"Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together": Post-Holocaust Memory and The Sexual Revolution in West Germany

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The document discusses the relationship between processing the meaning of the Nazi Holocaust and the evolution of sexual politics in post-1945 West Germany.

The document mainly discusses the relationship between processing the meaning of the Nazi Holocaust and the evolution of sexual politics in post-1945 West Germany.

The document says the German 68ers continued the silence of their elders on the subject of the Holocaust, treating it as 'ancillary' to German fascism, rather than its central event.

"Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together":

Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual


Revolution in West Germany

Dagmar Herzog

It would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in


Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that sup-
presses sexuality.
-ARNO PLACK(1967)
Is morality only about genitals and not about genocide?
-VOLKMAR SIGUSCH (1984)'

In histories and journalistic assessments of the West German New Left,


the sexual revolution figures awkwardly. It is generally either downplayed
Research for this essay was begun with an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in
the Humanities at Harvard University and completed with a Summer Stipend from the
National Endowment for the Humanities; I am grateful to both organizations for their gen-
erosity and support. Even as this essay only marks the beginning for me of a long search to
make sense of the issues it raises, I am also deeply grateful to the many individuals who-
by patiently wading through its earlier incarnations and offering astute criticisms-have
helped me to give it whatever clarity it has now. Each of them has left his or her mark; none
of them is responsible for the outcome. I thank Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Volker Berg-
hahn, Lauren Berlant, Jane Caplan, Erica Carter, David Crew, Geoff Eley, Sander Gilman,
Atina Grossmann, Elizabeth Heineman, Kali Israel, Claudia Koonz, Robert Moeller, Uta
Poiger, Anson Rabinbach, Christiane Rothmaler, Joan Scott, and Michael Staub.
1. Arno Plack, Die Gesellschaftund das Bose: Eine Kritikder herrschendenMoral (Munich,
1967), p. 309, hereafter abbreviated G; and Volkmar Sigusch, "Editorial,"SexualitaitKonkret
5 (1984): 4.

CriticalInquiry 24 (Winter 1998)


? 1998 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/98/2402-0007$02.00. All rights reserved.

393

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394 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

or ignored, savagely criticized, or treated as comic relief.2 Meanwhile, in


the mass of literature on post-Holocaust memory in West Germany that
has appeared in the last decade in both English and German, there has
been a surprising silence about the relationship between the processing
of the meaning of the Nazi Judeocide and the evolution of sexual politics
in the post-1945 period.3 Yet furthering the sexual revolution was a cen-
tral component of the student rebellions of the sixties and seventies and
doing so was closely intertwined with the New Left's efforts to bring the
2. The best recent English-language histories of the West German New Left are in
Richard W. McCormick, Politicsof the Self:Feminismand thePostmodernin WestGermanLiterature
and Film (Princeton, N.J., 1991); Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The GermanLeft:
Red, Green,and Beyond (Cambridge, 1993); and Sabine von Dirke, 'All Powerto the Imagina-
tion!":The WestGermanCounterculture from the StudentMovementto the Greens(Lincoln, Nebr.,
1997). See also William David Graf, The GermanLeft since 1945: Socialismand SocialDemocracy
in the GermanFederalRepublic (Cambridge, 1976); Rob Burns and Wilfried van der Will,
Protestand Democracyin WestGermany:Extra-ParliamentaryOppositionand the DemocraticAgenda
(New York, 1988); and (the rather hostile) Jillian Becker, Hitler'sChildren:The Storyof the
Baader-MeinhofTerroristGang (London, 1989). Interesting German-language histories can
be found in Peter Mosler, Waswir wollten,was wir wurden:Studentenrevolte-zehnJahre danach
(Reinbek, 1977), and CheSchahShit:Die SechzigerJahrezwischenCocktailund Molotov,ed. Eck-
hard Siepmann et al. (Berlin, 1984). CheSchahShitis 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 Sexualititsbegriff der 60er und 80er Jahre," in Sado-
masochisten,Keusche, und Romantiker:VomMythos neuer Sinnlichkeit, ed. Heider (Reinbek,
1986); and Ulf Preuss-Lausitz, "Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden K6rper," in Preuss-
Lausitz et al., Kriegskinder,Konsumkinder,Krisenkinder:Zur Sozialisationsgeschichte seit dem
ZweitenWeltkrieg(Weinheim, 1989).
3. 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; Omer Bartov, Murderin Our Midst: The Holocaust,IndustrialKilling, and Representa-
tion (New York, 1996); HolocaustRemembrance:The Shapesof Memory,ed. Geoffrey Hartman
(Oxford, 1994); Probing the Limitsof Representation:Nazism and the "FinalSolution,"ed. Saul
Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); and Reworkingthe 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 mem-
ory 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'sEnd, 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,"AmericanHistoricalReview 101 (Apr. 1996): 354-95.

Dagmar Herzog is associate professor of history at Michigan State


University and the author of Intimacyand Exclusion:ReligiousPoliticsin Pre-
RevolutionaryBaden (1996). She is currently working on a sexual history
of West Germany from the 1940s to the 1990s.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 395

subjects of fascism and the Third Reich more forcefully into public dis-
cussion. Although the sexual revolution was unquestionably larger than
the New Left student movement, and although some student radicals
were uninterested in theorizing sexual questions, a significant portion of
the student movement saw itself as the vanguard of the true sexual revolu-
tion. Student radicals were both among the most open and provoca-
tive defenders of the new publicity of sexual styles and practices that
characterized the late sixties and early seventies and the ones that most
explicitly made the case that sexual repressiveness was a bulwark of a
politically and economically repressive society. For them, sexual libera-
tion was an indispensable and inextricable component of political revolu-
tion. Sexual conflicts, furthermore, proved to be an important site for this
generation's struggles to understand the meanings and lessons of the Ho-
locaust.
The West German New Left student movement was never very
large-actual activists probably numbered only in the thousands-but it
was extraordinarily influential. Not only did the movement shape the
values of its own and subsequent generations in the broadest and most
profound ways, but in the decades since the sixties the movement's exis-
tence has also been taken-even by more conservative observers-as a
sign that Germans truly were capable of democracy. This made the stu-
dent movement in West Germany peculiarly important in comparison
with the movements in other nations.4 Meanwhile, the West German New
Left was certainly appalled by many forms of social and political injustice,
and it celebrated and supported a broad array of resistance struggles,
both in the Third World and at home. The damaging consequences of
capitalism, racism, imperialism, and militarism worldwide were major
preoccupations, and, indisputably, race relations in the U.S., the war in
Vietnam, the struggles of the Palestinians, the need to reform West Ger-
man universities, the value of Marxist theory, and the limitations of really
existing Stalinism figured as prominently in New Left activism as did ei-
ther sex or the legacies of Auschwitz. And yet the facts of German fascism
and the Judeocide in particular left an inescapable imprint on postwar
West German culture and affected postwar people's lives and self-
understandings in the most intimate ways. It was ultimately no coinci-
dence that members of the West German generation of 1968-both New
Left men and their feminist critics-repeatedly made references to the
Third Reich and the Holocaust in their battles with each other, and with
members of their parents' generation, over sexual mores and relations.
Experiments in communal living, new parenting styles, and a rene-
gotiation of gender relations, among other things, all were elaborated
against the backdrop of the perceived legacies of the Nazi past. In devel-

4. See Heinz Bude, Das Altern einer Generation:DieJahrgange 1938 bis 1948 (Frankfurt,
1995), esp. pp. 17-22 and 41-42.

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396 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

oping new sexual attitudes and practices, the "68ers" declared that they
were breaking with what, in their view, had caused German fascism in
the first place: not only "capitalist imperialism," but also a particular set
of (what they called) "bourgeois" familial arrangements and a specific
form of conservative Christian morality. Yet much of what the 68ers were
actually rebelling against were their own experiences in the postfascist
1950s and the interpretations of Nazism's sexual legacies proffered by
parents and political and religious leaders in that decade. Although the
trajectory of the sexual revolution in West Germany was in many respects
similar to that in other Western nations-with intergenerational and in-
tergender conflicts playing themselves out in similar ways-there was an
unusual ferocity to the German debates that makes sense only when we
understand the complex mutual imbricatedness of different eras in Ger-
man history.
Studying the connections between post-Holocaust memory and the
sexual revolution in West Germany can illuminate three areas of intellec-
tual and political inquiry.5 One subject it can help us begin to reconsider
is the practical ramifications and consequences of Christian theology and
moral teachings of the 1940s and 1950s, both Catholic and Protestant,
for the generation that would come of political age in the 1960s and
1970s. For due in part to the special role granted the churches by the
Allied occupiers, and in part to the frantic desire to reestablish "normal-
ity" and "decency" in the postwar period, conservative Christians were
initially in an unusually strong position to shape the moral landscape and
5. 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 cul-
tural 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 Misogy-
nies: Reflectionson Mythsand Malice (New York, 1991), pp. 42-60; Alvin H. Rosenfeld, "The
Fascination of Abomination," in Imagining Hitler (Bloomington, Ind., 1985); Friedlinder,
Reflectionsof Nazism: An Essay on Kitschand Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York, 1984);
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, "Smut and Anti-Semitism," in TheJewishPresence:Essayson Identityand
History (New York, 1977), pp. 216-24; and (for a contrasting perspective) Jean-Pierre
Geuens, "Pornography and the Holocaust: The Last Transgression," Film Criticism20 (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, PoliticalInversions:Homosexuality,Fascism,and theModern-
ist Imaginary(Stanford, Calif., 1996); Linda Mizejewski, Divine Decadence:Fascism,FemaleSpec-
tacle,and theMakingsof SallyBowles (Princeton, N.J., 1992); and Silke Wenk, "Hin-weg-sehen
oder: Faschismus, Normalitit, und Sexismus," in ErbeuteteSinne: Nachtriigezur BerlinerAus-
stellung "Inszenierungder Macht, asthetischeFaszinationim Faschismus,"ed. Klaus Behnken and
Frank Wagner (Berlin, 1988), pp. 17-32. 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 Studies3 (Winter
1997): 42-76.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 397

language of the postwar years and to put forward influential interpreta-


tions of Nazism's causes and effects (all the while managing rather suc-
cessfully to marginalize more progressive Christians' efforts to connect a
spiritual revival with social justice and antimilitarist efforts). Although the
messages about Nazism and its sexual politics implicitly and explicitly
put forth by many of the more moderate and conservative religious and
political leaders were occasionally contradicted by the suggestion in
popular magazines, perpetrator biographies, and survivor memoirs that
there was a titillating relationship between pleasure and Nazi evil, more
generally the religious and the popular messages appeared to reinforce
each other. The general message seems to have been that the Nazis them-
selves encouraged promiscuity and illegitimacy and that their sexual
immorality was inseparable from their other crimes.6 Meanwhile, if ex-
68ers' retrospective accounts about life in the fifties are to be believed,
church and political leaders in that decade also succeeded in narrowing
questions of morality to sexual matters and in presenting sexual sobriety
as the most effective cure for the nation's larger guilt and moral crisis.
These phenomena have the potential to explain much about the political
directions subsequently taken by the student movement. In short, then,
although it may seem strange to spend time discussing postwar Christian-
ity when the focus of this essay is on the generation of 1968 and its views
on sex and the Holocaust and their interconnection, Christianity actually
matters considerably. It does so both because the Christian churches posi-
tioned themselves as the adjudicators of good and evil in the postwar pe-
riod and because it was the churches (and the politicians and publicists
allied with them) that brought sexuality into the picture as the primary
moral challenge facing postwar Germany.
In addition, attending to the ways post-Holocaust memory and the
sexual conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s were interwoven can provide
a fresh perspective on the West German New Left itself-both on the
New Left's peculiar mixture of fierce antifascism and unthinking anti-
Semitism, and on what was at stake in the evolution of its anxieties, preoc-
cupations, and internal conflicts around sex. Throughout their program-
matic writings on sex, members of this generation returned frequently to
the problems of genocide and brutality within the concentration camps,
with New Leftists suggesting that it was sexual repression that engen-
dered the Nazi capacity for cruelty and mass murder, while German femi-
nists were quick to invoke the Holocaust in their own assaults on male

6. For a particularly classic example of a survivor memoir widely read in West Ger-
many at the time and conveying precisely this message, see Eugen Kogon, The Theoryand
Practiceof Hell: The GermanConcentrationCampsand the SystemBehind Them,trans. Heinz Nar-
den (1947; New York, 1975); see esp. the chapter on "The Psychology of the SS," pp. 258-
71. For a flavor of the kind of titillating messages about the perpetrators' virility put out in
the mainstream media, see Heinz H6hne, "Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf: Die Ge-
schichte der SS," Der Spiegel, 14 Nov. 1966, pp. 94-107.

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398 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

sexual aggression and male disinterest in female sexual pleasure. In part,


as my first epigraph suggests-and its sentiments were by no means un-
usual in its time-New Leftists launched such arguments in order to
strengthen their case for sexual liberation with the most shocking meta-
phors available. But the recurrence of Holocaust imagery also indicates
some anxieties that the release of libido might be, not just liberatory, but
rather dangerous, and that the pursuit of pleasure might lead, not to
social justice, but to evil-anxieties that feminists would bring into the
open, but with their own distortions and for their own purposes. In addi-
tion, one noteworthy feature of so many of the debates within the left
scene about sex, and about sex and fascism, is their focus on the male
body and male desires and anxieties in particular. In postwar West Ger-
man struggles over the various sexual lessons of Nazism, male bodies
were called to a kind of public visibility and accountability that most
scholars of the history of sexuality generally assume to be reserved for
women.
Finally, exploring this conjunction of issues can contribute to a revi-
sion of the extant scholarly and journalistic consensus on the politics of
memory in West Germany in general. One matter that can be illuminated
by a study of postwar sexual conflicts has to do precisely with the "lay-
erings" of memory I have begun to describe here-that is, with the ways
each cohort of postwar West Germans evidently approached the past only
through, over, and against the interpretations of their historical predeces-
sors (with New Leftists contradicting the representations of the past of-
fered them by many of their parents, and feminists offering yet a third
description of Nazism's purported sexual lessons). The other insight that
can be gained from examining these proliferating versions of the lessons
of the Third Reich directly challenges the stereotypical view of postwar
West Germany as characterized by repression or amnesia regarding the
Holocaust. While this view is restated continuously, my research indicates
a contrary perspective: that postwar West Germans, specifically as they
struggled over postwar sexual relations, were actually talking constantly
about their nation's recent past, including the mass murder at its heart.
Beginning to get at this complicated and in obvious ways so deeply
freighted set of problems involves drawing not merely on the formative
and the programmatic texts of the 68ers, though those sources are cru-
cial. It also means trying to make sense of the outpouring of autobio-
graphical memory-essays about their adolescences in the fifties and their
sexual comings-of-age in the sixties, written by ex-68ers in the late seven-
ties and early eighties, as their faith in their own ability to sustain both a
political and a sexual revolution broke down. This is where attention to
the multiplicity and complexity of memory's "layerings" becomes espe-
cially important. For what is going on in these memory-texts is an attempt
to reconstruct the fifties' interpretations of the thirties and forties within
the context of the seventies' and eighties' struggle with the meaning of

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 399

the sixties. Meanwhile, it is also significant that many of these memory-


essays appeared in the special issues on sexuality suddenly put out by
almost every New Left journal of note in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
and one of the striking features of these essays is, again, the obsessiveness
with which they tried to make public some of the most intimate ways men
in particular related to their own bodies and the bodies of others.
Exploring these various interconnected problems means, further-
more, returning to and reexamining a much-discussed and now-classic
text on both fascism and sex: New Left and "feminist male" Klaus Thew-
eleit's two-volume magnum opus, Male Fantasies,published in West Ger-
many in 1977-78. Male Fantasies'stwo sprawling volumes constituted an
extended treatise on the literature of the Freikorps-those paramilitary
gangs roaming Weimar Germany, the Baltics, and adjacent territories to
crush popular insurgencies, and it has generally been received as a study
of the (proto)fascist male mind. This is not least because many members
of the Freikorpsended up among Hitler's stormtroopers and/or as concen-
tration camp commandants and guards. One of Male Fantasies'smain ar-
guments had to do with what it found to be the fascist man's fear of the
feminine-especially of imagined hordes of Bolshevik females-and of
anything wet, muddy, red, or gushing, as well as the fascist man's fear of
his own body's potential for pleasure. But while most commentators (and
certainly not incorrectly) see Male Fantasiesas an intervention into debates
about fascism, I want to show that another useful way to think about Male
Fantasiesis to see it also as an effort to bring the subjects of fascism and
the Third Reich to bear on a set of problems the West German New Left
was having with itself about gender and sex. This is especially true of the
second volume, significantly subtitled Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzingthe
WhiteTerror.When Male Fantasiesis resituated in its historical context-
both in terms of the trajectory of the West German New Left and the
sexual revolution it had been trying to make since the late sixties, and in
terms of the evolving ways the Third Reich and the Holocaust had been
interpreted in the postwar era-its content appears in a new light as well.
Simultaneously, this resituation enables a deepened understanding of the
connections the generation of 1968 evidently perceived between sexuality
and fascism. Male Fantasiesis an original and very individual intervention
in conflicts about these themes, but it also reflects and summarizes many
of the broader preoccupations of the generation of which Theweleit was
a member. For although the reference points of Nazism and the Holo-
caust run like a thread through the sexual debates of the postwar period,
surfacing at the most seemingly unlikely moments, their palpable pres-
ence was not always articulated directly in the printed record; sometimes
the relationship between pleasure and violence, or pleasure and evil, was
addressed at more oblique angles. It was often Theweleit who hauled
back into explicit focus that which seemed to be worked through only in
displaced ways elsewhere.

