Ökonomisches Vertrauen und antisemitische Gewalt: Jüdische Viehhändler in Mittelfranken 1919-1939
Introduction: Why Queer German History?
This essay examines ways in which historians might learn from queer approaches to the past. Drawing inspiration from queer theory and ideas long circulating in cultural, literary and medieval studies, it argues that there is much to be gained when we adopt a more self-reflexive, genealogical, context-specific analysis of lives lived. A queered history interrogates whether our guiding questions and assumptions might actually foreclose possible lines of analysis, especially around matters of identity. Emphasizing overlap, contingency, ambiguity and complexity, it asks us to linger over our own assumptions—individual as well as societal—to interrogate the role they play in the past we seek out, discover and recreate in our writing. Not just the preserve of scholars of LGBT history, it questions universal experience, suggests new historical pivots and periodizations, while pointing out the unconscious ways in which progressive narrative arcs often seep into our analyses.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/371?rss=1
Teaching Sodomy in a Carolingian Monastery: A Study of Walahfrid Strabos and Heitos Visio Wettini
In 824 the monk and teacher Wetti of Reichenau experienced a terrifying vision in which an angel led him through an afterlife where monks, clerics and laypeople experienced a variety of temporal and eternal punishments. Only the intercession of saints, martyrs and virgins saves Wetti, who would have been irrevocably doomed because he had corrupted his students through his teaching, his bad example and his deeds. Wetti’s fellow monk Heito wrote a widely circulated prose version of this vision, which the Carolingian scholar Walahfrid Strabo later turned into an apparently metric version. Both versions extensively address the scelus sodomiticum (the crime of sodomy) but express fundamentally different viewpoints on the nature, the moral assessment and the dangers of same-sex sexuality in a monastic context. Heito implies that Wetti exposed himself and his students to the danger of eternal damnation through practising or at least facilitating sodomy. Walahfrid manages through a number of subtle alterations to acquit Wetti and his school from allegations of sodomy and to turn the scelus sodomiticum into an individual fault rather than a threat to the community and to monastic purity in general. Comparing the two versions of the Visio Wettini provides new insights into the medieval monastic classroom as a queer space, medieval assessments of same-sex desire, the role of classical learning in the monastic curriculum and the construction of monastic purity.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/385?rss=1
Same-Sex Male Love and Patriotic Sacrifice in Prussia: On the Death of Ewald von Kleist, 1759
This essay takes the death of the soldier poet Ewald von Kleist in 1759 as the starting point to explore how the language of same-sex male love animated early Prussian patriotism. It probes the ambiguous character of the love that inhered in the amorous friendship of Kleist with the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, and suggests that their passionate letters show more than just the effusions common to the epistolary genre. It then argues that their understanding of same-sex love, which culminated in the sacrifice of life for each other, was transposed onto the patriotic poetry of the Seven Years War. The transposition was not, however, universally applauded, as Lessing’s dissent suggests. The article concludes by noting how a binary understanding of sexuality has occluded our sense for the possibilities of same-sex male love and hidden from view how this love backlit early patriotic discourse. This discourse was first carried on, moreover, in poetry. Only later was it expressed in prose, in Thomas Abbt’s On Death for the Fatherland, which drew inspiration from the earlier poetic exchange.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/402?rss=1
The Queer Cases of Psychoanalysis: Rethinking the Scientific Study of Homosexuality, 1890s-1920s
This article charts the development of psychoanalytic cases of homosexuality in the early twentieth century against the backdrop of seemingly stable sexological understandings of congenital homosexual identity and behaviour. It argues that psychoanalysts offered alternative models to the taxonomies of sexology, which had remained intellectually tied to discourses of pathology and difference. It contrasts Freud’s approach to homosexuality in several famous early cases, such as ‘Dora’ and Daniel Paul Schreber, with rarely considered cases and writings by Isidor Sadger and others. This analysis reveals nuanced distinctions between early psychoanalytic positions: whereas Freud’s approach created the potential for greater equality between homosexual and heterosexual subjectivities by abolishing straightforward categories of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’, and by arguing for a universal bisexuality and polyvalent sexuality, Sadger and others remained focused on the question of a cure, and continued to prioritize a heterosexual norm. From this early psychoanalytic focus on male homosexual cases, the article traces a shift towards female homosexuality in the interwar period, including consideration of wider environmental and social factors in homosexual development and identification. Throughout, this article considers how the search for authenticity led psychoanalysts to scrutinize the evidentiary status of patient statements rather than take these at face value, opening up new possibilities and frameworks for the representation of queer subjectivities.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/419?rss=1
Sex, Shame and West German Gay Liberation
This article contributes to a reassessment of gay liberation by focusing on how matters of sex and desire featured in the gay press and the gay movement in 1970s West Germany. Gay liberation has often been viewed through an affirmative lens, contrasted favourably with the supposed shame-filled conformism of the postwar homophile movement. I problematize this perspective by analysing ambivalence about homosexual desire and gay (male) sexual practice, both in the pages of the commercial gay press and in gay activist publications. Using case studies of intergenerational desire—or ‘paedophilia’—and sado-masochism, I question the extent to which the 1970s saw a transition towards the ideal of mutual, reciprocal relationships. In so doing, I argue that historians of homosexual politics should not only analyse questions of ideology and strategy but also sex, desire and ambivalence about self and society. Concluding through a consideration of the interrelationship between ‘pride’ and ‘shame’, this article shows that gay liberation was anything but a mere hedonistic interlude.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/34/3/445?rss=1