Abstract
Germany’s traumatic experience with total war in 1914–18 presents challenges for historians dealing with the history of gender. The responses of common soldiers to the trauma of war, and their conceptions of masculinity and sexuality, were complex. While the all-pervasive image of the steel-nerved, disciplined warrior suggests an easily identifiable, militarized egemonic ideal, this masculine image was fragile and, as Monika Szczepaniak recently noted, tends to be oversimplified.1 Sociologist R. W. Connell argues that while hegemonic masculinity was defined in opposition to subordinate forms of masculinity, perceptions and constructions of hegemonic masculinity were elusive, contested and always changing.2 To what degree did soldiers embrace dominant images of masculinity? As Christa Hämmerle recently observed, it is difficult to uncover the degree to which hegemonic, militarized conceptions of masculinity were accepted by the majority of soldiers who experienced the Great War.3
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M. Szcepaniak (2011) Militärische Männlichkeiten in Deutschland und Österreich im Umfeld des Grossen Krieges: Konstruktionen und Dekonstructionen (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann), p. 10.
R. W. Connell (1995) Masculinities (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p. 3.
C. Hämmerle (2005) ‘Zur Relevanz des Connell’schen Konzepts hegemonialer Männlichkeit für Militär und Männlichkeiten in der Habsburgermonarchie, 1868–1914/1918’, in M. Dinges (ed.) Männer — Macht — Körper: Hegemoniale Männlichkeiten vom Mittelalter bis heute (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), pp. 116–19.
K. Hagemann (1997) ‘Of “Manly Valor” and “German Honor” — Nation, War and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising against Napoleon’, Central European History, 30:2, pp. 187–220
U. Frevert (1996) ‘Soldaten, Staatsbürger: Überlegungen zur historischen Konstruktion von Männlichkeit’, in T. Kühne (ed.) Männergeschichte — Geschlechtergeschichte: Männlichkeit im Wandel der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), pp. 82–5
U. Frevert (2004) A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford: Berg).
G. L. Mosse (1996) The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 79–80
See T. Kühne (2006) Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischer Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht).
J. Crouthamel (2011) ‘“Comradeship” and “Friendship”: Masculinity and Militarization in Germany’s Homosexual Emancipation Movement after the First World War’, Gender & History, 23:1, pp. 111–29.
See, for example, G. Eley (2006) ‘How and Where is German History Centered’, in N. Gregor, N. Roemer and M. Rosemen (eds) German History from the Margins (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 274–5.
B. Kundrus (2002) ‘Gender Wars — The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic’, in K. Hagemann and S. Schüler-Springorum (eds) The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford: Berg), p. 160.
M. Roper (2009) The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. xi.
C. Hämmerle (1999) ‘“You let a weeping woman call you home?” Private Correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany’, in R. Earle (ed.) Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 176.
R. Nelson (2011) German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
E. Vickers (2009) ‘“The Good Fellow”: Negotiation, Remembrance and Recollection — Homosexuality in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45’, in D. Herzog (ed.) Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s 20th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 109–34.
A. Lipp (2003) Meinungslenkung im Krieg: Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Soldaten und ihre Deutung, 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), pp. 27–30
E. Domansky (1996) ‘Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany’, in G. Eley (ed.) Society, Culture and the State in Germany 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press), pp. 427–30.
E. R. Dickinson (2003) ‘The Men’s Christian Morality Movement in Germany, 1880–1914’, Journal of Modern History, 75:1, pp. 61–2.
J. Steakley (1975) The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers), p. 62.
A. Grossmann (1997) Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 16.
M. Hirschfeld (ed.) (1930) Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft, Schneider.), p. 274.
M. Hirschfeld (2006) The Sexual History of the World War (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, reprint of the translated edition of Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges of 1941), p. 131.
R. Beachy (2010) ‘The German Invention of Homosexuality’, Journal of Modern History, 82:4, p. 809.
H. A. Preiss (1921) Geschlechtliche Grausamkeiten liebestoller Menschen (Frankfurt: Süddeutsche Verlagsanstalt), p. 6.
See E. Bab (1903) ‘Frauenbewegung und männliche Kultur’, Der Eigene, and A. Brand (1925) ‘Was wir wollen’, pamphlet, both found in H. Oosterhuis and H. Kennedy (1992) (eds) Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge), pp. 135–44
C. Bruns (2005) ‘Der homosexuelle Staatsfreund: Von der Konstruktion des erotischen Männerbunds bei Hans Blüher’, in S. zur Nieden (ed.) Homosexualität und Staatsräson: Männlichkeit, Homophobie und Politik in Deutschland 1900–1945 (Frankfurt: Campus), pp. 103–7.
G. P. Pfeiffer (1925) Männerheldentum und Kameradenliebe im Krieg: Eine Studie und Materialien-Sammlung (Berlin: Adolf Brand Kunstverlag)
M. Danielsen (1919) ‘Mehr Mut — mehr Idealismus’, Die Freundschaft, 1:18, pp. 1–2
R. Hört (1919) ‘Liebe und Freundschaft’, Die Freundschaft, 1:14, pp. 1–2
Kurt (1920) ‘Manneswürde’, Die Freundschaft, 2:16, p. 1
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© 2014 Jason Crouthamel
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Crouthamel, J. (2014). Love in the Trenches: German Soldiers’ Conceptions of Sexual Deviance and Hegemonic Masculinity in the First World War. In: Hämmerle, C., Überegger, O., Zaar, B.B. (eds) Gender and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302205_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137302205_4
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