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400 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

The apparent inability to leave the past behind-indeed, the appar-


ently unquenchable urge to it
bring up over and over again precisely in
the context of sexual relations-not only reveals how intense was the felt
need to invert the sexual lessons of Nazism drawn by their parents' gener-
ation but also, and perhaps even more significantly, suggests something
about the difficulty of theorizing a sexual revolution-of connecting plea-
sure and goodness, sex and societal justice-in a country in which only a
generation earlier pleasure had been so intimately tied in with evil.
It is quite evident that for most of its existence, from its inception in
the 1960s to the present, the West German New Left struggled both to
understand the connections between sexuality and fascism and to put
those understandings to use in the sexual politics and more general politics
of its own time. The very first efforts at thematizing the links between sex
and fascism in the 1960s involved the recovery and reappropriation of the
Freudian Marxist work of Wilhelm Reich from the 1930s and of various
members of the Frankfurt School from the 1930s to the 1950s. (Increas-
ingly, of course, the ongoing work particularly of Theodor Adorno and
Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s became part of the New Left debates.)
Characteristically, sixties commentators stressed the inadequacy of
attention paid in some of the earlier psychologically or ideologically fo-
cused work to "material" (by this they meant economic, social, and histor-
ical) factors. Yet even as this lack was duly noted, the commentators also
stressed how essential attention to psychology and ideology was and la-
mented the explicit neglect of post-Freudian insights in too much post-
war left theorizing about fascism. Marxist scholar Wolfgang Fritz Haug,
for example, an important mentor to the 68ers, made exactly these points
in 1965 in the pages of the Marxist journal Das Argument(of which he was
the main editor). In his introduction to Reinhart Westphal's "Psychologi-
cal Theories about Fascism," one contribution to a series of special issues
of Das Argumentdedicated to retheorizing German fascism, Haug stressed
the ways "Nazism displayed psychopathological abnormalities of such ep-
ochal historical force, that the task has become urgent to seek the founda-
tion of this force within normality" (especially, Haug suggested, within
the bourgeois family) and insisted that the significance of psychology's
insights lay in the way they "forbid the fundamental separation of the
abnormal from the normal, which means here: fascism from bourgeois
society."Above all, Haug asserted, and here he was expressly invoking the
Holocaust, what made psychology important was its ability to investigate
"the connection between the suppression of sexual drives on the one
hand and the anti-Semitic persecution mania and its raging in manifest
cruelty on the other."'

7. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, "Vorbemerkung," Das Argument32 (1965): 30-31.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 401

Westphal himself, reflecting a common postwar left concern about


the 1930s Left's inability to attract the masses away from fascism, under-
stood his task as reviewing for readers what could be gained from the
extant studies on the psychology and appeal of fascism (not only Reich's,
but also those of Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, and Alexander Mitscher-
lich). Placing the "prehistory of the personality-foundation of fascism"
in "the history of the family and its changing economic function within
capitalism," Westphal explained the combination of hate and guilt feel-
ings, rage against an actually weak but nonetheless fiercely authoritarian
father, and hostility towards sexuality that supposedly characterized both
Hitler and his followers. In reviewing one study, Westphal suggested that
the animus against sexuality thought to characterize the bourgeois family
weakened heterosexual tendencies only to intensify "anal- and phallic-
sadistic" tendencies and contribute to the production of individuals
whose personality was "authoritarian-masochistic" or "ambivalent, sado-
masochistic." At another point, he suggested that the process by which a
variety of fears could be projected specifically onto Jews was accelerated
by "the reactive defense against homosexual aims directed towards the
father."And at yet another point he indicated that in the sadistic subjec-
tion of and fear of the female one could find the fear of sexual strivings
in general, as he also pointed out that "the latent homosexual component
among the Nazis" expressed itself in "the fanatic persecution of manifest
homosexuality (like Jews and communists, homosexuals were sent to con-
centration camps)."s
All these contradictory but also in many ways mutually reinforcing
themes would recur many times, although always with different subtle
nuances, in other late sixties and early seventies texts. As the New Left
and feminist journalist Ulrike Heider later simply summarized it (in the
course of her attempt to defend the gains of the sexual revolution against
neoconservative ex-leftists and romantic maternalist ex-feminists), the
early proponents of the sexual revolution had argued that it was the sado-
masochistic psychic structure produced by the petty bourgeois authori-
tarian nuclear family that caused the Germans to become a people of
racist murderers.9
In 1967, Arno Plack, a young philosophy Ph.D., produced a major
text elaborating on these matters: Societyand Evil: A Critiqueof theReigning
Morality.Although Plack was sharply criticized by some on the Left,1ohis
work would also prove remarkably influential. According to Plack, not
only Freud himself but also the psychoanalyst Mitscherlich and the (at
that time much-discussed) animal behavior theorist Konrad Lorenz all
8. Reinhart Westphal, "Psychologische Theorien ilber den Faschismus," Das Argument
32 (1965): 31, 34, 37, 38.
9. See Heider, "Freie Liebe und Liebesreligion," pp. 92-109, esp. p. 94.
10. Compare for example Haug, review of Societyand Evil, by Plack, Das Argument56
(1970): 49-53.

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402 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

mistakenly assumed that there was an innate aggressive drive in human


beings. In contrast, Plack insisted that aggression was a learned behavior
acquired because of the frustration of drives for nurture and pleasure.
Plack's book is long and meandering, containing extended asides on such
issues as the importance of maternal tenderness and breastfeeding and
the need to respect women as sexual beings while avoiding the dangers
of female careerism. It also contains extended consideration of the les-
sons of the Holocaust, particularly as these had come to light in the con-
text of the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in 1963-65 and reported
on daily in major newspapers. (Twenty-two SS-men were tried, as well as
one prisoner Kapo; the years of testimony from 273 witnesses made a
detailed picture of what went on in Auschwitz difficult for the public to
ignore. For many subsequent 68ers, these trials were a radicalizing event.)
Plack was clearly not only targeting the conservatism of his elders
but was also concerned to distance his own self-consciously, thoroughly
theorized analysis from what some might perceive to be nothing but an
elaboration of such slogans of his peers as the call to Make Love, Not War.
Plack insisted on the unhealthiness of monogamy and called for "ahealthy
sensuality"(G, p. 169). But he was also intent on clarifying that, as he
put it, "it is after all not so that through the sheer fact of sexual activity
aggressivity can be avoided." Sexual excess, he suggested, could also sig-
nal hidden hostility towards one's fellow human beings-though he was
quick to explain that this hostility might well have its roots in a deficit of
motherly warmth in infancy (G, pp. 287-88). Nonetheless, Plack's over-
arching contention throughout was that "un-lived-out sexual impulses"
led to "aggression, indeed lust for murder" (G, p. 163). Or, more pre-
cisely: It was the original suppression of sexual drives that created the
"vital displeasure" (vitaler Unmut).When it built up, it produced that very
aggression other theorists thought was natural, an aggression that was
itself suppressed before subsequently exploding in wartime. This, ac-
cording to Plack, was why there had to be collective enemies: to alleviate
the moral burden on the conscience. These enemies must be made to
seem both evil and cowardly, someone to whom the group who attacked
them could feel morally superior. And this, in turn, Plack observed, was
the bitter kernel of the 'joke" that the Jews would have had to have been
invented if they had not already existed. Simultaneously, and this again
was a characteristic move for his generation, Plack was quick to point
out-parenthetically-that while Jews functioned this way for his own
society, "a similar dynamic is at work elsewhere for the Negroes" (G, p. 274).
Plack drew repeatedly on the testimony from the Auschwitz trials,
trying to fit the contradictory scraps of evidence they offered into his
argument that sexual repression was the cause of cruelty. For example, in
one instance he declared: "Do not object at this point that after all even
some SS-men in Auschwitz did not shy from initiating intimate relations
with Jewesses." There was, he pointed out, quite a difference between,

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 403

on the one hand, comfortable coexistence between "different racial or


religious groups" such that sexual relations between individuals from
those different groups were a possibility and, on the other hand, the
"'taking' of Jewesses in order to humiliate them, as members of a hated
'race,' even more" (G, p. 163). At yet other points Plack puzzled over how
it could be that older members of society called loudly for the punish-
ment of rapists and murderers but were disinclined to support the Ausch-
witz trials. Plack surmised that the liberties taken by individual criminals
bothered people, but murderers in uniform were an object of identifica-
tion. As Plack put it, "Murder with the permission of the state is the secret
yearning of the many, who do not want to do the evil, to which they are
drawn, without a good conscience" (G, p. 323).
Over and over again, Plack stressed what clearly for many of his gen-
eration was a profound and value-transforming revelation: those who
"celebrated true orgies of sadism" in the camp were seemingly, when out-
side the camp, so law-abiding and ordinary in every respect, people who
had never run amok in even the slightest way (G, p. 308). These appar-
ently were individuals who, before and after their time in Auschwitz, were
characterized by the most stereotypical philistine probity and petty bour-
geois normality and respectability; even the state prosecutor at the tri-
als-who seemed to marvel at his own findings-had felt compelled to
comment, "'Those aren't even citizens, but real philistines who back then
could let their bad instincts have free reign"' (G, p. 305). As one member
after another of the generation of 1968 would later testify, the similarity
between the code of good behavior postwar society demanded of them
and the model of behavior evidently exemplified by the executors of
genocide, sickened them deeply. But it is also clear that identifying this
similarity helped them feel as though they could finally understand how
"it" could have happened, and they had something concrete to fight
against in their present. Above all, they had a handle on what came to
seem like one of the greatest hypocrisies of postwar society, in Plack's
words, "the secret agreement of the society, that provides cover for the
concentration camp murderer, but at the same time for example de-
nounces the parents of a bride for the crime of pimping, if they allow the
future son-in-law to spend the night" (G, p. 309). Morality, their society
seemed to be telling them, was only about sex, not about murder."
11. 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 degra-
dation of the human finds its continuation in the sexual acrobatics of the Swedish film-
maker" (quoted in Heinz Ungureit, "Bernkastels Landrat vergleicht 'Das Schweigen' mit
Auschwitz," FrankfurterRundschau, 24 June 1964, p. 22).

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404 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

Although Plack only mentioned Wilhelm Reich occasionally, Reich's


spirit is in evidence throughout Plack's book. And it is clear that in the
popular dissemination of the sorts of ideas advanced by Plack no one was
more influential than the rediscovered Reich, as many who lived through
the late sixties in West Germany will testify. Reprints of Reich's work, first
in bootleg form, then formally published, were circulated widely in the
early days of the sexual revolution; it was "Wilhelm Reich up and down,"
as one left woman later remembered. Or as a former member of the Ger-
man SDS (Sozialistischer DeutscherStudentenbund,comparable to the Ameri-
can Students for a Democratic Society) later put it, "Wilhelm Reich was
probably bootlegged back then more than any other author." In 1968 the
outside wall of the cafeteria at the University of Frankfurt carried a graf-
fiti slogan exhorting all passersby to "read Wilhelm Reich and act accord-
ingly!"'12
In his key text, RepressiveFamilyPolitics (1969), Dietrich Haensch of-
fered a particularly accessible cut-and-paste pastiche of Reich's main
views. Calling for emancipation from both authoritarian childrearing and
monogamous marriage (though he was quick to stress that, like Reich, he
was not advocating loveless promiscuity), Haensch reinforced his pleas
for general sexual liberation by explaining that not only capitalist class
relations but also fascism and brutality in wartime were products of the
"genital weakness" induced in those whose natural drives had been coer-
cively distorted and repressed and who had been forced to develop
"cramped-up" concepts of honor, duty, and self-control. Hitler had only
needed to intensify already-existing bourgeois practices, and these, in
turn, had outlived Hitler. "The tendency to sadism is maintained,"
Haensch informed his readers, "by diverting the libidinal energies away
from the sexual drive and towards the drive for destruction and aggres-
sion; the necessary fixation on the enemy occurs by diverting the hatred
produced by the ambivalent hate-love fixation on the sexual oppressor
onto the military opponent."'3
But also those who did not explicitly invoke Reich as their main au-
thority nonetheless operated with similar assumptions. One group that
did so-with spectacular flair-were the members of the Kommune 1, a
small but endlessly publicized and debated experiment in communal liv-
ing and anarcho-radicalism launched in Berlin in 1966. (A classic ex-

12. "Ich will das so alles nicht," Pflasterstrand,no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p.
33; Siepmann, "Genital versus Prnigenital: Die Grossvaiter der sexuellen Revolution," in
CheSchahShit,p. 101; and Mosler, Waswir wollten,was wir wurden,p. 159. On Reich's extraor-
dinary significance for the 68ers, and on how his ideas were interpreted, see also Reimut
Reiche, "Sexuelle Revolution-Erinnerung an einen Mythos," in Die FriichtederRevolte:Uber
die VeranderungderpolitischenKulturdurchdie Studentenbewegung(Berlin, 1988), pp. 55-57.
13. Dietrich Haensch, RepressiveFamilienpolitik:Sexualunterdriickung als Mittel der Politik
(Reinbek, 1969), pp. 14, 12, 66, 67.

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.h ::

IIN

Kahle Maoisten vor einer kahlen Wand


FIG.1.-"Naked Maoistsbefore a Naked Wall."Membersof the Kommune1 in 1967.
Froma brochureput out by the Kommune 1, reprinted(and captioned)in DerSpiegel,26
June 1967, p. 20. This photo has been reprintedmany times-usually in a spiritof humor
and/or nostalgia-and now counts as one of the icons of the era. In 1988, formerleader of
the SDS ReimutReiche(long hostile to the Kommune1) would makethe followingobserva-
tion about this photo: "Consciouslythis photo-scenewas meant to re-createand expose a
police house-searchof the Kommune 1. And yet these women and men stand there as if in
an aestheticallystaged, unconsciousidentificationwith the victimsof their parentsand at
the same time mock these victimsby makingthe predeterminedmessageof the pictureone
of sexual liberation.Therebythey simultaneouslyremainunconsciouslyidentifiedwith the
consciouslyrejectedperpetrator-parents.'Sexualitymakesyou free' fits with this pictureas
well as 'Workmakesyou free' fits with Auschwitz"(Reiche,"SexuelleRevolution,"p. 65).

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406 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

ample of the Kommune l's provocative style was provided by the photo
of its members-including one of the two children living with them-
distributed by the members themselves on a self-promotional brochure;
see fig. 1.) On trial in 1967-68 for distributing leaflets against the Viet-
nam War (which were interpreted by the authorities as an invitation to
burn department stores), one member of the commune defecated in the
courtroom and others mocked the prosecution witnesses' criticisms of the
group's much-advertised advocacy of promiscuity by rhetorically asking,
"If our anti-authoritarian stance ... is a sign of constitutional abnormal-
ity, then is authoritarian behavior and National Socialism a consequence
of the healthy normality of the Germanic race?"14 Meanwhile, the preem-
inent newsmagazine Der Spiegel,in the late sixties remarkably sympathetic
to the sexual revolution and the New Left (including the Kommune 1),
alike, brought the standard New Left line on sex and fascism to a very
broad audience indeed. In 1966, in a long disquisition on the centuries-
long history of societal attempts to suppress sexual pleasure (a narrative
that took many jabs at the Christian churches: the church fathers' "fear
of sex became the trauma of a whole culture," and so on), Der Spiegel
could clearly not resist adding Adolf Hitler to the illustrious list of those
historical figures purportedly profoundly hostile to sex (fig. 2). Crucially,
Der Spiegel used a Hitler quote from Mein Kampf-to the effect that the
society of the 1920s was "a hothouse of sexual images and provocations"
and that "public life must be freed of the suffocating perfume of our
modern eroticism"-to slam the very similar sort of remarks produced
by "the defenders of cleanliness" in the 1960s.15
Over and over again, in the years that followed, leftists would make
these sorts of connections. The aforementioned Wolfgang Fritz Haug, for
instance, would opine again in 1969 (in an essay entitled "The Sexual
Conspiracy of Late Capitalism?") that "fascism has demonstrated, to what
an extent people who are sexually suppressed and therefore dominated
by sexual fears" can be controlled and manipulated, while Dieter Duhm,
in his much-discussed book, Fear in Capitalism(1972), also found sexual
repression to be at the source of "the murder orgies of the Third Reich."16
Duhm (in a series, incidentally, of poachings from Plack) underscored this
message by strongly suggesting that there was a direct connection be-
tween Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler's Catholicism-induced sexual
14. Trial testimony reproduced in Klau mich, ed. Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel
(Berlin, 1967), p. [173].
15. "Die gefallene Natur,"Der Spiegel, 2 May 1966, pp. 54, 57-58.
16. Haug, "Sexuelle Verschw6rung des Spditkapitalismus?"Neue Kritik 51-52 (1969):
87, and Dieter Duhm, Angst im Kapitalismus:ZweiterVersuchder gesellschaftlichenBegriindung
zwischenmenschlicher Angst in der kapitalistischenWarengesellschaft
(Lampertheim, 1972), p. 100;
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 bour-
geois are receptive for the insanity of fascism due to a repressive sexual morality" are pre-
sented in Karl W. Pawek, "Im Dritten Reich der Sinne," Konkret(Aug. 1978): 44.

