Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945-69

Abstract

This is a sober and brisk account of the situation of gay men in postwar Germany, up to 1969. It acknowledges a debt to other leading scholars of sexuality in modern Germany (such as Dagmar Herzog and Uta Poiger), and to a wider literature that has sought to problematize the history of sexuality (by Jeffrey Weeks and Michel Foucault, for example). The first substantive chapter, one of the most interesting, focuses on the difficult situation of gay men vis-à-vis the law in the immediate postwar years. Legal sanctions against homosexual behaviour remained in West Germany, but there was considerable confusion about whether National Socialist injunctions against it were more problematic than Weimar and Wilhelmine ones. The police invested substantial time and energy in persecuting gay men, just as they did in Britain, but with less support from the judicial system, which increasingly came to see homosexual behaviour as problematic, but instinctive and unlikely to be extirpated. The police, though, used agents provocateurs, as well as building up relationship networks through exploring arrested men’s correspondence—and even cultivating ‘super-grasses’ who might inform on large circles of acquaintances.