| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2005)

DAGMAR HERZOG begins her study by using the rich scholarship of the last decade to examine the conflicting sexual practices, attitudes, policies, and ideologies of Nazi Germany. She challenges older conclusions about these subjects, and insists that questions about sexuality rarely produce definitive or unambiguous answers. As she notes, the Nazis did not have a "master-plan [or]coherent policy" (17) for sexuality, and simultaneously acted or legislated in ways that were emancipatory for some, repressive, dangerous, and punitive for others. In her words, "legitimation of terror and the invitation to pleasure operated in tandem." (18) But for Herzog, understanding the co-existence and permeable boundaries between sexual freedom and sexual repression, and the many popular sexual responses to the workings of the Nazi state is not an end in itself. Instead, as the title of her work indicates, she is concerned with sex after fascism. Her purpose is to discuss how a variety of social and political groups reimagined the Nazi sexual past in different ways as they grappled with the reconstruction of political and moral truths in the post-1945 world. These same sexual imaginings enabled a variety of post-war actors — from Christian churches to political parties to professionals and intellectuals — to explain the rise of Nazism or to deal with their own complicity in the most brutal dimensions of the regime.

The first chapter of the book covers the period from the 1920s into the World War II era. Here Herzog addresses questions of continuity or rupture in sexual behaviours, attitudes, and policies between the Weimar and Nazi eras, and then focuses on Nazi policies and controls. The topics of youthful promiscuity, reproductive policies, the sexual demonization of Jews, adultery, and homosexuality are included in her discussion. Herzog depends on an impressive array of secondary literature, best represented in English in the works of scholars who contributed to a special issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality which she edited in 2001/2002. Chapter 2 covers a "post-war moment" spanning the seven or eight years immediately after 1945. In her analyses of this period Herzog joins other scholars who have shown that instead of silence about Nazism, those years saw "incessant, insistent chatter," (97) especially about sex, as society sought to manage memory and normalize Nazism. She refers to this period as a "window of sexual liberality" (72) which was shut down after 1953 with "an abrupt shift toward sexual conservatism." (101) This change is the subject of Chapter 3 which covers the years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s during which the search for normality was evident in law, advice books, and the media, and debates about desirable sexual behaviors and policies were often described in terms of the Nazi past, with conservatives insisting Nazism was degenerate, and liberals viewing it as repressive. Chapter 4 moves away from the usual story of the sexual revolution of the mid-1960s, by analysing these events in the light of their connections to evolving views of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Chapter 5 is a bit of a detour as Herzog shifts from West Germany to discuss the "alternate modernity" (184) of the German Democratic Republic, and to describe what she sees as its "remarkable sexual culture" in the post-war era. With Chapter 6 the author returns to the West and focuses on the post-1968 debates about sexuality in the New Left, and the eventual collapse of the sexual revolution in the 1980s. The chapter ends with a brief glance at the post-reunification decades during which the focus of sexual politics was "1968" and not the Nazi years.

In this panoramic sweep of German history, Herzog brings to non-German readers an impressive array of the most recent German scholarship on the history of sexuality, politics, and memory, along with exhaustive references to similar materials in English. She expands on these materials through her own investigations of advice literature, the writings of sexologists, medical professionals, philosophers, and sociologists, sexual surveys, published policies and law, and numerous newspapers. In some cases, material is repetitive, and often the reader has a hard time judging the impact or importance of a particular publication or survey. Do these works indeed represent "most" Germans as she sometimes claims? Nuggets of useful historiography and intellectual history are scattered through the volume including an introductory summary of strands of scholarly interpretations of sexuality under Nazism; a discussion of Theodor Adorno's invocations of Nazism to argue for sexual freedom in the early 1960s, and an analysis of New Left cultural critic Klaus Theweleit's two-volume Male Fantasies, which sought to define the essence of the relationship between fascism and sexuality.

In this book, Herzog has tackled extremely difficult and complex historical questions. The story of the connections among sexual behaviours, attitudes, and ideologies and their political meanings is never simple and transparent. Attempting to bring these issues into considerations of memory and the uses (or abuses) of the past is a daunting enterprise and sometimes conclusions boldly go beyond the evidence presented. While Herzog might hope to startle us with sweeping generalities that "no one argued," or "everyone thought," and "all agreed," in reality her chapters are always filled with diverse actors, and contested views and values. A particularly good example of this is the author's assertion in Chapter 2 that the post-1945 period was a "time of libertarianism and open possibilities." (100) In fact, the evidence in the chapter documents the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, shattered marriages, a push for restoration of "heterosexual domesticity," and heightened homophobia. The author would have done better to stay with an argument for "ruptures and continuities, retrieval and reconstruction and [sic] new departures." (107)

As we read the book, we must follow the contradictory tactics developed for "responding to social and political changes as West Germany moved from fascism to democracy," and how these relied heavily on debates over sexual behaviours and values. At the same time, we must consider how these tactics are also the tools for managing the memory of Nazism. Overlaps or porosity in chronology, which are understandable given the subject matter and material, nevertheless frequently make it difficult to follow the author's arguments. Raising these cautions should not deter anyone from reading Herzog's book; it is an always provocative and fascinating account of 20th-century German social, political, and cultural history. Some of the weaknesses I have pointed to result from the complexity of the undertaking. In the end, Herzog provides valuable insights for an understanding of the historical contretemps and conundrums of 20th-century Europe. In so doing she convinces us that history is an amalgam of "interpretations and conditions, representations and reality." (260)


Jane Slaughter University of New Mexico

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