Male sexuality and psychological trauma: Soldiers and sexual disorder in world war I and Weimar Germany

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 60-84

  Crouthamel, Jason ^a  

^a GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANXIETY DISORDER; ARTICLE; CIVIL DISORDER; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; GENDER IDENTITY; GERMANY; HISTORY; HYGIENE; LEGAL ASPECT; MEMORY; MEN'S HEALTH; MILITARY MEDICINE; PERCEPTION; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PSYCHOSEXUAL DISORDER; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUALITY; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL STATUS; SOCIOECONOMICS; SOCIOPATHY; SOLDIER; TRAUMATIC SHOCK; VIOLENCE; WAR;

ANXIETY DISORDERS; CIVIL DISORDERS; CULTURAL DIVERSITY; GENDER IDENTITY; GERMANY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MEMORY; MEN'S HEALTH; MILITARY HYGIENE; MILITARY PERSONNEL; MILITARY PSYCHIATRY; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTIONS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; SEXUAL PARTNERS; SEXUALITY; SHOCK, TRAUMATIC; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR DISORDERS; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL PERCEPTION; SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS; VIOLENCE; WORLD WAR I;

EID: 63249083091     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. The contours of this debate are outlined by George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985);
2. see also Sabine Kienitz, "Body Damage: War Disability and Constructions of Masculinity in Weimar Germany," in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth Century Germany, ed. Karen Hagemann and Stephanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 181-204. For a definition of "remasculinization" in the context of post-1945 Germany see Robert Moeller, "The Remasculinization of Germany: An Introduction," Signs 24 (1998): 101-5.
3. See Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 168-70;
4. for a classic study on the contrast between Weimar's images of the "new woman" and the realities women faced see Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, "Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche," in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 33-65.
5. Regarding Nazi Germany's racial construction of gender boundaries and persecution of "asocials" see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chaps. 8, 9.
6. On the crisis of male authority and the end of the patriarchy and bourgeois family following World War I see Elisabeth Domansky, "Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany," in Society, Culture and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 427-64.
7. Recently, there has been some interesting scholarship on modern warfare's appeal for men;
8. see, for example, Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York: Basic Books, 1999);
9. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), esp. chap. 12.
10. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 117;
11. see also Mosse's classic work on the myth of the war experience, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). On conflicts and contradictions in Nazi images of war as the arena of heterosexual masculinity and necessary tolerance of homosexual comradeship see Geoffrey J. Giles, "The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS and Police," in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 256-90.
12. See, for example, Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).
13. George L. Mosse, "Shell Shock as a Social Disease," Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 101-2.
14. Examples of cultural approaches to the connections between the war, sexual breakdown, and violence in interwar Germany include Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995);
15. Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Germany: Film, Literature, and "New Objectivity" (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. chap. 4.
16. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 84, 108-9.
17. Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 37.
18. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 33-34.
19. Marcus Funck, "Ready for War? Conceptions of Military Manliness in the Prusso-German Officer Corps before the First World War," in Hagemann and Schüler-Springorum, Home/Front, 54-55.
20. See also James D. Steakley, "Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenberg Affair in Wilhelmine Germany," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman et al. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 233-63.
21. Funck, "Ready for War?" 58.
22. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1985), chap. 7.
23. Bärbel Kuhn, Familienstand: Ledig: Ehelose Frauen und Männer im Bürgertum, 1850-1914 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 6-9.
24. Ibid., 187.
25. Ibid., 188-89.
26. See also George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 86-90.
27. Mosse, The Image of Man, 100.
28. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1998), 356-57.
29. Weindling, Health, Race, 15-19.
30. Mosse, The Image of Man, 78-80.
31. Ibid., 110-11.
32. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 61-62;
33. see also Mosse, The Image of Man, 110.
34. James M. Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 218-20.
35. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1:302.
36. In Philip Witkop, ed., German Students' War Letters, trans. A. F. Wedd (1929; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 280.
37. Elaine Showalter, "Rivers and Sassoon: The Inscription of Male Gender Anxieties," in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Randolph Higonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 64.