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:41-

=*~P
N,"k

-4K
.JOV

-7W..??

Sex:KritikerHitler
- f.Qcr. ,,t2.ve"."
FIG. 2.-"Sex-Critic Hitler: Suffocating Perfume." From Der Spiegel, 2 May 1966, p.
58. In portraying Hitler as a "sex-critic" by quoting antisexual statements from Mein
Der Spiegellent weight to its own defense of sexual liberation. Completely suppressed Kampf,
in this
account was the fact that Hitler was anything but unambiguous in sexual matters; not only
did Hitler vehemently criticize "bourgeois notions" and "prudery" in less public venues,
but he and other leading members of the Nazi regime would ultimately actively encourage
pre- and extramarital promiscuity-and not only for the sake of reproduction. Compare
Bleuel, Das saubereReich, pp. 7, 10-11, and 176-204.

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408 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

shyness and the pleasure in sadism Himmler evidenced by traveling to


Auschwitz specifically to observe the flogging of female prisoners there.-
And like Haensch before him, Duhm tied the potential for aggression to
fear and hatred of repressive parents. Referring specifically to the Ausch-
witz trials, Duhm remarked that "the bestiality of these executioners sits
deeply in all human beings who are raised with the instrument of fear
and who because of their fear have no possibility of living out in any way
their hatred against the oppressors (in the first instance the parents)" (AK,
p. 100).
Related themes emerged in the writer Karlheinz Deschner's TheCross
of the Church:A Sexual History of Christianity(1974). Deschner was older
than the 68ers-he was in his forties in the late 1960s/early 1970s-but
he was well-received by them.'" Deschner relied a great deal on Reich's
own criticism of Christianity and above all on Reich's notion that sexual
satisfaction and sadism were mutually exclusive. Deschner quoted Reich
pointedly: "The kindness and goodness of genitally satisfied people is
noticeable. I have never seen a human being, who was capable of satisfac-
tion, who could be sadistic." By contrast, according to Reich, "inhibited
sexual energy is transformed into destruction." Deschner also relied on
Plack, quoting one of his statements on sexualized brutality in Auschwitz.
Plack had been struck by testimony about the prisoner Kapo Bednarek
who, it was said, "kicked the genitals of his victims until they died." In
doing so, in Plack's view, he was "kicking that drive that the dominant
morality taught him to despise." Plack explained that in some parts of
Spain after a bullfight "men and boys stream into the arena in order to
spit and trample on the testicles of the slain animal: a true festival of
17. 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 hos-
tility 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 EverydayLife, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven,
Conn., 1987), pp. 197-207.
18. See, for example, Henryk Broder's glowing review in Konkret,which not only ef-
fused 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 groBe Verbrechen war immer der Geschlechtsverkehr," review of Das Kreuz
mit der Kirche:Eine Sexualgeschichte des Christentums[The Cross of the Church: A Sexual His-
tory of Christianity], by Karlheinz Deschner, Konkret[May 1975]: 51).

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 409

triumph over the so-called base, brutish, 'the evil' in our selves." Plack
felt this dynamic explained Auschwitz as well, and clearly Deschner
found him convincing, quoting Plack's remark that "the morality of the
mass murderers, who make the Jew into their bull, is none other than
that of the petty bourgeois philistines from the ranks of whom they are re-
cruited."'9
Deschner's book skidded back and forth across the centuries and dif-
ferent national contexts, but in so doing he managed to amass an extraor-
dinary amount of evidence on the extent to which the Christian church
had continually communicated the idea that pleasure was more obscene
than butchery. Though the bulk of the book focused on earlier times, the
concluding chapter of the 1974 edition heaped on evidence from the fas-
cist and especially the postfascist period as well. Deschner not only scath-
ingly quoted church leaders pleased by Nazi attacks on sexual immorality
and actively calling on their faithful to participate in the war effort but
also cited example after example of postwar West German Christian
spokespeople who, unfazed by the "millions of dead" in two world wars
and in Vietnam, continued to act like sex and nudity and pornography
were the main moral challenges. As one post-World War II Catholic com-
mentator cited by Deschner put it, "If there is a drive that is capable of
pressing the human being down beneath the dignity of his reason and
freedom, then surely that is the sexual drive" (KK, p. 398).20 Incredulous
that "one still takes this religion seriously!" rather than "making it the
object of satire, of psychiatrists... [and] sticking its proclaimers among
the comics, in courtrooms, in rubber cells," Deschner over and over un-
derscored his main point: that "the actual crime in 'Christian culture' is,
precisely, absolutely not murder, but rather-with a grain of salt-sexual
intercourse" (KK, p. 399).
Needless to say, in making these connections, in slamming both
Christianity and the Nazi era and pinpointing what they saw as the sexual
dysfunctionality of both, New Left men were also announcing and justi-
fying their own sexual views and practices. They were lending a special
moral aura to their own rejection of monogamy and of (what they fre-
quently called) "'fascistic' nuclear families."2 At the same time (and this
was no less important), quite a few of the most vocal disseminators of
these views were certainly not advertising themselves as misogynists-
that would come later-but rather more as victims of a society that se-

19. Quoted in Deschner, Das Kreuzmit der Kirche:Eine Sexualgeschichtedes Christentums


(Duisseldorf, 1974), pp. 385, 390-91; hereafter abbreviated KK.
20. Deschner is quoting the postwar commentator E Pittet, one of the contributors to
the Catholic sex advice manual GesundesGeschlechtsleben: Handbuchfiir Ehefragen, ed. Franz
Xavier von Hornstein and A. Faller (Olten, 1950).
21. Grossmann, "Questions of Jewish Identity: A Letter from New York,"in Germans
andJews since the Holocaust:The ChangingSituationin WestGermany,ed. Anson Rabinbach and
Jack Zipes (New York, 1986), p. 176.

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410 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

verely damaged human beings' ability to take pleasure in their own bod-
ies and the bodies of others.22
Furthermore, these commentators were quite clearly articulating
their horror at what they saw as the persistence of the Nazi legacy in their
present, both as it was directed at children and as it was aimed at adults.
Duhm, for example, expressly connected his discussion of Nazism with
documentation of widespread child abuse within West German families-
"this massive number of private concentration camps" (AK, p. 101). Plack
had made similar comments. In a related vein, the sex-rights activist (and
former head of the Frankfurt student movement) Giinter Amendt in
1978 elaborated on the connections he saw between the at once repressive
and (surreptitiously) sadistic-erotic child disciplinary practices being rec-
ommended by respected educators and policymakers in West Germany
and the "fascism of Nazi Germany."Alarmed by conservative politicians'
success in making "duty, obedience, industriousness and order" key edu-
cational goals again, Amendt reminded his readers that "'as is well-
known, these principles were also written on the barracks walls of Ausch-
witz and Treblinka.'"23 Two years earlier, Amendt had also with great
earnestness criticized the 1976 papal encyclical (which opposed homo-
sexuality and sexual liberation) as a "sex crime" and criticized conser-
vative politician Franz-Josef Strauss's homophobic remark, "Bettera cold
warriorthan a warm brother," with the following observation: "For whom-
ever's historical consciousness has not completely rotted away, this expres-
sion of E-J. Strauss's differs in no way from the 'Jew-bitch' and
'communist pig' that as labels led the way to the 'final solution' in the
concentration camps."24

Strikingly, New Leftists' interpretations of Nazism's sexual politics


stood in sharp contradiction to those proffered by the institutions that
sought to establish themselves as the main moral authorities in the imme-

22. 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" (Werzweimalmit derselbenpennt, gehdrtschon
zum Establishment)could ever have been considered progressive, but he assured his readers
that it most certainly had been. "An incredibly chauvinist, heartless, indeed reactionary
sentence, I would say today; the astonishing thing is that almost no one but the 'old moral-
ists' questioned its progressiveness (which was taken as evidence for its progressiveness)"
(Preuss-Lausitz, "Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden Kirper," p. 98).
23. Guinter Amendt, "'... dann meinen die auch Gewalt...,"' Konkret(May 1978):
14. Amendt is quoting approvingly Jutta Wilhelmi's comments in the FrankfurterRundschau.
Amendt is probably best known for his bestselling "sex enlightenment" books for teenagers,
Sexfront(Frankfurt, 1970) and DaSeBu (Das Sex Buch) (Dortmund, 1979).
24. Amendt, "Die gesunde Lehre iiber die Geschlechtlichkeit," Konkret(May 1976): 36.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 411

diate postwar years.25To many Christian activists (and numerous political


leaders along with them) Nazism promoted the destruction of the family
and encouraged a generalized promiscuity. The best way to assert post-
war society's differencefrom Nazism was to advocate traditional family val-
ues. Even generally secularized homes tended to communicate
stereotypically conservative values around sex.26 Furthermore, in a coun-
try governed until 1966 by Christian Democrats, the perspectives the
churches fostered were not only the most widely disseminated ones but
also the ones that structured criminal and civil law and state family and
welfare policy. There was also in the postwar decade-and this is crucial
to register-a progressive version of Christianity being articulated, one
which drew different lessons from the Nazi past than conservatives did.
This strand of Christianity combined hope for a renewal of serious spiri-
tuality with openness to some aspects of socialism and with a profound
opposition to remilitarization.27 But these more progressive views were
minority ones; they also typically did not extend to sexual matters. In
short, while countervailing interpretations of Nazism's sexual lessons did
exist in little pockets here and there, they were quite hard to find. Social
Democrats scrambled to disassociate themselves from any taint of Wei-
mar-era sexual radicalism, and even the most politically leftist of Chris-
tian antifascists tended to share some sexual assumptions with their more
conservative brethren.
Meanwhile, to judge alone by the ubiquity of essays published in
Western Germany on the topics of "the marital [or sexual] crisis [or mis-
ery] of our day" in the second half of the 1940s and the first half of the
1950s, those ten years were hardly a time of conservative consensus about
marriage and sexual morality. Instead, they were a time of considerable
tumult, contradictory tendencies, and widespread cultural anxiety about
marital and sexual relations; the often hysterical tone of these essays re-
inforces that judgment.28 (And, certainly, commentators on the "erotic

25. On the importance of both the churches and the attempts to restore the patriar-
chal family and sexual conservatism in the postwar years, see also Heide Fehrenbach, Cin-
ema in DemocratizingGermany:ReconstructingNational Identityafter Hitler (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1995), and Maria Hbhn, "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).
26. See Peter Kuhnert and Ute Ackermann, '"Jenseitsvon Lust und Liebe? Jugendsex-
ualitit in den 50er Jahren," in "DieElvis-Tolle,die hatteich mir unauffdllig wachsenlassen":Le-
bensgeschichteundjugendlicheAlltagskulturin denfiinfzigerJahren, ed. Heinz-Hermann Krfiger
(Opladen, 1985).
27. 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.
28. The essays listed under the headings "Ehe,""Geschlecht," and "Sexualitit" in the
Bibliographieder deutschenZeitschriftenliteratur
between 1944 and 1955 provide an excellent

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412 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

overstimulation and damned sexualism" of the era thought a dramatic


upheaval in sexual mores was at hand already.)29But it is also significant
how very many of those essays insisted that they were offering "Christian"
or "church-oriented" perspectives on, and solutions to, the purported
misery/crisis.30
In an anthology from the early 1980s attempting to reconstruct
68ers' formative experiences in the 1950s (it is entitled Childrenof War,
Childrenof Consumerism,Childrenof Crisis), the authors stressed over and
over again the emphasis placed in the 1950s on "petty bourgeois family
virtues on the one hand and anti-Communism on the other," as tradi-
tional (petty) bourgeois norms and styles of childrearing became a prime
means to demonstrate postwar Germans' "decency" (Wohlanstandigkeit).31
In light of the way the German bourgeoisie had been compromised by its
absorption into fascism, and in light of the virulence of Nazi anti-
Bolshevism, these were ironic continuities, only presented as ruptures.32
And as the editors also observed, the transparent hypocrisy of those par-
ents and teachers "who had helped to carry the Nazi regime and were
now hiding behind properness" would ultimately fuel the youth rebel-
lions from the mid-sixties on.33
The churches played a crucial role from the very beginning in pre-
senting sexual propriety as the cure for the nation's larger moral crisis-
and in suggesting that sexual immorality, not complicity in murder, was
the source of that crisis. For example, in October 1945 one Protestant
synod, in its postwar call to its flock to turn away from the godlessness of
Nazism, expressed far more concern about the "forgetting of respect and
modesty between man and woman ... the crumbling of chastity"-and

sampling of these themes; the preoccupation with "crisis" subsided somewhat in the later
1950s, presumably at least in part because the postwar gender imbalance (the much-hyped
"surplus of women") was beginning to "even out."
29. Johannes Leppich, "Thema 1," in PaterLeppichSpricht:Journalistenhiren den 'roten'
Pater ed. Giinther Mees and Ginter Graf (Diisseldorf, 1952), p. 44.
30. 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 ex-
ample, 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 theolo-
gians. 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, and "'Der Sexus ist kein Siindenpfuhl,"' Der Spiegel, 28 Nov. 1966, pp. 68-87.
31. Preuss-Lausitz et al., "Einleitung," Kriegskinder,Konsumkinder, Krisenkinder,pp. 15,
16, 22.
32. On these double continuities presented as ruptures, see also the important essay
by Robert G. Moeller, "Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany: Women and
Social Policy in the Federal Republic, 1949-1955," FeministStudies 15 (Spring 1989): 137-69,
as well as Moeller, ProtectingMotherhood:Womenand the Familyin the Politics of Postwar West
Germany(Berkeley, 1993).
33. Preuss-Lausitz et al., "Einleitung," Kriegskinder,p. 24.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 413

the way these made Germany a "laughing-stock" among nations-than


about what it euphemistically referred to as the expropriation of the Jews.
Another Protestant statement in 1946 stressed that as significant as "the
sin of yesterday" (here it referred obliquely to the "horrors and crimes"
of the Nazis) was "the sin of today": the "licentiousness... with which
women and girls today surrender themselves and men profane female
honor."34The Catholic church issued similar statements, not only identi-
fying Nazism with secularization and lamenting and criticizing the "secu-
larization" of wartime and postwar marital arrangements, but also
contrasting (elliptically but pointedly) "the dark memories of the past
years" with the need for "Christian family life" in the present; one Catho-
lic commentator expressly connected disdain for virginity with Hitler's
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.35 Although a number of these
texts lumped together the postwar "disorder" (with its "surplus of
women" and their sexual relations with occupation troops) with the Nazi
period, they also referred to the ways the Nazi years themselves had for-
mally and informally encouraged pre- and extramarital heterosexuality.36
On the whole, Christianity in the postwar period presented itself as
a great contrast to Nazism. Nazism's great crime, in the postwar churches'
estimation, was that it turned the German people away from the Christian
God. Even those critical of church complicity with the Nazis contributed
to this interpretation by tending to describe the complicity as consisting
in the churches' absorption of Nazi ideas glorifying the state and the ra-
cialized Volkrather than, as they might have, locating that complicity in
the churches' failure to interrogate the history of its own anti-Judaism.
Yet when attempting to present Christian sexual values as a mean-
ingful contrast to Nazi ones, both Catholic and Protestant commentators
ran into some difficulties, especially around reproductive matters. In the
pages of the prestigious intellectual Catholic journal FrankfurterHefte, for
example, in an essay on "The Woman Question," Maria Jochum in 1946
34. "Wort der ausserordentlichen Landessynode der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kir-
che in Oldenburg an die Gemeinden Oktober 1945," and "Kundgebung der Landessynode
der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern in Ansbach, 9.-13. Juli 1946," in
KirchlichesJahrbuchfiir die evangelischeKirchein Deutschland1945-1948, ed. Joachim Beck-
mann (Guitersloh, 1950), pp. 43, 45, 48. Yet another statement, announcing that the Ger-
man 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" ("Wortan die Gemeinden
der ausserordentlichen Rheinischen Provinzialsynode vom 20. September 1946," in
KirchlichesJahrbuchfiir die evangelischeKirchein Deutschland1945-1948, pp. 56-57).
35. Robert Grosche, "Der deutsche Katholizismus 1945-1950," P. Audomar Scheuer-
mann, "AbriBdes kirchlichen Eherechts," and Pope Pius XII's remarks to Berlin Catholics
(17 June 1949), in "Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters," in Das katholische
Jahrbuch 1951/52 (Heidelberg, 1951), pp. 133, 161-75, 210. See also the related remarks
made by the pope in 1950 in "Botschaften und Ansprachen des Heiligen Vaters," pp. 217-
18. For the remark about Goebbels, see Leppich, "Thema 1," p. 46.
36. See Hans Peter Bleuel, Das saubereReich: Theorieund Praxis des sittlichenLebensim
DrittenReich (Bern, 1972), pp. 176-204.

