschismusbegriff der '68er' und zu Peter Schneiders Selbstkritik," Niemandsland: Zeitschrift zwischen den Kulturen 2, no. 1 (1987)
165. Hermann Sauer, "Zwischen Gewissen und Dämon: Der 20. Juli gestern und heute," Junge Kirche (1955): 426
166. This was a prevalent 1980s peace movement slogan; quoted in Detlev Claussen, "In the House of the Hangman," in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, p. 61
167. Piwitt, "Niemand muß hungern: Das Gerede von der 'Überbevölkerung' ist ein verbrecherischer Mythos. Zwei Amerikaner haben ihn zerstört," review of Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, by Joseph Collins and Frances Lappé, Konkret (Aug. 1978): 39
168. Broder, "Ίhr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern.' Έuer Jude von heute ist der Staat Israel,'" p. 11
169. Achim Schmillen, "Wir sind besser als die Alten!" Die Zeil, 14 Mar. 1997, p. 22
170. Although the intensity of the 1960s intergenerational confrontation in countries that had collaborated with the Nazis was not nearly as great as in Germany, there were some similar features. Compare for example Luisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, trans. Lisa Erdberg (Hanover, N.H., 1996)
171. Barbara Köster, "Rüsselsheim Juli 1985," interview by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in Wir haben sie so geliebt, die Revolution, ed. Cohn-Bendit (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 244. Köster (who eventually visited Israel, which caused the final break with her parents) was not alone. As she put it: "It was a permanent and painful topic, and it was only when I got to know other students that I understood that this was not just my problem, that the shame about the persecution of the Jews had brought many to rebel against parental authority!" (ibid.)
172. Other scholars who are starting to make this point-coming from different but related perspectives-include Grossmann, "Unfortunate Germany," and Moeller, "War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review 101 (Oct. 1996): 1008-48
173. Just to give two examples: The undecidability of the relationship between pleasure and evil-or, to put it another way, the problem of sadism-was one of the almost everywhere undertheorized but also ubiquitously present elements of the frenetic debates about Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). Meanwhile, the relationship between certain kinds of gender socialization and the proclivity to cruelty continues to exercise a wide range of feminist theorists in numerous disciplines
174. See Markovits, "Coping with the Past: The West German Labor Movement and the Left," in Reworking the Past, pp. 262-75
175. See also Rabinbach, "Introduction: Reflections on Germans and Jews since Auschwitz," in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, pp. 3-24
176. and Sophinette Becker, "Bewusste und unbewusste Identifikationen der 68er Generation," in Erinnem, Wiederholen, Durcharbeiten: Zur Psycho-Analyse deutscher XVenden, ed. Brigitte Rauschenbach (Berlin, 1992), pp. 269-75