Abstract
By 1918, the war seemed to have the opposite effect on male sexuality as what had been originally anticipated in 1914. Instead of stabilizing sexual behavior and reinvigorating gender norms, the war seemed to stimulate sexual chaos. While conservative doctors and cultural critics still blamed the rise in sexually “abnormal” behaviors on traditional enemies—socialism, independent women, homosexuals, Jews—they also found a disturbing link between the cherished experience of combat and the spread of perceived sexually deviant behavior. The fear of the sexual “other” persisted, but this was compounded by the fear that ordinary Germans returning home from the front concealed psychopathologies. Most disturbingly for those who tried to control sexuality, sexually damaged men had become largely invisible.
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Notes
See, for example, Karin Hausen, “Die Sorge der Nation für ihre ‘Kriegsopfer’: Ein Bereich der Geschlechterpolitik während der Weimarer Republik,” in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat (Munich: Sauer Verlag), 1994, 719–40.
Erika Kuhlman, Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War: Women, Gender and Postwar Reconciliation between Nations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 139–40. On the privileging of the memory of men in combat over the activities of women on the home front, see Karen Hagemann, “Home/Front: The Military, Violence and Gender Relations in the Age of the Two World Wars,” in Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, 2.
While historians long assumed that the war experience made a major contribution to women’s emancipation, this has been complicated and brought into question, see Ute Frevert, Women in German History (Oxford: Berg, 1990), 151–67.
On the reassertion of patriarchal control shortly after the war in France, see Steven C. Hause, “Minerva than Mars: The French Women’s Rights Campaign and the First World War,” in Margaret Randolph Higonnet, et al, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 99–113.
On the widespread “strike” of soldiers at the front in the last months of the war, see Wilhelm Deist, “Verdeckter Militärstreik im Kriegsjahr 1918?” in Wolfram Wette, ed., Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten (Munich: Piper, 1992), 146–66.
On the “stab in the back” legend, see Wilhelm Deist, “Der militärische Zusammenbruch des Kaiserreichs: Zur Realität der ‘Dolchstosslegende,” in Wilhelm Deist, ed., Militär, Staat und Gesellschaft—Studien zur preussisch-deutschen Militärgeschichte (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1991), 211–33.
Sandra Maß, Weiße Helden, schwarze Krieger: Zur Geschichte kolonialer Männlichkeit in Deutschland 1918–1924 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2006), chapter 3.
Hans-Georg Baumgarth, Das Geschlechtsleben im Kriege—Eine Rechtfertigung für viele Unglückliche (Berlin: Rosen Verlag, 1919), 46–47.
For more on postwar debates over sexual breakdown, see Jason Crouthamel, “Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma: Soldiers and Sexual ‘Disorder’ in World War I and Weimar Germany,” in Journal of History of Sexuality, 17:1 January 2008, 60–84.
Magnus Hirschfeld, ed., Sexual-Katastrophen. Bilder aus dem modernen Geschlechts- und Eheleben (Leipzig: A. H. Payne, 1926), 40–41.
Magnus Hirschfeld, Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, Zweiter Band (Leipzig: Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft, Schneider, 1930), 506.
Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2.
James M. Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 37–39.
Ibid., 159–64. On doctors’ attempts to control the image of mentally traumatized war victims, see Julia Barbara Köhne, Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914—1920 (Hamburg: Matthiesen Verlag, 2009).
Of the more than 150,000 victims of the T-4 program, it is not known exactly how many were veterans of the First World War. Recent research by Philipp Rauh shows that just over 7 percent of a representative sample of patient files were disabled war veterans. See Philipp Rauh, “Von Verdun nach Grafeneck: Die psychisch kranken Veteranen des Ersten Weltkrieges als Opfer der nationalsozialistischen Krankenmordaktion T4,” in Babette Quinkert, Philipp Rauh, and Ulrike Winkler, eds., Krieg und Psychiatrie, 1914–1950 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 70.
For more on the political left’s failure to win support from disabled veterans, see Jason Crouthamel, The Great War and German Memory, chapter 4; on German disabled veterans’ resentments toward the Weimar Republic’s pension system, see also Deborah Cohen, Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 168–70.
Eleanor Hancock, Ernst Röhm: Hitler’s SA Chief of Staff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 88–89.
Ibid., 90. See also Eleanor Hancock, “‘Only the Real, the True, the Masculine Held its Value’: Ernst Röhm, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality,” Journal of the History of Homosexuality, 8:4 (1998), 616–41.
Ernst Röhm, The Memoirs of Ernst Röhm, translated by Geoffrey Brooks, introduction by Eleanor Hancock (London: Frontline, 2012; original 1928, Munich), 170–71.
On Röhm’s image in the eyes of his Nazi colleagues, see Geoffrey Giles, “The Institutionalization of Homosexual Panic in the Third Reich,” in Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 238–39.
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© 2014 Jason Crouthamel
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Crouthamel, J. (2014). Coming Home. In: An Intimate History of the Front. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376923_7
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