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414 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

certainly stressed that the Nazis had encouraged promiscuity, diverging


drastically from Christian values by making a sexual revolution of sorts.
Jochum expressly emphasized the disturbing way, under the Nazis, un-
married women were "encouraged into extramarital motherhood or at
least into libertinage." But in seeking a language in which to validate the
church's own demand for procreation, Jochum stumbled into circumlo-
cution. The Nazi-encouraged "joy in children," she declared, was actually
"the opposite of the true order of life, that is realized in humble accep-
tance and not in the goal-orientation of a state's hubris."37The prominent
Protestant bishop Hanns Lilje ran into similar conundrums in 1954 as
he struggled in the pages of the Protestant Sonntagsblattto specify the
distinctions between Nazi and Christian values. On the one hand, he
pointed out that Nazism was ultimately about a "fundamental denial of
the family.., despite all wordy profamily declarations." And he insisted
that it must be self-evident that "it is the end of all ethics in this matter,
when one wants to make a biological breeding institute out of marriage
and family." On the other hand, however, like Jochum, he urgently
wanted his readers to understand that having the "will to the child" (Wille
zum Kind-a term frequently used by the Nazis and which Lilje simply
repeated unselfconsciously) was a powerful act of Christian faith.38Mean-
while, some Christian commentators had much less difficulty asserting
contrasts between Christian and Nazi sexual politics. Another contributor
to the FrankfurterHefte in 1946, for example, the Catholic doctor Her-
mann Friihauf, acknowledged only in passing that the Nazi reproductive
agenda had involved not only the enforcement of abortions for "eugenic"
and "racial" reasons but also an active attempt to stem the abortion rate
among those sorts of women the regime hoped would reproduce prolifi-
cally.39 Friihauf's main message was that a comprehensiveantiabortion
stance was the only way to be truly anti-Nazi, and he reached for the
strongest metaphor available to underscore this point. According to Fru-
hauf, whoever favored abortion rights, "whether he intends this or not;
whether he understands this or not, serves those forces and powers, that
trespass against humanity; he finds himself at a particularly dangerous
point on that precipitous slope, that in its last consequences leads to the
gas chambers of some Auschwitz."40
Even though the conclusions drawn by Friihauf constituted a one-
37. Maria Jochum, "Frauenfrage 1946," FrankfurterHefte 1 (June 1946): 24, 25.
38. Hanns Lilje, "Zerfall der Familie?" Sonntagsblatt,7 Feb. 1954, p. 24.
39. 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.
40. Hermann Friihauf, "Paragraph 218," FrankfurterHefte 1 (Oct. 1946): 590. On the
persistence of these sorts of explicit comparisons between abortion and concentration
camps (including Auschwitz) into the 1950s, see Angela Delille and Andrea Grohn, "Es ist

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 415

sided reading of Nazi reproductive policies, they were widely held, and
not only among Catholics. Even many of the left-liberal Social Democrats
who acquired the reins of government in 1966 were, as some female par-
liamentarians later remembered, marked by an "incalculable" and "pro-
nounced trauma" around the topic of abortion. It was "because of the
memory of the horrors of euthanasia in the NS-era," one recalled, that
her male colleagues-many of them Protestants-"would not even begin
to consider a change in the criminal law."There was a widespread belief,
as another reconstructed it, that "precisely we as Germans could not ap-
proach this topic."41
What was it like to grow up in a climate in which these sorts of views
were influential? Over and over again, writing in the late seventies and
early eighties, former 68ers tried to capture the "hothouse atmosphere"
of the fifties and the way (as they remembered it) their parents' genera-
tion acted as though religious piety and/or an uptight sexual morality
were the best way to display decency even as (with the American occupi-
ers' blessing) countless former Nazis were restored to positions of author-
ity within the new Federal Republic.42One after another, individual 68ers
recalled "the stifling air of the Catholic small town," or their parents'
"masochistic-Protestant attitude, that managed to make of every misery
a higher virtue." Some merely commented on how "the parents perma-
nently preached morality,"while one claimed she suspected there was a
"connection between the prudery of the parents' generation and the
erotic tie to the Fiihrer to which a large part of that generation had suc-
cumbed."43 Others, like 68er novelist Peter Schneider, simply referred
self-evidently to "the sexual taboos of the postwar years"-even as

verboten ...: Empfingnisverhiitung und Abtreibung," in Perlonzeit: Wie die Frauen ihr
Wirtschaftswunder erlebten,ed. Delille et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 124.
41. See Helga Timm and Renate Lepsius, "Ohne uns keine Reform des Paragraph
218," in Frauenpolitikals Gesprachemit SPD-Parlamentarierinnen,ed. Lepsius (Hamburg,
Beruf"
1987), pp. 113-15. It was apparently possible in the fifties to articulate an alternative read-
ing of the lessons of Nazi reproductive policies and to present a proabortion stance as an
appropriately anti-Nazi one, as one report in Der Spiegel (on a trial in Wiesbaden in which
an abortionist was found not guilty) made clear. The court there, among other things, re-
marked pointedly that "the effort to encourage population growth has in German history
... been pursued in an ugly, abominable way."But in this instance Der Spiegel related this
perspective with sarcasm and not as a respectable alternative to the dominant view (Der
Spiegel, 6 Aug. 1958, pp. 23-24).
42. 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 fiber
eine Nachkriegskindheit," in Triimmer,Traume,Truman:Die Welt1945-49, ed. Gabrielle Dietz
et al. (Berlin, 1985), p. 103.
43. Uli Puritz, "Schreiben fiber Sexualitit: Oder Wie fische ich das Salz aus der
Suppe," Asthetikund Kommunikation40-41 (Sept. 1980): 16; Michael Schneider, "Nicht alle
sind tot, die begraben sind," p. 102; Siepmann, "Die Negation der Negation als brennender
Weihnachtsbaum: Das Treibhaus der antiautoritiren Philosophie und seine Erbauer," in
CheSchahShit,p. 184; and Heider, "Freie Liebe," p. 93.

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416 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

Schneider also evocatively captured the intensity of his first petting expe-
riences ("the wild arousals that we felt and that sometimes seemed really
fascistic to me").44
Writing in a special issue of the Berlin-based New Left journal As-
thetikund Kommunikationentitled "Germans, Leftists, Jews" (1983), Eber-
hard Kn6dler-Bunte succinctly described his fifties upbringing within an
atmosphere of repressed sexuality and the persistence of uninterrogated
anti-Semitism: "From my parental home I knew only that one had sinned
heavily against the Jews, and the pastor traced this back to the betrayal
of our Jesus. More could not be gotten in a north Wuirttembergian small
town in the fifties. ... What remained palpable was the aura of innuendo
and secrets that was as difficult to get at as the one surrounding sexuality."
Kn6dler-Bunte also admitted that, having learned about the Judeocide
from a book in 1958, in his disgust with his family he instrumentalized
the Holocaust:

That the Germans could kill millions of human beings just because
they had a different faith was utterly inexplicable to me. My whole
moral world view shattered, got entwined with a rigorous rejection
of my parents and school. If religion had not prevented this mass
destruction of human beings, then it is no good for anything, then
the whole talk of love of your neighbor and of meekness... was just
a lie.45

And in the pages of the Hamburg-based Konkret,the premier New Left


newsmagazine, Hermann Peter Piwitt put it most unsparingly. Writing in
1980 in an essay entitled "Love under the Kidney Table" (in reference to
the fashionable furniture of the fifties), Piwitt constantly switched back
and forth between seemingly incompatible topics. On the one hand, there
are descriptions of his teenage paranoia that people on the street could
smell his daily masturbation, and there are accounts of his rage at God
for not proving His existence by punishing him for this activity. And,
intercut with these, there are bitter references to the hypocrisies of post-
Holocaust Germany and the sickening insipidness of its truisms:

That without God, without faith, life is meaningless, absurd. This


was a publicly agreed-upon matter-that the misery of the era, of
Nazism, of the war, originated in the "faithlessness of the mass, that
no longer took the old values seriously" [here he was directly quoting
a 1953 issue of the Protestant Sonntagsblatt].... And we? ... The
truth was, that we were expendable,... the whole generation that

44. Peter Schneider, "Die Sache mit der 'Minnlichkeit': Gibt es eine Emanzipation der
Mtnner?" Kursbuch35 (Apr. 1974): 121, 122.
45. Eberhard Kn6dler-Bunte, "Verlingerung des Schweigens," Asthetikund Kommuni-
kation 51 (June 1983): 45, 44.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 417

had to grow up in the fifties. ... We were neither Jews, nor did the
repute of having murdered some open certain other doors for us.46

Or, as Piwitt put it in another essay on the fifties, there was in that decade

a generalized insecurity about how to behave.... Embarassing was


not only dandruff-embarassing was also "that matter of the Jews"
[das mit denJuden]. .... Embarassing for a girl, no longer to be "inno-
cent," and embarassing for a man to marry a girl that had already
been with another man before him.... Not just embarassing but
criminal was homosexuality, abortion, partner-switching; and a land-
lady was guilty of pimping if she allowed a woman renting from her
to have male visitors.47

The way "memories" of the Holocaust and memories of and angst


about sex jostle each other here only makes sense when we see that both
sex and the Judeocide were inextricably intertwined with questions about
God and the meaning of life, and with the inadequacy of the simplistic
pieties that were being offered as answers. Sex and the Holocaust got
tangled up in these memory-pieces in part because the particular conser-
vative version of Christianity promoted in the 1950s, with its muddling
of different kinds of "sins,"had already tangled them up. No one pointed
this out more forcefully than the 68ers themselves and their mentors.
Karlheinz Deschner, in his The Crossof the Church,was most scathing sim-
ply by amassing incriminating evidence. For example, in one particularly
angry passage, Deschner reported this postwar comment by the im-
mensely popular Catholic priest Johannes Leppich:

It is true: we have a terrible war behind us, a war which has left
behind demolished churches and houses and a multitude of dead.
But destroyed churches and houses can be rebuilt, and every day
enough human beings are born. No-that is not what is ruining Ger-
many. And if one asks me: is our Volkbeing ruined, or does it still
have a future, then there is only one answer: We are dying once more
at the hands of our women and girls, who every day throw what is
most sacred in them into the dirt. [Quoted in KK, p. 401]48

46. Hermann Peter Piwitt, "Liebe unterm Nierentisch," SexualitdtKonkret2 (1980):


36, 37.
47. Piwitt, "Autoritar,betulich, neckisch und devot," Konkret(May 1979): 33.
48. 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 discus-
sion of his popularity and impact in PaterLeppichSpricht,pp. 43-53, 5-15.

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418 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

Clearly, the fifties in West Germany saw a broadscale attempt to sup-


press and monitor the sexual behavior of both women and men, even as
women were monitored much more effectively and closely and-simulta-
neously-even as actual sexual behavior regularly departed from the ex-
pected norms.49 It was not until approximately the middle of the 1960s
that both women and men began rebelling more openly. By 1966, Der
Spiegelwas reporting that a sexual revolution was at hand, though it also
reported that in one survey, 50 percent of female university students still
defined themselves technically as virgins (although the vast majority of
these also stated that they were indeed sexually active, engaging in pet-
ting-they used the American term-to the point of orgasm).50 A few
years later, discussions of petting were being drowned out in a flood of
debates about the pill and promiscuity.5' As one poster of the era put it,
"We're not talking about 'the pill,' we're taking it."52 Many women partici-
pated in the sexual revolution as actively as men. "I experimented
around without any inhibitions," one former 68er woman recently sum-
marized it, and countless personal testimonials, from both women and
men, concur.53 But already in 1968 there were signs of discontent among
New Left women, and by the mid-1970s, with the feminist assault on New
Left men in full swing, this discontent would be public knowledge, a
source of great voyeuristic interest to the nonleft, nonfeminist general
public and a source of enormous contention-and ultimately anguish-
within the Left.

49. 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 im-
portant testimonies in Kuhnert and Ackermann, 'jenseits von Lust und Liebe?"
50. "Die gefallene Natur," pp. 50-69, and "So nennt man das," Der Spiegel, 14 Nov.
1966, pp. 112-13. Already in the early 1960s the popular newsmagazine Stern ran a survey
that incorporated a broader cross-section of class backgrounds and age groups and found
that 87 percent of men and 70 percent of women admitted to having engaged in premarital
intercourse (although those who did so with someone other than their subsequent spouse
only amounted to 74 percent of the men and 41 percent of the women). See Wolfgang
Metzger, "Liebe, Ehe und geschlechtliches Leben," in KrisederEhe? ed. Johannes Schlemmer
(Munich, 1966), p. 84. For a more detailed analysis of the differences (and, more impor-
tantly, 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 Research7 (May 1971): 89-106.
51. For example, contrast the Spiegelreports from 1966 with "Thema Eins,"Der Spie-
gel, 3 Aug. 1970, pp. 33-46.
52. This poster is evident in a photograph in Sabine WeiBler, "Sexy Sixties," in Che-
SchahShit,p. 98.
53. C. H., private conversation with author, 1996.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 419

Although New Left women had a number of complaints, sex was at


the heart of what increasingly appeared to be an irresolvable rage be-
tween (not all, but a great many) New Left men and women. The fact
that childcare and other household labor went unremunerated, the fact
that left men condescended towards women's intellectual abilities, and so
forth, were seen as somehow derivative of or at least inextricable from
that originary rage. And although women in the U.S. and other western
European countries certainly had similar gripes (and ultimately experi-
enced a similar male backlash), there is also a distinctive streak of venom
in the West German debates that is hard to miss-a streak of venom typi-
fied, for example, by the ubiquity of the phrase "[chop that] cock off!"
(Schwanzab!) in feminist graffiti.
New Left female fury at specifically New Left male behavior in bed
was the spark igniting the feminists' own revolution, a fury palpably clear
in the very first New Left feminist document, the flyer put out by the
Frankfurt Broads' Collective (Weiberrat)in 1968 (fig. 3). Along with the
visual impact of the chopped-off penises of well-known New Left leaders
came the following text:

We won't open our mouth! If we do open it, nothing comes out! If


we leave it open, it gets stuffed for us: with petty bourgeois dicks,
socialist screw pressure, socialist children, love, socialist flotsam and
jetsam, turgidity, socialist potent horniness, socialist intellectual pa-
thos,... revolutionary fumbling-about, sexual-revolutionary argu-
ments ... BLAH BLAH BLAH!... Let's vomit it out: we have penis
envy, we are frustrated, hysterical, uptight, asexual, lesbian, frigid,
shortchanged, irrational ... hard, virile.... We compensate, we
overcompensate... We have penis envy, penis envy, penis envy....

Then came the famous and oft-quoted concluding slogan: "Liberate the
socialist pricks from their bourgeois dicks!"54
The years that followed saw the proliferation of a wide array of femi-
nist institutions, from rape crisis centers to coffeehouses and bookstores.55
By the end of the 1970s, it was easy to see that the women's movement
was one of the strongest social movements in the country. And like the
New Left men before them, feminist women targeted the churches for
particular animus. Some worked to reinterpret Christianity itself, among
other things generating a creative feminist theology movement (many of
54. Flyer text reprinted in Sibylla Fliigge, "Der Weiberrat im SDS," in CheSchahShit,
p. 174.
55. Useful histories of the women's movement in West Germany include Der grosse
Unterschied:Die neue Frauenbewegungund die siebzigerJahre,ed. Kristine von Soden (Berlin,
1988); AutonomeFrauen: Schliisseltexteder Neuen Frauenbewegungseit 1968, ed. Ann Anders
(Frankfurt am Main, 1988); Sofing es an!: JOJahreFrauenbewegung,ed. Alice Schwarzer (Co-
logne, 1981); and Keiner schiebtuns weg: Zwischenbilanzder Frauenbewegungin der Bundesre-
publik, ed. Lottemi Doormann (Weinheim, 1979).