38. Doris Kaufmann, "Science as Cultural Practice in the First World War and Weimar Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 1 (1999): 125. On statistics for psychiatric patients in the regular army see Robert Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 53.
39. Jason Crouthamel, "War Neurosis versus Savings Psychosis: Working-Class Politics and Psychological Trauma in Weimar Germany," Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 2 (2002): 162-82.
40. Fears of "pension neurosis" were especially widespread among doctors who later supported National Socialism;
41. see, for example, Dr. H. Koetzle, "Gedanken zur Reform des Reichsversorgungsrechts," in Deutsche Kriegsopferversorgung, 2. Jahrg., Folge 1, Berlin, October 1933, 10, Bundesarchiv Koblenz.
42. Paul Plaut, "Psychographie des Kriegers," in Beiträge zur Psychologie des Krieges (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1920), 34, 46-47.
43. Ibid., 110-18. For a critical analysis of Plaut's methodology see Bernd Ulrich, Die Augenzeugen: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe in Kriegs- und Nachkriegszeit, 1914-1933 (Essen: Klartext, 1997), 298-301.
44. Plaut, "Psychographie," 102-3.
45. Ibid.
46. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1930;
47. New York: Norton, 1961). For an in-depth analysis of psychoanalysts' responses to war neurosis see Lerner, Hysterical Men, 175-85.
48. Magnus Hirschfeld, The Sexual History of the World War, translator unknown (1941;
49. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2006), 30.
50. Weindling, Health, Race, 108.
51. Erwin J. Haeberle, "Swastika, Pink Triangle and Yellow Star: The Destruction of Sexology and the Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany," in Duberman et al., Hidden from History, 365-69.
52. Hirschfeld, The Sexual History, 131.
53. These terms appear in numerous flyers' narratives of the war.
54. See, for example, pilot Ernst Udet's description of his "wedding" to his observer in his Mein Fliegerleben (Berlin: Ullstein, 1935), 10-11.
55. Thomas Kühne, "'⋯ aus diesem Krieg werden nicht nur harte Männer heimkehren': Kriegskameradschaft und Männlichkeit im 20. Jahrhundert," in Männergeschichte-Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne, ed. Thomas Kühne (Frankfurt: Campus, 1996), 174-91.
56. Hirschfeld, The Sexual History, 135-36.
57. Ibid., 136.
58. Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual-Katastrophen: Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts- und Eheleben (Leipzig: A. H. Payne, 1930), 40-41.
59. Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft Schneider, 1930), 506. Hereafter cited in text.
60. See Erich Wulffen, Der Sexualverbrecher: Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Verwaltungsbeamte und Ärzte (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1910). During the Weimar years he updated this study with his Kriminalpsychologie des Täters (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1926).
61. Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 109-10.
62. Ibid., 112-13.
63. See also Magnus Hirschfeld, Zwischen zwei Katastrophen (originally entitled Sittengeschichte der Nachkriegszeit) (1931;
64. Hanau am Main: Karl Schustek, 1966), 463-64.
65. Anton Kaes, M (London: British Film Institute, 2000).
66. Eugen Kahn, "Psychopathen als revolutionäre Führer," Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 52 (1919): 90-91. On historical links between hysteria and Jews see Sander Gilman's The Jew's Body (New York, Routledge, 1991).
67. P. Lissmann, Die Wirkungen des Krieges auf das männliche Geschlechtsleben (Munich: Verlag der Aerztlichen Rundschau Otto Gamelin, 1919), 22. For a fascinating comparison to post-World War II sexual problems between men and women see Dagmar Herzog, "Desperately Seeking Normality: Sex and Marriage in the Wake of War," in Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163.
68. Lissman, Die Wirkungen, 9-11.
69. This case is related in Hirschfeld, The Sexual History, 135.
70. Lissmann, Die Wirkungen, 13-22.
71. Ibid., 28.
72. H. A. Preiss, Geschlechtliche Grausamkeiten liebestoller Menschen (Frankfurt: Süddeutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1921), 6.
73. Ibid., 41-43.
74. Hans-Georg Baumgarth, Das Geschlechtsleben im Kriege: Eine Rechtfertigung für viele Unglückliche (Berlin: Rosen, 1920), 46-47.
75. Letter from Erich G. to Reichsarbeitsministerium, 30 September 1932, R3901/Film 37013, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (hereafter cited as BBL).
76. August F. to Reichsarbeitsministerium, 26 October 1921, R3901/Film 36027, BBL.
77. Hermann Klomfoth, foreword to Hans Schlottau, Kriegsfurioso: Visionen eines Verwundeten (Hamburg: Pionier-Verlag, Carl Thinius, 1920), 3.
78. "Die Liquidierung der inneren Kriegslasten," Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten und Kriegsteilnehmer, 25 January 1930, Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
79. See also Crouthamel, "War Neurosis versus Savings Psychosis" (see n. 30).
80. Emil Vogeley, "Die Psychiatrie und Neurologie im Dienst der kapitalistischen Klasse," Internationaler Bund der Kriegsopfer, no. 10 (October 1928): 1, DDR Massenorganization-Abteilung, BBL.
81. "Geschäftsmann oder Arzt!" Internationaler Bund der Kriegsopfer, no. 2 (March 1928): 3, DDR Massenorganization-Abteilung, BBL.
82. "Renten Neurose," Internationaler Bund der Kriegsopfer, no. 8 (August 1928): 3, DDR Massenorganization-Abteilung, BBL.
83. "Kriegs-Hysterie," Internationaler Bund der Kriegsopfer, no. 12 (December 1925): 1, DDR Massenorganization-Abteilung, BBL.