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Rechenschaftsbericht
des weiberratsder gruppefrankfurt

LZ2S
\\
'II
t&o

,- =

f-map
iNo

1) schauer 4) krahl
2) gang 5) rabehl
3) kunzelmann 6) reiche
7) ...
FIG.3.-"Report of the Broads' Collective of the Frankfurt Group." Flyer created by
SDS women in November 1968. Reprinted in AutonmeFrauen, p. 12.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 421

whose members have, significantly, been sharply criticized for their own
unthinking anti-Semitism; efforts, for example, to undercut antifeminist
versions of Christianity by describing Jesus Christ as "the first feminist"
have, unfortunately, commonly included disparaging assertions that in
being so, Jesus was breaking from "patriarchal Judaism").56 Other femi-
nists argued that Christianity was unsaveable-misogynist in its very es-
sence-for as one poem about Jesus' mother Mary put it, "the religion of
men began with your rape." Another feminist slogan-emblazoned in
graffiti on a church wall-was: "If men could get pregnant, abortion
would be a sacrament."'57Abortion, indeed, was a major issue; the main
formal campaign that feminists engaged in, launched in 1971, was the
struggle to separate pleasure from the fear of pregnancy by legalizing
abortion. This is the campaign that consolidated feminism into a real and
widely supported social movement, one that drew in many women be-
yond the confines of New Left circles.
Meanwhile, within the Left a far more controversial, though infor-
mal, campaign involved (what in the U.S. context has been named) "the
battle for orgasm equity," that is, the effort of many feminists to redefine
heterosexual sex acts themselves.58 Certainly some women involved
with men were perfectly, indeed extremely, happy with penetration.59
But countless others-gathering courage in the women's consciousness-
raising groups that were springing up everywhere-began to declare that
penetration just did not do it for them and that they were tired of being
traumatized into thinking themselves frigid and defective.60 As one put
it, they "no longer want to feel like just a more or less shapely mass of
flesh with a hole."61 The catalyzing document for thousands of women
56. See Susannah Heschel, "Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology," Tikkun 5
(May-June 1990): 25-28, 95-97, and Judith Plaskow, "Feminist Anti-Judaism and the
Christian God,"Journal of FeministStudiesin Religion 7 (Fall 1991): 99-108.
57. See the photograph in Ele Sch6fthaler, "Zweierlei MaB: Die evangelische Kirche
und der Paragraph 218," in Das KreuzmitdemFrieden:1982Jahre Christenund Politik,ed. Peter
Winzeler et al. (Berlin, 1982), p. 145.
58. See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, "The Battle for Or-
gasm Equity: The Heterosexual Crisis of the Seventies," Re-makingLove: The Feminizationof
Sex (New York, 1986).
59. 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 Herbeifiihrbar-
keit: Zur feministischen Diskussion um den Orgasmus," Freibeuter2 (1979): 94-100; Peggy
Parnass, "Ich bin Peggy Parnass," SexualitatKonkret1 (1979): 94-95; and Maria Wieden,
"Wider den linken Moralismus von Sexualitit,"Asthetikund Kommunikation43 (Mar. 1981):
113-17.
60. For details on the clitoris debates, see Anders, "Chronologie der gelaufenen Ereig-
nisse," in AutonomeFrauen, p. 26; Michaela Wunderle, "Lust und Liebe: Die feministische
Sexualititsdebatte," in Der grosse Unterschied,pp. 20-24; and Renate Schlesier, "Die totge-
sagte Vagina: Zum Verhiltnis von Psychoanalyse und Feminismus: Eine Trauerarbeit," in
Weiblich-Miinnlich: KulturgeschichtlicheSpuren einer verdriingtenWeiblichkeit,ed. Brigitte Wart-
mann (Berlin, 1980).
61. Nushin, "Frauenfolter,"Pflasterstrand,no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. d.

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422 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

was the bootleg translation of Anne Koedt's The Myth of the VaginalOr-
gasm-which became an underground bestseller when it appeared in
Germany in 1973. Popularized versions of its findings appeared in Alice
Schwarzer's The "Little"Difference(1975) (Schwarzer was and is the editor
of the main German feminist magazine Emma)and in the prominent fem-
inist Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit's pathbreaking tome, Sexism (1976).
Janssen-Jurreit, for example, opined forcefully that men's neglect of the
clitoris was a "rape of women's self-experience" that could well be de-
scribed as "clitoridectomy the occidental way."She also implicitly invoked
the Holocaust to strengthen her case, actually describing the indicative
features of "Hitler's race theologies" as "no sexual self-determination for
the woman, no striving for individual erotic happiness."'' The antifemi-
nist backlash from many-also leftist-men (and not a few women) was
not far behind.
Reading New Left men's memory-essays from the late seventies and
early eighties, one gets the sense that the entire New Left scene in Ger-
many went through a phase somewhere in the mid-seventies of exploring
not only clitoral stimulation but also nonpenetrative sex in general. And
one also gets the sense that few men (at least among those who were
writing about it) were ultimately very happy with this development,
whether they were self-styled "chauvies" or sensitive-guy "softies."Rather
than seeing alternatives to penetration as a way to experiment with inten-
sifying sexual pleasure for both partners, numerous essays not only
mocked the notion of "the infantile caressing paradise of endless cuddle-
orgasms" purported to have become typical in "the scene" (contrasting
this with the lost dream of "sex with hide and hair... with sweat and tears
ofjoy and pain ... with orgasms like cannons firing")63but also expressed
a vituperative rage at feminism-which easily slid into a more simple and
all-encompassing misogyny. The classic summary statement of this mood
was undoubtedly (the pseudonymous) Gernot Gailer's declaration of
1980 (which appeared in both the taz, a left Berlin daily, and in Asthetik
und Kommunikation):

This women's movement. As if we didn't have enough to do. ... Then


they show up. Chop that cock off, they say right away, if we once lech
at them a second too long. Chop that cock, no thank you, I say then.
Totally self-assured. And: the truly oppressed ones are us after all.
We men. Down with the women's movement. For more peepshows.

62. Marielouise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexismus:Uberdie Abtreibungder Frauenfrage(Munich,


1978), pp. 539 and 295; trans. Verne Moberg, under the title Sexism:TheMale Monopolyon
Historyand Thought(New York, 1982).
63. Hermann L. Gremliza, "Normalitditder Perversion," SexualitdtKonkret3 (1981): 8.
See here also two satiric interventions: the special issue of Pardon on "Lust ohne Frust: Die
neue Erotik" (Aug. 1979), and "Verein gegen schAidlichenGeschlechtsverkehr e.V.," Sexuali-
tit Konkret3 (1981): 30.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 423

That's no joke. Honestly. I am for the peepshow. The women's move-


ment doesn't do anything for me.64

But as is already evident in the flyer put out by the Frankfurt Broads'
Collective in 1968, it is difficult to separate chronologically the feminist
women's insurgency from the misogynist male backlash against it; the
men's response is already contained in the women's own statement of com-
plaint. A similar dynamic would be evident in subsequent years, as femi-
nists and antifeminists engaged in an escalating spiral of attacks and
counterattacks. (Simultaneously, an interesting feature of many men's
comments on the battle of the sexes was that they frequently elided the
issue of the consistent presence of active antifeminism by acting, time and
again, as though they had been putting up with feminist demands for a
long time, but now were, finally, for the first time, breaking the silence.)65
In their attempts to score points against recalcitrant leftist males,
feminists repeatedly invoked the fascist era in a variety of ways, decrying
Nazism's "masculinity-madness" and "masculine ideology"66 and, among
other things, announcing that "antifeminism" was "the hidden theoreti-
cal basis of German fascism."'' For example, after one Siegfried Knittel
had confessed his misogynist fantasies and behavior in the important left-
ist, Frankfurt-based newspaper Pflasterstrandin 1978 (and the male edito-
rial collective had inadequately distanced themselves from his remarks),
forty enraged female staffers put out the following declaration:

One may feel sorry for the early fate of young Siegfried or not, and
it is surely very regrettable, that the erstwhile SS-bullies also did not
have a pretty youth, [but] it is to be welcomed as well that they at
least are not allowed to see the Pflasterstrandas their central geni-
tal. ... Not even a concentration camp guard in the National and Sol-
diers Paper could report on his "self-emancipatory acts" with such
freedom and ease as Siegfried Knittel could about his deeds in the

64. Gernot Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau zieht sich aus," Asthetikund Kommunikation40-41
(Sept. 1980): 91.
65. To give just three examples (from 1977, 1980, and 1992): See Siegfried Knittel,
"Vom Ende der matriarchalischen 'Emanzipations'-moral," Pflasterstrand,no. 22, 12-25 Jan.
1978, pp. 20-22; Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau zieht sich aus"; and "Wutgeheul aus Min-
nerseelen," Der Spiegel, 25 May 1992, pp. 68-84.
66. See "Eine Welle von Nazi-Drohungen gegen Feministinnen," Emma (Dec. 1983):
5; Margarete Mitscherlich, "Die Unfdihigkeit zu kimpfen," Emma (Apr. 1991): 28; Ingrid
Schmidt-Harzbach, "Die LiUgevon der Stunde Null," Courage(June 1982): 34; and Anne-
marie Troeger, "Die DolchstoBlegende der Linken: 'Frauen haben Hitler an die Macht ge-
bracht,"' Frauen und Wissenschaft:Beitrdgezur Berliner Sommeruniversitat
fiur Frauen,Juli 1976,
ed. Gruppe Berliner Dozentinnen (Berlin, 1977), p. 324.
67. Annette Kuhn, "Der Antifeminismus als verborgene Theoriebasis des deutschen
Faschismus: Feministische Gedanken zur nationalsozialistischen 'Biopolitik,"' in Frauenund
Faschismusin Europa: Der faschistischeKdrper,ed. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda
Stuchlik (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), p. 39.

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424 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

Pflasterstrand.We will not let the political frustration of the men be


carried out on our backs and bellies.68

Characteristic gestures of this sort also appeared constantly in Emma. In


one major essay, for instance, Emmaidentified the entire male-dominated
sexual revolution of the 1960s with the Nazi period. According to Emma,
the young women who had, together with leftist men, "gone on the street
against rearmament, against the emergency laws, and Vietnam, [the
women who] had begun to take the pill and discuss the 'sexual revolu-
tion,'" were "slowly starting to realize that they were once again going to
be betrayed," just like their erstwhile "brown" mothers had been. These
daughters "no longer wanted to type and listen ... and willingly spread
their legs"; they were "waiting for the zero hour [die Stunde Null, that
is, May 1945]."69 Contributors to Emma also explicitly linked leftist men's
defenses of pornography with both fascism and Auschwitz.70 And one
Emma contributor underscored her points about the horrors of rape by
explicitly invoking the so-called Einsatzkommandos (the battalions that per-
formed the mass executions by shooting which constituted a significant
part of the Holocaust). But what had in actuality been the roundup and
slaughter of more than one million (some say two million) Jews of both
genders on the Eastern front she described as a spectacle specifically of
mass rapesof ethnically unidentified women and children.71
It was not surprising, then, that progressive men would fight back
using similar tactics. Henryk Broder, for instance, writing in Konkret(even
as he confessed that "when women have big boobs I automatically reduce
my expectations of their brains") criticized the feminist slogan "all men
are chauvinists" by pointedly comparing it with the racist notion that "all
Jews are cunning."72 (Broder was and is a well-known German Jewish
commentator on matters Jewish and German; he has aptly been defined
recently as "a kind of Mr. Moral Jewish Voice in Germany." In the late
1970s, Broder was just starting to highlight his Jewishness more fre-
quently in his journalistic work.)73 Other men used related tactics. Psy-
choanalyst and "masculinity specialist" Berndt Nitzschke, for example,
responding to feminist attacks on porn, called attention to the Nazis' at-

68. Die Frankfurter Stadthexen et al., in Pflasterstrand,no. 23, late Jan.-early Feb.
1978, p. 1.
69. "Der Aufstand der Frauen: Am 6. Juni 1971 ging es los!" Emma (June 1991): 18,
20-21.
70. See FIL, "Sieg Macho," Emma (Dec. 1987): 6, and Ingrid Strobl, "Justine und Jus-
tiz," Emma (Feb. 1988): 33. See also the section on "Playboy bis TAZ,"in Schwesternlustund
Schwesternfrust: 20Jahre Frauenbewegung,ed. Alice Schwarzer (Cologne, 1991), p. 129.
71. See Ute Bechdolf, "'Das Schlimmste waren die Schreie,"' Emma (Aug. 1989):
33, 35.
72. Broder, "Ich bin ein Chauvi," Konkret(Oct. 1979): 55, 57.
73. Scott D. Denham, "Schindler Returns to Open Arms: Schindler'sList in Germany
and Austria," GermanPoliticsand Society 13 (Spring 1995): 138.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 425

tacks on porn and its purportedly Jewish purveyors. Nitzschke sarcasti-


cally pointed out that "the dignity of the German woman was thoroughly
protected back then, because the sex-offenders were not sitting, as they
supposedly are nowadays, behind trees at night, but rather.., in the con-
centration camps."74

To hear ex-68ers tell it, the tension between the sexes on the Left
was increasingly felt to be inseparable from a larger emergent sense of
political disorientation. Sometimes when one reads the left books and
newsmagazines it seems like post-1968 melancholia in West Germany set
in already around 1969, or indeed, already in 1968 itself. A foretaste of
the future mood came, for example, when Reimut Reiche, head of the
SDS in 1966-67 and author of the widely read and convolutedly theo-
rized (Marx- and Marcuse-influenced) Sexualityand Class Struggle (1968),
harshly criticized the Kommune 1 for, "as paradoxical as it sounds," both
"its Proudhonism and its Stalinism"; he meant to call attention to its na-
ivet6 about being able to create a political revolution in a little island by
itself and the psychological "terrorism" with which its members treated
each other in their insistence on maintaining nonmonogamy.75 Indeed,
the leaders of the Kommune vacillated between charming (and at the
time quite politically inventive) self-revealing vulnerability-as for ex-
ample when communard Dieter Kunzelmann told a major newsmagazine
that "I have difficulties with my orgasm and I want this to be made known
to the public.... [I want to have] a real orgasm sometime"-and a rather
harsh braggadocio about the acquisition of new female members and fel-
low travelers: "It's like training a horse; one guy has to break her in, then
she's available for everyone."'' As Reiche phrased it in the lovely con-
torted prose of the day: "This subjectively revolutionary attitude becomes
objectively counterrevolutionary" (SK, p. 155). (Rudi Dutschke, one of
the most earnest and charismatic of the New Left's leaders, put it even
more forcefully. He not only charged that "this is not what I imagine a
commune should be. The exchange of women and men is nothing but
the application of the bourgeois principle of exchange under the sign of
pseudorevolutionism." He also suggested that the Kommune 1's mem-

74. Berndt Nitzschke's lecture before sexologists in Salzburg, 5 Nov. 1988; excerpted
in Emma (Feb. 1989): 29.
75. Reiche, Sexualitatund Zur AbwehrrepressiverEntsublimierung(Frank-
Klassenkampf"
furt, 1968), p. 155; hereafter abbreviated SK.
76. Quoted in Heinrich Mehrmann, "Erobern Kommunen Deutschlands Betten?
Mehr Sex mit Marx und Mao," Pardon (Aug. 1967): 17, 22. The most moving analysis of
the Kommune's significance is in Klaus Hartung, "Die Psychoanalyse der Kiichenarbeit:
Selbstbefreiung, Wohngemeinschaft und Kommune," in CheSchahShit,pp. 102-6.

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426 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the SexualRevolution

bers were "unhappy neurotics" and that the group's naked self-display in
the self-promotional photograph "reproduces the gas chamber milieu of
the Third Reich; for behind the exhibitionism helplessness, fear, and hor-
ror are hidden.")" Reiche reported that many young leftists had started
communes in imitation of the Kommune 1, but when their expectation
that the escape from the nuclear family and sexual repression could abol-
ish all suffering and fulfill all hopes instantaneously proved a delusion
this led to "many ... chaotic personal collapses or, where these could be
avoided, to positions of deep resignation" (SK, p. 155). Whether or not
Reiche in his self-righteous superiority over Kunzelmann and Co. was
correct in the specifics (and it is worth pointing out that bothReiche's and
Kunzelmann's organs provided targets for the Broads' Collective's angry
humor), what is significant is the sense evident throughout Reiche's dis-
cussion-one that would become articulated with ever greater fre-
quency-that the political difficulties the Left was running into more
generally were inextricable from their crises and confusions around sex.
Certainly by the mid-seventies the sense of both personal and politi-
cal disenchantment (and the puzzling over whether and how those were
related) was starting to get articulated with ever greater regularity, and
by the late seventies, particularly with the retrospectives generated at the
occasion of the ten-year anniversaries of 1967 and 1968, melancholia and
introspection were the overwhelming moods, along with both self-
castigation and mutual recriminations.78 By 1977, at least one left text
spoke of "the collapse of the antiauthoritarian movement" as though it
were a self-evident fait accompli.79The intensification of state and police

77. Quoted in "'Wir fordern die Enteignung Axel Springers,"' Der Spiegel, 10 July
1967, pp. 32-33.
78. 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 psy-
choanalyzing and sociologizing interpretations of post-68 privatization in Johann August
Schiilein, "Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende oder der Riickzug ins Private: Eine
sozialpsychologische Analyse," in "Zehn Jahre Danach," the retrospective special issue of
Kursbuch48 (June 1977): 101-17; the eloquent and earnest introspection of a participant,
Peter Schneider, "'Nicht der Egoismus verfalscht das politische Engagement, sondern der
Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,"' FrankfurterRundschau,25 June 1977, p. III; the agonized
rage at neoconservative mockery of 68ers in Walter Boehlich, "Biirgerkrieg als Sex-
schnulze," Konkret(Dec. 1980): 62-63; and, as well, three important obituaries: (on Ulrike
Meinhof) Gremliza, "War sie denn unser?" Konkret(June 1976): 4; (on Herbert Marcuse)
Gaston Salvatore, "Triumen entsprang ein Augenblick Geschichte," Der Spiegel, 1979, pp.
148-49; and (on Rudi Dutschke) Michael Schneider, "Sanft war er, sanft, ein biBchen zu
sanft-wie alle echten Radikalen," Konkret(Feb. 1980): 23-25. Note also the simplistic psy-
chologizing on post-68 depressiveness (along with some condescending remarks about for-
mer 68ers' sexual unhappiness) in Ursula Nuber and Heiko Ernst, "Die traurige
Generation," PsychologieHeute (Apr. 1989): 20-27. A more balanced and sensitive interpreta-
tion of seventies melancholia is Michael Schneider, Den KopfverkehrtaufgesetztoderDie melan-
cholischeLinke:Aspektedes Kulturzerfallsin den siebzigerJahren(Darmstadt, 1981).
79. "Editorische Notiz der Herausgeber," in Jos van Ussel, Sexualunterdriickung:Ge-
schichteder Sexualfeindschaft,ed. Heinrich Brinkmann et al. (GieBen, 1977), p. [1].

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 427

repression of the Left (including tapped phones, house searches, and


blacklisting, especially in 1977 as the government escalated its antiterror-
ism campaign), did not, to say the least, make either the Left's self-
diagnoses or its ability to envision fresh political agendas any easier.80
Pressure came from within as well, as the Left suffered internal conflicts
over terrorism and careerism; both of these phenomena seemed like ad-
missions that the revolution was failing. Overall, there was a sense of deep
discouragement that political transformation had not been as easy to
achieve as had been initially expected and that the state the students were
battling was both more powerful and more flexible than had been
thought. In these years there were particularly intense debates about the
inadequacy of Marxist and other political-economic analyses and activ-
ism, and the need to attend to subjective and personal matters; simulta-
neously, there was fierce controversy over whether the focus on the
personal was a sign of depoliticization, a "drawing-back into the private,"
as one essay in the left journal Kursbuchput it, or precisely part of the
necessary "revolutionizing of the everyday," as the Kommune 1 (and its
dissident sibling Kommune 2) had originally wanted.8" It was specifically
its confidence in the absolute inseparability (and mutual beneficiality) of
the personal and the political, as Peter Schneider pointed out in 1977,
that in the beginning had given the student movement its euphoric
strength and revolutionary power, and it was exactly those "personal and
political needs, that later got separated into mutually hostile camps."82
Only for a brief moment in the late sixties "everything"--sex and
politics, hash and Vietnam-"had seemed to hang together with every-
thing else," as former member of the SDS Eckhard Siepmann put it, and
then things became more confused. What remained was "a desert, in
which no one understood anyone else anymore, everyone was suspicious
of everyone else, and no theoretical stone could still be found standing
on top of another."83Furthermore, to complicate the difficulties over the

80. On the state campaign of repression against the Left, see Margit Mayer, "The
German October of 1977," New GermanCritique13 (Winter 1978): 155-63. On the complex
interactions between external repression and internal problems within the Left, see Har-
tung, "Versuch, die Krise der antiautoritiren Bewegung wieder zur Sprache zu bringen,"
Kursbuch48 (June 1977): 14-43.
81. Schfilein, "Von der Studentenrevolte zur Tendenzwende oder der Rfickzug ins
Private," p. 101, and Mehrmann, "Erobern Kommunen Deutschlands Betten?" p. 22. See
also Kommune 2, Versuchder RevolutionierungdesbiWrgerlichen Individuums:KollektivesLebenmit
politischerArbeitverbinden!(Cologne, 1971). For another characteristic example of the late
seventies discussion of the notion that without working on the personal-in this case work-
ing 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.
82. Peter Schneider, "'Nicht der Egoismus verfilscht das politische Engagement,
sondern der Versuch, ihn zu verheimlichen,"' p. III.
83. Siepmann, "Unergriindliches Obdach ffir Reisende" and "1969-Die grol3e Son-
nenfinsternis," in CheSchahShit,pp. 194, 204.

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428 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the SexualRevolution

relationship between the personal and the political, the later seventies
were a moment when the sixties' sexual revolution and the seventies' fem-
inist critiques of it were bothfelt to be in crisis; there was an explosion of
(often mutually conflicting) accounts announcing that promiscuity wasn't
working, but twosomes weren't working either, and that general romantic
and sexual unhappiness was widespread. As Stefan Hinz observed in the
pages of Konkretin 1981: "Loving has become difficult. Certainly in this
country it has."84
As part of the larger introspective move, in the late seventies and
early eighties many of the New Left journals produced special issues on
the topic of sexuality, and these issues were widely read and discussed-
by all accounts sparking profound conflicts in bars, workplaces, and
bedrooms alike. In every case, the justification for such a publishing
enterprise was formulated in terms of dissatisfaction with the reigning
state of affairs in and between left bodies. As the editors of the Pflaster-
strand put it in a tone of strategic self-deprecation in the wake of their
special issue of December 1977, the reason the issue had sold out so
rapidly had nothing to do with the quality of its contents. Rather, "the
topic caught hold, because there is such a total deficit in the discussions
around relationships, sexuality and the women/men battle." Their only
motivation, they claimed, had been "to provide something like a provo-
cation, dragging the topic out of private drawers into the light of day."8s5
Or again, as some members of the editorial collective put it, the goal
was to "carry out [publicly] a discussion, that otherwise always stays
jammed up in the cogs of privateness."86The editors were worried that
among too many young people, "the same creepy dramas as went on in
grandma and grandpa's bedroom still exist today" ("S,"p. 19). In a re-
lated vein, the editors of Konkretannounced in 1979 that they were
bringing out a special issue, SexualitdtKonkret,"because round about us
we see the ruined sexual relationships and the helplessness in face of
them."87
Clearly, even as a number of contributors to the special issues com-
plained (and rightly so) that (with few exceptions) no one was making
themselves truly vulnerable, and even as members of the Pflasterstrand's
editorial collective, for example, expressed awareness that encouraging
individual experiential contributions (or, as they put it, "subjective screw-
experience-reports") could draw the rebuke that one was "solely grubbing
around in one's own individual shit, rather than only even tentatively sug-
gesting collective paths and perspectives towards liberation and transfor-
84. Stefan Hinz, "Die Kunscht des Liebens," Konkret(Apr. 1981): 50.
85. "Sexualitat: Wenig Fortsetzung. . .," Pflasterstrand,no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 19;
hereafter abbreviated "S."
86. Drei aus der Redaktion, "Von Feen und Faunen," Pflasterstrand,no. 23a, 9-22 Feb.
1978, p. 4.
87. "Intern," SexualitdtKonkret1 (1979): 4.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 429

mation" ("S,"p. 19),88part of the impetus for these projects was precisely
the desire to make the private public (in some ways thus reclaiming one
of the earliest impulses of the student movement). Thus, for example,
Pflasterstrandeditor Daniel Cohn-Bendit responded to feminist criticism
that male writers on matters sexual were all just "paper masturbators" by
declaring that "I am not just a paper masturbator but rather a deeply
committed masturbator with many fantasies and dreams that are neither
all ugly nor all pretty."89 Others ventured different forms of vulnerability
(or exhibitionist self-exposure?), whether sharing-as one man did-the
self-derogatory information that he had so loved looking supercool in his
ultratight jeans ("pure insanity: for more than a decade I did that to my-
self, even though so often it made my balls and my stomach hurt"), or
volunteering-as another did-that "I always come too early,"or reveal-
ing-as in yet a third case-that "I share with some men that I know the
experience, in the course of screwing suddenly to be 5 kilometers away,
separated from my penis, separated from the woman, totally alone."90
As the writings on sex on the Left multiplied in the late seventies
and early eighties, two themes repeatedly recurred. One had to do with
a profound hostility to feminism and a deep anxiety among left men that
women, under the influence of feminism, might reject the act of "dick-
fucking" (Schwanzficken--that is, penetration), entirely. And the other had
to do with the relationship between the personal and the political, be-
tween sex and what had happened to the attempt to change the world.
Indeed, one could argue that the whole series of issues on sex in the
Pflasterstrandin late 1977/early 1978 consisted mainly of one long and
embittered extended conversation about the "dick-fuck,"and the related
issue of left male resentment at feminism, and vice versa. Simultaneously,
it was an important forum for both male and female leftists to articulate
their sadness and confusion about the state of left politics. Contributor
after contributor remarked on "the political helplessness of the Frankfurt
scene. Externally nothing succeeds anymore, internally we beat on each
other." Or, as another put it, "already years ago we had it up to here with
the proletarians . .. now we apparently have it up to here with ourselves."
Occasionally a call for a more utopian optimism broke through-as one
"Micky" announced in February 1978: "I am not ready to sacrifice the
visions of a liberated ... world of revolutionary houses of lust and of
laughing orgies."91 But mostly contributors took the opportunity to re-

88. "Kontroverse zum 'Stammheim-Fick,"' Pflasterstrand,no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23.
89. Dany, in Pflasterstrand,no. 23, late Jan.-early Feb. 1978, p. 3.
90. Puritz, "Schreiben fiber Sexualitat," p. 13; "Gedanken eines Sauriers," Pflaster-
strand, no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 40; and "Vbgeln," Pflasterstrand,no. 21, 15
Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 28.
91. Harry Oberlinder, "Notizen aus der Provinz,"Pflasterstrand,no. 23, late Jan.-early
Feb. 1978, p. 3; Drei aus der Redaktion, "Von Feen und Faunen," p. 5; and Micky, "Warum
ich mich an dieser Diskussion nicht beteilige. . .,"Pflasterstrand,no. 23a, 9-22 Feb. 1978, p. a.

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430 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

mark on the growing confusion over what it might mean to be leftist and
how exactly left sexuality differed from the bourgeois version.
One left man, calling himself "a dinosaur," "a relic from the so-called
Softie-era," generated consternation in the Frankfurt scene by confessing
in 1977 that "despite my best efforts I can no longer find the unbroken
red thread. My most beautiful screw ever was on the morning when the
news came over the radio of the death in Stammheim [announcing that
three of the imprisoned left terrorists from the Red Army Faction had
committed suicide]. We were both for a long time completely numb. Then
we fucked pretty brutally, then we were totally empty."92 Responding to
the outrage of the editors that he was getting off on other people's suffer-
ing and thereby disengaging sex from politics in the most offensive way,
the "dinosaur" tried to sort through his feelings once more. First he com-
plained that the editors should not have accompanied their statement of
disgust about him with such a hurtful caricature (fig. 4)-as though the
"dinosaur" spent his time masturbating while thinking of the suicides.
The "dinosaur" accused the editors of imitating the Stiirmer(the influen-
tial Nazi magazine filled with racist images of not only big-nosed but also
hypersexualized Jews). And the "dinosaur" also reflected further in self-
critical anguish on his own and everyone else's confusions:

The suicides in Stammheim did not make me horny. They made me


feel rage, sadness, helplessness. In this situation I could-and that is
first of all my brokenness, maybe-screw, specifically in this rage and
mourning. I could screw AGAINST ALL THAT and was simultane-
ously driven by something outside myself, was a victim, okay, maybe
I also turned the woman with whom I was having sex into a victim.
In any case I was empty, and my body could speak, against the
speechlessness, that we, I guess, all felt. Or didn't you feel it? With
you apparently it's not like that. Sex must be integrated into a politi-
cal reality, you say. That seems to work seamlessly for you. Not for
me. Sex and relationships and politics, with me that's sometimes sep-
arate, sometimes opposed.93

This concluding perspective would be articulated even more forcefully


two years later when the aforementioned pseudonymous Gernot Gailer,
in his sophisticated and much-discussed statement of (what we would
now call un-p.c.) left pornographic fantasies, "ADream Babe Undresses"
(published in its unabridged version in Asthetikund Kommunikation),in-
voked the old 68er slogan Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together
only to disagree completely. "Sex and politics," Gailer intoned, "never did
work, does not work, and never will work."94

92. "Gedanken eines Sauriers," pp. 40, 42.


93. "Antworteines Sauriers," Pflasterstrand,no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23.
94. Gailer, "Eine Traumfrau," pp. 84-85.

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-fv
KONTROVERSE
ZUM 03(18
vi "STRMMfHEIM-TcIK"
r
rhnr
,9'flo
1!9
.',Z,
.7-

Die Auseinandersetzung iiber Sex-


ualitat und das v6geln begreifen wir
als einen wichtigen Tell in unseren Be- b1Qi" -7-/'
ziehungen. Doch wenn sich diese
Suche nach Verinderung im luftleeren
Raum abspielt, nicht integriert ist in
eine politische Realitit, ist es eine Ge.
fahr, dab die "Subjektivitit an sich"
zum einzigen Inhalt der Verinderungs-
wiinsche verkommt. Es lebe die Indivi-
dualitit: jeder erzlhlt seine Schwierig-
keiten und Probleme, versucht sie nach
seinen M6glichkeiten und Vorstellung-
en zu 16sen, interessiert sich vielleicht
ab und an noch mal, wie andere diese
bewiltigen . . . mehr ist da an Perspek-
tive tatsichlich nicht drin.
Das Manko, das allen subjektiven
Vdgel-Erlebnisberichten anhangt, ist.
dab aus ihnen auch nicht einmal an-
satzweise irgendwelche perspektivisch-
en, kollektiven Phantasien zur Vertn-
derung geweckt werden. - Geschweige SCHONSTE VOGELLI WARAN DEM MORGEN,ALS DIOL
E•,,MEINE
denn, dab da sowas von gemeinsamer VON DEM TODAUS STAMMHEI44AUS DEM RADIO KAM
Betroffenheit bzw. gemeinsamer Suche Pfl/aul'rsrund Nr.21
nach Mdglichkeiten von Verinderung- \_'"MELDUNG
en und Bediirfnisbefriedigung herzu-
stellen wire.
Die Getrenntheit der Erzihler und
A-4-l?uJ
Scheile. So, wie ihr es geschrieben Bei l uch kommt das nichtvi r
uns wurde uns am deutlichsten auf Sexualitit muis integnert sein in pols-
habt, wie ihr es wahrgenonnmmen habt,
Seite 42. habt ihr recht, und ich verstehe euer tische Realitit schreibt ihir.I)as cheint
Genosse "Saurier", denke doch mal Befremden. thr miiht es haben, wenn bei Euch hruchlos zu klappen. Bei mir
mit vertauschten Rollen: wie mag es ihr jenen einen Satz aus dem Zusam- nicht. Sexualitit und Bezichungen und
Dir ergehen, wenn Du in einer Knast-
menhang reict, von dem ich dachte, Politik, dab ist hei mir manchmal ge-
zelle hockst und erfIhrst, dab die Ge- er wiirde im Zusammenhang klar. trennt, manchmal gegensitzlich. Ich
nossin, mit der Du einmal so toll Das mag auch an meiner flapsigen habe Phantasien, die manchmal weit
(asprachlos) gevogelt hast, sich angeb- Schreibe liegen, aber woran liegt es, aultrhalb dieser Idylle liegen, die
lich in der Zelle nenenan erhaingthat daB ich mir, in der Karrikatur mit AUCHlKompensation hedeuten.
und Du anschliehend im Pflasterstrand
einer Asthetik des .iirmer, im Pflas- Man wird hei euch schnell zun)
ltest, dab Leute drauten mit dieser terstrand-Biiro einen abwicnse? Die Verriter. Ich verstehe euer moralisches
Meldung ihr schonstes Vogelerlebnis ISelbstmorde in Stammheim haben Erschrecken, aher ich crnchrecke auch
verbinden.
Imich nicht aufgegedt. Sie haben mich vor curer Moral, in der ich eine arme
ieghche mal vorhandene Gemein- wtitend, traurig, ratios gemacht. In Sau bin, die keinen roten Faden mehr
samkeit geht verloren oder war es
Idieser Situation konnte ich - und das findet.
lang vorher, ohne dab wir es wahrha- ist erstmal meine Kaputtheit, vielleicht, Ich tcile cure Knritikan srimtlichen
ben wonlten. Die Totalitit an Gegen-
v6gein, eben in dieser Wut und Trauer. Artikeln tiberSexualitiit, daos sich da-
satz, was unsere Empfindungen aus- Ich konnte DAGEGEN v6gein und raus beim besten Willen keine perspek-
macht, ti6t Beispiele kaum noch zu. war gleichzeitig fremdbestimmt, ein tivischen, kollcktiven Phantasien zur
Die Aussagen der Roten Hilfe zu
Ruhland fallen uns zu Dir ein: "Die Opfer, ok. vielleicht habe ich auch die Veranderung
erkennen lassen. Abir
:Frau, mit der ich gevdgelt habe, zum icb will mir und allen anderen auch
armnne Sau hat jedes Mab fiir oben und
Opfer gemacht. Ich jedenfalls war leer, zunestehen, sich erstmal dutch einenj

FIG.4.-"Controversy about the Stammheim-Fuck." Caricature accompanying


the editors' criticism of the "dinosaur" and the "dinosaur's" response, Pflasterstrand,
no. 22, 12-25 Jan. 1978, p. 23.

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432 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

This was the milieu in which 68er Klaus Theweleit was writing Male
Fantasies.Male Fantasiesneeds to be seen, I think, as a last-ditch attempt
at an optimistic reading of the relationship between the personal and the
political. In contradiction to the building sentiment that pleasure, sex,
and politics were at odds, Male Fantasiesannounced, resoundingly, that
pleasure, sex, and politics did belong together. Male Fantasies suggested
that sexual dysfunctionality was at the heart of the most important and
gruesome political events of the twentieth century. It brought, in short,
both German fascism and the Judeocide explicitly back into the discus-
sion the Left was having with itself, and it proposed that understanding
the connections between bodily feelings and the propensity to violence in
the past could show the way to a nonfascist future.
The impact of Male Fantasiesshould not be underestimated. In the
late 1970s, when it was published, the book was a blockbuster hit, and it
was not only widely reviewed but also broadly appropriated, in both pop-
ular and scholarly venues. Rudolf Augstein, the editor of Der Spiegel, in
1977 deemed Male Fantasies"maybe the most exciting German-language
publication of this year,"while in the more conservative but no less influ-
ential FrankfurterAllgemeineZeitungin 1978, Lothar Baier (who found the
book appalling and announced that its explanatory value "inclines ...
towards zero") also noted that the two volumes had created a sensation,
that the publisher was unable to keep up with the extraordinary demand,
and that "in certain parts of the intellectual scene they are being
almost maniacally devoured." And in the pages of the opinion-making
Die Zeit, Male Fantasieswas called "the most productive contribution of
left theoreticians to the fascism debate to date." The review in Frank-
furt's Pflasterstrandactually said that the book could help to heal the
problems in the left scene and to "build bridges" between the estranged
parties.95
The impact was lasting. A few years later, in the early 1980s, Ulf
Preuss-Lausitz, in his contribution to the anthology on 68ers' coming of
age in the 1950s, started his inquiry with the assumption that in the bod-
ies of human beings, "in these places of seemingly greatest privacy, lines
are drawn of whole-societal processes, and that this in turn affects our
social-political actions." His inspiration for pursuing these reciprocal con-
nections between bodies and politics, he emphasized, came above all from
two sources: his own and his peers' experiences, and "the investigations
95. RudolfAugstein, "Frauen fliessen, Mdinnerschiessen," Der Spiegel52, 1977, p. 132;
Lothar Baier, "In den Staub mit allen Feinden der Frau,"FrankfurterAllgemeineZeitung, 18
Apr. 1978; Bazon Brock, "Frauen, Fluten, Kbrper, Geschichte: Ein wichtiger Beitrag linker
Theorie zur Faschismusdebatte," Die Zeit, 25 Nov. 1977, p. 11; and "Blut und Widerstand:
Der Traum vom Terror,"Pflasterstrand,no. 21, 15 Dec. 1977-11 Jan. 1978, p. 19.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 433

of Klaus Theweleit into the dangers and possibilities of certain body-


socializations." Theweleit's most impressive accomplishment, said Preuss-
Lausitz, was the way Theweleit "above all convincingly worked out the
inner affinity between the socialization of men in that time and fascism."96
Meanwhile, just last year, in 1996, in a new anthology on the history of
masculinity, Male Fantasieswas once again hailed as a pathbreaking work,
this time as the pioneering text in the history of masculinity in Germany
and one which "surely now as much as ever counts as the most well-
known contribution" to that genre.97
As mentioned, Theweleit attempted to make sense of the (proto)fas-
cist male mind above all by consulting protofascist and fascist men's own
writings. Theweleit examined over 250 Freikorpsmemoirs as well as the
writings of such men as Goebbels and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf
Hdiss. In addition to this rich source base, Theweleit engaged a broad
array of theoretical works and issues. Although resolutely anticapitalist
and deeply committed to understanding human psychology, Theweleit
was repeatedly critical of Marx, Freud, and the Freudian Marxist Frank-
furt School. Instead, Male Fantasies drew eclectically on various non-
Freudian analytic theories. It was particularly influenced by Gilles
Deleuze and F6lix Guattari's notions of the unconscious as a "desiring-
machine" and by Margaret Mahler's insights into how acts of aggression
provided "maintenance mechanisms" for children suffering from psycho-
sis, particularly children who, being (as Theweleit summarized her)
"not-yet-fully-born," had never acquired the necessary sense of bodily
boundedness to be able to relate libidinally to other bodies.98 Theweleit
was convinced fascistic men had the same problem. And his book heaped
on such a wealth of empirical evidence from so many men's own writings
that, for many readers, the thesis became hard to resist.
Male Fantasiescareens wildly between the brilliant and the idiotic, the
tedious and the illuminating, the perceptive and the problematic; often
those tendencies coexist within the same passage. It is definitely the prod-
uct of a 68er. (Theweleit, born in 1942, describes his parents, and thereby
situates himself similarly to those who felt that the aftereffects of Nazism
lingered throughout their adolescences in the fifties: "The blows [my fa-
ther] brutally lavished as a matter of course, and for my own good, were
the first lessons I would one day come to recognize as lessons in fascism.
The instances of ambivalence in my mother-she considered the beatings

96. Preuss-Lausitz, "Vom gepanzerten zum sinnstiftenden K6rper," p. 89.


97. Thomas Kiihne, "Mainnergeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte," in Miinnerge-
Miinnlichkeitim WandelderModerne,ed. Kfihne (Frankfurt, 1996),
schichte-Geschlechtergeschichte:
p. 16.
98. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris
Turner, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1987, 1989), 2:212; see also 2:210-11; hereafter abbreviated
ME

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434 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

necessary but tempered them-were the second" [ME 1:xx].) But Male
Fantasies is also definitely a post-1968 book. Rather than simplistically
adopting Wilhelm Reich's dictums about the relationships between sexu-
ality and fascism in the way, say, Dietrich Haensch did, Theweleit is con-
stantly at pains to criticize and go beyond Reich. Moreover, rather than
assuming triumphing over the Right will be easy, Male Fantasiesassumes
a world in which leftists are once again disoriented and are struggling to
understand what makes conservatism appealing to the "masses."Further,
it is a world in which there is tremendous perplexity about the relation-
ship between the personal and the political. And, finally, far from assum-
ing that all antifascists' sex lives are going smoothly, Male Fantasies
struggles with the challenges brought by feminism as well as with the
general sense of dissatisfaction with the way the sexual revolution was
going. Male Fantasiesis above all an intervention in two conversations: the
one that the male Left was having with itself about its own bodies, and
the one (less openly thematized but no less pressing) that the society as
a whole had intermittently been having about the relationship between
pleasure and evil.
Near the end of volume 1, Theweleit complained that "historians
have never been interested in what has really happened to human bod-
ies-what bodies have felt" (MF 1:362). And clearly his book involved a
recurrent attempt to figure out what fascistic men's bodies actually felt,
particularly when they were engaging in killing on the battlefield, though
also, for example, when engaged in the ritual of marching in spectacular
column formations. But Theweleit was interested as well in what the left
men of his generation were feeling inside their bodies.
On one important level, Theweleit can be read as styling himself as
an ultra-sensitive guy, while in his own way outmachoing the other guys,
implying quite strongly that sensitive guys have more fun. Against the
clamor of other heterosexual men worrying over the impact of feminism,
Theweleit was telling them: relax.99 Relax: it's not the erection that mat-
ters (indeed, he repeatedly mocked other-also especially left-men's
concerns about erection and penetration), it's the whole-body orgasms
you'll have if you lose your fear of women, and of their fluids, and of their
recesses (in fact, what you're really afraid of is your own fluids, and you
shouldn't be). Relax, furthermore, because women, and feminism, are
not scary; women and feminism are good for us, too. And to top it all off,
to reinforce this message, Theweleit had the whole chilling counterexam-
ple of the Third Reich to back him up. This, then, is the spirit in which

99. 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 refutethe old canard that all Nazis were gay!) that suggest that homosex-
uals, like psychotic children, might be incompletely "born";see ME 2:314-18.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 435

Theweleit could deliver such bon mots as the following:

If personal relationships are to be transformed, it no longer suffices


simply to demand more frequent and more pleasurable orgasms....
Instead, the very notion of the orgasm as the sensation of one person
has to be dissolved, abandoned. If human beings were to begin to
achieve release through orgasms in which they experienced the
other, the diverse and the different as equal, they might well become
nonfascists. [MF, 2:104]

(Very occasionally there are other moments in Male Fantasiesas well, ones
which acknowledged that bodies didn't always cooperate with utopian
programs. As Theweleit put it affectingly in passing in volume 1, what
"all of us" "suffer most from" is feelings of alienation: "The real problem
is that our bodies cramp up when they try to feel pleasure; sweat breaks
out where love should; our soft, erect members become unsatisfied
bones. .."
[MF, 1:416-17].)
But when he turned away from his own generation and to the details
of the past, Theweleit ran into more difficulties. For example, he seemed
unable to decide whether fascism offered its adherents pleasure or not,
and he resolved this dilemma far more successfully when thinking
through the appeal fascism held for the general public (see esp. MF,
1:430-32) and the warrior-though here too he ran into theoretical tan-
gles-than when he tackled the problem of brutality within concentra-
tion camps. Theweleit's basic argument throughout the book was that
"the fascist never experiences the existence of a body capable of re-
lease. ... [His is] a body incapable of the experience of pleasure in any
form" But then again, in the context of making a case about
(MF, 2:195).
the inadequacy of past antifascism and eager to develop an antifascism
that would be more successful because more attuned to the "mysteries"
of the body (MF, 2:108), Theweleit was sure that the key to the fascists'
success lay in the "refusal by fascism to relinquish desire" (albeit "desire
in its most profound distortion"); the Communist Left in the pre-Nazi
years, according to Theweleit, "never so much as intimated that there
might be pleasure in liberation" (MF, 2:189). Or at another point, spe-
cifically in the context of criticizing the Left for assuming fascism had
anything to do with the masses' economic interests, Theweleit asserted
that "what fascism allows the masses to express are suppressed drives,
imprisoned desires" 1:432). Or yet again: "Fascism never expropri-
ates the owners of the (ME,
means of production. ... The only thing it 'liber-
ates' is perverted desire-which it then turns loose on human beings"
2:201).
(MF,Turning to the battlefield, Theweleit was more consistent. Invoking
the notion of "the orgasm of killing" (MFj 2:127), Theweleit explained
that for "soldier males," "heroic acts of killing take the place of the sexual
act" (ME 2:279). Soldier men take pleasure in killing, but it is not a sexual

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436 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

pleasure; indeed, according to Theweleit, it is the pleasure of averting


sexual desires in one's own body by destroying the bodies of others.
Theweleit stated very clearly that "I would hardly describe the white ter-
ror as a form of 'sexuality"'; instead, he argued, soldier males try to es-
cape or transform their own sexuality, "which they perceive as a force
that will engulf and destroy them" (MF, 2:315). And most explicitly: "It
seems increasingly doubtful that terms such as hetero- or homosexuality
can usefully be applied to the men we are studying.... These men seem
less to possess a sexuality than to persecute sexuality itself-one way or
another" (MF 2:61).
But when he got to torture within concentration camps, Theweleit
had to face head-on the problem of pleasure in evil. At various points in
the book (like Plack and other 68ers before him), Theweleit was at pains
to point out that notions of an innate aggressive drive or death drive in
human beings were nonsense. Furthermore, in tackling the notion of hu-
man nature as innately evil, Theweleit rather cleverly invoked head Nazi
Hermann Goering as a key proponent of that view (an excellent discredit-
ing strategy), and he pointed out very movingly and perceptively that the
spread of the idea of human evil's inevitability was one of the most tragic
and pernicious consequences of Nazism itself. But in the end, what did
this leave him with?
In an extended section in the second volume, Theweleit ventured an
interpretation of a phenomenon observed by the (long-anonymous) au-
thor of The Men with the Pink Triangle (it had just appeared in 1972), a
homosexual survivor of the concentration camps of Flossenbtirg and
Mauthausen. This author said he himself had witnessed "'on more than
thirty occasions'" an SS camp commander masturbating during floggings
of prisoners (MF, 2:301).100 In Theweleit's view, the public masturbation
needed to be understood in multiple ways: as a deliberate reminder of
the utter disempoweredness of the spectators; as a celebration of the tor-
turer's own aliveness in the face of those condemned to death; as a tortur-
ing of the victim in his capacity as a sexual being (in other words as
antisexual against others); and also-and here we get to the heart of
Theweleit's problem-as the torturer's act of repressionagainsthimself How
could this be (particularly since Theweleit himself acknowledged that
"ritual flogging seems to me to be the most 'sexual,'... of all forms of
torture")? How is evil not true pleasure; how is this not a truly enjoyable
orgasm? Was this concentration camp commandant not having orgasms?
Theweleit ultimately suggests that, yes, of course, he was, but they were
not the bestkind. This is how Theweleit put it: He presumed to know that
100. It was recently discovered that the author of The Men with the Pink Trianglewas
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 W. Dunlap, "Personalizing Nazis' Homosexual Victims," New York
Times,26 June 1995, p. Al).

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 437

the public masturbator at the flogging absolved himself

of the requirement that he fantasize in order to gain pleasure. Mas-


turbation releases him absolutely from his threatening interior since
this now takes the externalized form of the victim at the whipping
post. His interior is severed from his body.... He is now able to
repress the "desire to desire,"'the very existence of his unconscious.
And the more he can substitute external perceptions for those of the
interior, the more successful repression will be. [MF, 2:303]

And how did the murder of the Jews function in Male Fantasies?Al-
though there have been countless reviews and discussions of Male Fanta-
sies both in the U.S. and in Europe, with only one or two exceptions no
one has noticed that 'Jews are almost entirely absent" from it, and cer-
tainly no one has explained what role they do play.'0' Far from ignoring
the Jewish question because Jews were just not a big concern for the pre-
Nazi Freikorpsmen that provided Theweleit with his main source base,
Theweleit instead repeatedly and quite deliberately invoked the Holo-
caust ("concentration camps," "Auschwitz,""gas chambers") in order-it
starts to seem-to give his arguments about sex an impact and weight
they would not have had if the Holocaust went entirely unmentioned.102
Theweleit has frequently been criticized for being inattentive to the vari-
ous levels at which his argument operated: the level of the fascism-loving
masses, the level of the soldier male, the level of the dyed-in-the-wool
Nazi, or indeed the level of Western bourgeois men in general-a prob-
lem he actually engaged quite openly himself, only in order to dismiss it
(see, for example, MF, 2:118, 213, 348-49). What has not been noticed is
that his argument also worked at the level of the Holocaust, and precisely
the ensuing ambiguity is what gave Theweleit's argument, in his time,
its power.
In fact, volume 2 of Male Fantasiesopenedwith the problem of trying
to explain Nazi anti-Semitism, pointing rightly to the limitations of tradi-
tional leftist analyses in which anti-Semitism was above all explained as a
technique for diverting anticapitalist impulses among the masses toward
Jews. Theweleit stressed "that this point is secondary. What we find at the
core of German anti-Semitism is instead a coupling of Jewishness' with a

101. Michael Rogin, "Fascist Fantasies," review of MF, in TheNation, 18-25 July 1987,
p. 65. See also the brief consideration of this problem in Jessica Benjamin and Rabinbach's
extremely interesting foreword to MF, 2:xiv.
102. One way Jews continually reappear is as part of the standard triumvirate of
things fascist men were said to hate: women, Communists (or proletarians), and Jews (as in
a sort of tired rattling-down of the three analytic categories of gender/class/race). But what
is interesting here is the way Theweleit often makes this threesome fit better into his argu-
ment by linking Jews with sex, or in other words by subsuming Jews into his sexual argu-
ment, as in such phrases as "contagious Jewish lust" (M1 2:162) or "lascivious or avaricious
Jews" (ME 2:348).

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438 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

'contagious' desire for a better life" (ME, 2:9). But quickly, in comments
both before and after this particular one, it becomes apparent that once
again, for Theweleit, fascism was about fear of the female and fear of
bodily delight. Thus he stressed that the fascistic soldier male had within
him "a concentration camp, the concentration camp of his desires" (MF,
2:6). (Indeed, at another point Theweleit stated that "I do not believe it
is at all exaggerated to claim that [Auschwitz commandant Rudolf] H6ss
and his contemporaries treated concentration camp internees in precisely
the same way as they treated their own desires, the productive force of
their unconscious: for both they had nothing to offer but incarceration,
the labor of dam-building, and death" [MF, 2:237]).•03 And it is on this
basis then that Theweleit could once more conclude confidently that "the
core of all fascist propaganda is a battle against everything that constitutes
enjoyment and pleasure" (MF, 2:7).
So again, as for the earlier 68ers-although with more attendant
angst and interpretive contortions-mass murder turns out to be primar-
ily about sexual repression.'14 The book gives evidence of an extremely
earnest and heartfelt, even if at times rather confused, effort to update
103. And as an antifascist strategy he recommended the following type of analytic
treatment for a soldier male: since he is "locked ... in his totality-armor," "analysis might
perhaps involve guiding him toward an acknowledgment of his bodily openings and of the
interior of his body, in order to protect him from immediate inundation by the fear of
dissolution if his bodily periphery becomes pleasurably invested" 2:261; also compare
(MF,
2:267-68 on "political work with potential fascists").
104. 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 compel-
ling) 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 crimi-
nality, and not beingpunished 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 Gestapo people or SS men: we
see them teaching, correcting, lecturing onsoldier-kids,....
'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 bodyhe 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 psy-
chotic 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, N.J, 1993], pp. 305, 303, 300, 303).

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 439

and refine the old 68er notion that sexual repression was the root of all
evil. But what the book wound up loing was circling around this prob-
lem, gnawing at it, trying to put the same point in endlessly different
ways, and yet running up against obstacles and inconsistencies at every
turn. Because what the book ultimately in its hundreds of pages once
again made clear is that it was indeed intensely difficult to theorize a
sexual revolution-to link pleasure and goodness, sex and progressive
politics-in a country in which only a few decades earlier so many people
appeared to have taken such delight in doing harm. What emerged was
a text wrestling with the contradictory cacophony of "lessons" postwar
commentators had put forward on the subject of Nazism, a text ultimately
unable to sort through satisfactorily the swirling mess of puzzle pieces the
postwar era had produced-all the while offering a compendium of the
traces of precisely those pieces.

7
It has become routine, both in the U.S. and in Germany, to criticize
postwar Germans for their callousness around the Holocaust. A growing
body of scholarship has focused on church and theological leaders in par-
ticular, documenting how many failed both to acknowledge the perni-
ciousness of the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and to engage the
question of how Christianity might need to change in the wake of the
Judeocide. Although there were clearly exceptions-and increasingly
so-the German churches were slow to confront Christianity's complicity
in making the Holocaust possible. And too few theologians were willing
to let go of the notion that Christianity possessed the truth and that ulti-
mately what God wanted was for Jews to convert.105 There has also been,
at least since the early 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, an out-
pouring of moving and articulate critiques--including autocritiques-of
West German 68ers' and West German feminists' too easy (indeed at
times tellingly and disturbingly vehement) hostility to Israel, too glib gen-
eralizations about Jews, too loose invocations of Holocaust rhetoric in at-
tempting to score points against "fascistic" conservative opponents, and
too shortsighted unwillingness to confront the complicity either of the
working class or of women in the persecution and murder machineries

105. See, among other things, Frank Stern, The Whitewashingof the YellowBadge:Anti-
semitismand Philosemitismin PostwarGermany,trans. William Templer (Oxford, 1992); Auschwitz
als HerausforderungfiurJuden und Christen,ed. Gtinther B. Ginzel (Heidelberg, 1980); Eberhard
Bethge, "Shoah (Holocaust) und Protestantismus" and Kurt Meier, "Die judenfrage' im hist-
orischen und theologischen Horizont des deutschen Protestantismus seit 1945: Ein Litera-
turbericht," in Der Holocaust und die Protestanten:Analysen einer Verstrickung,ed. Jochen-
Christoph Kaiser and Martin Greschat (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), pp. 1-37, 241-69; and
Heschel, "Anti-Semitesagainst Anti-Semitism," Tikkun8 (Nov.-Dec. 1993): 47-53.

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440 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

of the Third Reich.'06 How, then, can we acknowledge these entirely apt
criticisms and still also see that postwar attempts to understand the sexual
lessons of Nazism involved not only an evasion but also an engagement
with the Holocaust?
In part, when postwar combatants over matters sexual invoked the
Third Reich they simply reflected a broader phenomenon, for blud-
geoning each other with the country's past indisputably became a sort of
lingua franca of postwar West German political culture, saturating ideo-
logical conflict over all manner of issues. Thus, for instance, antinuclear
activists from the 1950s to the 1980s could warn that nuclear war would
mean "a burning oven far more imposing than the most terrible burning
ovens of the SS-camps,"'07or a catastrophe compared to which "Auschwitz
and Treblinka were child's play."'08 Or-to give an especially challenging
example-the above-mentioned Hermann Peter Piwitt could in the late
1970s in the pages of Konkretconfidently describe global economic injus-
tice as "a murderous conspiracy measured against which the conse-
quences of Hitler's 'final solution' seem positively charming."109Indeed,
this Holocaust-as-a-hammer technique was used as vigorously by conser-
vatives as it was by leftists. And it is worth pointing out that those trying
to sensitize non-Jewish Germans about the dangers of this technique
could at times fall into a similar trap. (The classic instance here is pro-
vided by Henryk Broder himself, who apparently could find no more
forceful way to criticize the tendency of German leftists and feminists to

106. On these and related points, see Broder, "'Ihr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern.'
'Euer Jude von heute ist der Staat Israel': Die neue deutsche Linke und der alltigliche
Antisemitismus," Die Zeit, 27 Feb. 1981; Die Verldngerungvon Geschichte:Deutsche,Juden, und
der Paldstinakonflikt,ed. Dietrich Wetzel (Frankfurt, 1983); Rabinbach and Benjamin, "Ger-
mans, Leftists, Jews," and Marion Kaplan, "To Tolerate Is to Insult," in New GermanCritique
31 (Winter 1984): 183-93, 195-99; many of the essays in GermansandJewssince the Holocaust;
Corinna Coulmas and Friedlinder, "German Leftists Come to Grips with the Past, a Case
Study,"Holocaustand GenocideStudies 6, no. 1 (1991): 33-44; Grossmann, "Feminist Debates
about Women and National Socialism," Genderand History 3 (Autumn 1991): 350-58; Elisa-
beth Domansky, "'Kristallnacht,' the Holocaust, and German Unity: The Meaning of No-
vember 9 as an Anniversary in Germany," Historyand Memory4 (Spring-Summer 1992):
60-94; and Heschel, "Configurations of Patriarchy,Judaism, and Nazism in German Femi-
nist Thought," in Genderand Judaism: The Transformationof Tradition,ed. T. M. Rudavsky
(New York, 1995). 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 'Historikerdebatte', zum Faschismusbegriff der '68er' und
zu Peter Schneiders Selbstkritik," Niemandsland:Zeitschriftzwischenden Kulturen 2, no. 1
(1987).
107. Hermann Sauer, "Zwischen Gewissen und Dimon: Der 20. Juli gestern und
heute,"Junge Kirche(1955): 426.
108. This was a prevalent 1980s peace movement slogan; quoted in Detlev Claussen,
"In the House of the Hangman," in GermansandJews since the Holocaust, p. 61.
109. Piwitt, "Niemand muB hungern: Das Gerede von der 'Oberbevolkerung' ist ein
verbrecherischer Mythos. Zwei Amerikaner haben ihn zerstbrt," review of FoodFirst:Beyond
the Myth of Scarcity,by Joseph Collins and Frances LappS, Konkret(Aug. 1978): 39.

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 441

play the comparison game too carelessly than by accusing them of "con-
tinuing ... the work of Adolf Eichmann" and preparing "the second
phase of the final solution.")"1
But there is something special about sex. There is some way in which
the invocation of Nazism and the Judeocide within sexual conflicts is not
merely a way to lend metaphorical heft and punch to one's statements.
For there are also a great variety of complex ways in which sexual mat-
ters-from the sexual demonology saturating anti-Semitic rhetoric; to
the Nazis' central obsession with controlling reproduction; to the sexual
humiliation, abuse, and sadism that occurred within concentration
camps-were close to the heart of the genocidal project of German fas-
cism since its inception (to say nothing of the much-puzzled-over ques-
tion of what role the production and/or suppression of human desires
had to do with the success of fascism in the first place).
The relationships postwar West Germans articulated between sex
and the Holocaust were many and convoluted, and the phenomenon of
this relatedness is not reducible to any one explanation. The links be-
tween the two themes have taken the most diverse forms. In some cases,
postwar commentators articulated a sort of causal connectedness, with
the most direct example being the 68ers' assertion that sexual repression
was the cause of cruelty. In other instances, the relationship was deployed
in a more analogic or metaphorical way, or as a substitution or dis-
placement.
Meanwhile, however, contemporary commentators are often pro-
foundly dismissive of 68ers' preoccupation and struggles with sex. One
recent example typifies the general tendency of self-distancing and ridi-
cule: In March 1997, Die Zeit ran an opinion piece by Achim Schmillen,
a thirty-something Green politician annoyed with the now-aging 68ers'
condescension towards his generation for its purported lack of political
courage. His opening volley, in response, was to refer sarcastically to the
main "achievements" of the 68er era as "street battles, sexual liberation,
communal horninesses." "Must we really," he asked his readers, "dive
around [in this little murky basin] for treasures, if we want to become
mature politically?""' Politicians, journalists, and many scholars continue
to consider sex too trivial, mundane, dirty, and/or private a matter to
warrant sustained analysis, even as they are certainly not above throwing
in references to sex for laughs. And even when sex is taken seriously as a
scholarly subject, as it increasingly is, it is still too often thought to involve
no politics beyond gender politics.
Yet for many German 68ers, sex and their broader political concerns
were inextricably connected, and to neglect the sexual parts of their at-

110. Broder, "'Ihr bleibt die Kinder Eurer Eltern.' 'Euer Jude von heute ist der Staat
Israel,"' p. 11.
111. Achim Schmillen, "Wir sind besser als die Alten!" Die Zeit, 14 Mar. 1997, p. 22.

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442 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the SexualRevolution

tempts at revolution is to miss a great deal. The 68ers' relationship to the


Holocaust is a remarkable case in point. Conflicts over sex became a key
site at which West German 68ers worked through their anxieties about
their generation's relationship to the mass murder in the nation's recent
past.
In this respect, perhaps one of many, the West German 1968 was
unique. The 1950s were morally conservative in other countries, too, and
were followed by student rebellions. But nowhere else did the insistence
on sexual conformity seem so hypocritical, so inexcusable; nowhere else
could it seem to the young such a patently obvious displacement of a
deeper unresolved guilt (and probably also continued anger about that
guilt).112 The 68er, labor organizer, and feminist activist Barbara K6ster
in the 1980s retrospectively summarized her own and her generation's
coming-of-age this way:

I was raised in the Adenauer years, a time dominated by a horrible


moral conformism, against which we naturally rebelled. We wanted
to flee from the white Sunday gloves, to run from the way one had
to hide the fingernails behind the back if they weren't above re-
proach. Finally then we threw away our bras as well.... For a long
time I had severe altercations with my parents and fought against
the fascist heritage they forced on me. At first I rejected their author-
itarian and puritanical conception of childrearing, but soon we came
into conflict over a more serious topic: the persecution of the Jews. I
identified with the Jews, because I felt myself to be persecuted by
my family."3

This can be read for what it is: a disturbing and simplistic, even offensive,
appropriation of the suffering of others. But it can also be read for what
it also is: an important, urgent, even desperate flailing to free oneself
from the cloying and everywhere inadequately acknowledged toxicities
of the supposedly so clean post-1945 period.
In sum, then, 68ers deliberately invoked the horrors of the Holo-
caust to strengthen their case for sexual liberation, even as, precisely in
so doing, they displayed singular insensitivity to the victims and survivors
of those horrors. Whether there is anything poignant here, or whether
this is just repugnant, is a question that remains open.
112. 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, Autobiographyof a Generation:
Italy 1968, trans. Lisa Erdberg (Hanover, N.H., 1996).
113. Barbara K6ster, "Rtisselsheim Juli 1985," interview by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in
Wirhabensie so geliebt,die Revolution,ed. Cohn-Bendit (Frankfurt, 1987), p. 244. K6ster (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.).

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CriticalInquiry Winter1998 443

But what all the 68ers' texts, including Male Fantasies,do make clear
is how much the extant consensus on the notion that West Germans-
before the airing of the Holocaust miniseries in 1979-primarily engaged
in repression or amnesia about the Judeocide requires revision. In fact,
the so often applied terms of repressionor amnesia may not really offer the
best way to describe postwar Germans' relationship to the Third Reich at
all. Instead, despite the recurrent announcement that taboos around the
subject needed to be broken, it appears that postwar Germans have been
talking about Nazism constantly.114 And in a peculiar but crucial way the
Holocaust has been at once absent and present in all that talk. For ex-
ample, while the centrality of the Judeocide to the Third Reich is the very
thing that is constantly being evaded when facile comparisons are put
forward in the context of other political agendas, it is also-however par-
adoxically-precisely the Holocaust's existence that allows self-definitions
in opposition to fascism to serve as a sort of shorthand to anchor and
assert the legitimacy and morality of one's own claims. Furthermore, and
this is a separate and even more significant matter, when it came to con-
flicts over sexuality, 68ers in particular really were talking about the Ho-
locaust itself; they were genuinely and deeply concerned to make sense
of the puzzle of the relationship between pleasure and evil. Even though
they found the argument that the Holocaust was a product of sexual re-
pression almost impossible to sustain in the face of contradictory empiri-
cal evidence, it is also quite possible that on some level they were onto
something extremely important. Certainly the debates on this and related
matters show no signs of being closed."5
The generally prevailing analysis of the German 68ers is that while
they brought the subject of the Third Reich back into public discussion,
they continued the silence of their elders on the subject of the Holocaust,
treating it (as Andrei Markovits among others has observed) as "ancillary"
to German fascism, rather than its central event.116 The German 68ers

114. Other scholars who are starting to make this point-coming from different but
related perspectives-include Grossmann, "Unfortunate Germany,"and Moeller, "WarSto-
ries: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,"AmericanHistorical
Review 101 (Oct. 1996): 1008-48.
115. Just to give two examples: The undecidability of the relationship between plea-
sure 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'sWillingExecutioners:OrdinaryGermansand theHolocaust(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 numer-
ous disciplines.
116. See Markovits, "Coping with the Past: The West German Labor Movement and
the Left," in Reworkingthe Past, pp. 262-75. See also Rabinbach, "Introduction: Reflections
on Germans and Jews since Auschwitz;" in Germansand Jews since the Holocaust, pp. 3-24,
and Sophinette Becker, "Bewusste und unbewusste Identifikationen der 68er Generation,"
in Erinnern, Wiederholen,Durcharbeiten:Zur Psycho-Analysedeutscher Wenden, ed. Brigitte
Rauschenbach (Berlin, 1992), pp. 269-75.

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444 DagmarHerzog Post-HolocaustMemoryand the Sexual Revolution

continued, in this view, the repression or amnesia about the Holocaust


thought to characterize the attitude of their parents' generation as well.
My own sense is that while the Holocaust may indeed officially have been
an "ancillary"concern for the 68ers, it was nonetheless potently and per-
vasively present, seeping into the most intimate aspects of their lives.
Something more complicated than either repression or amnesia was at
work. Reconstructing the postwar conflicts over sexuality-which both
blocked a direct engagement with the racial politics and most acute hor-
rors of German fascism and also continuallyinvokedthese-can shed light, I
want to suggest, not only on postwar Germans' evasion of the memory
and legacy of the Judeocide, but also on their irresolvable obsession
with it.

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