Sexuality in Modern German History offers both a detailed survey of this key subject and a new intervention in the history of sexuality in modern Germany. It investigates the diverse and often contradictory ways in which individuals, activists, doctors, politicians, artists, church leaders, reform movements and cultural commentators have defined 'normal' or 'natural' sexuality in Germany over the past two centuries. Katie Sutton explores how these definitions have been used to shape identities, behaviours, bodies and practices, from norms of heterosexual, marital, reproductive sex to ideas around the policing and categorisation of 'unnatural' or 'deviant' bodies and practices. Covering a range of crucial themes, including birth control, prostitution, queer and trans rights and heterosexual intimacy, this important text comes with 30 illustrations and a wealth of primary source extracts and secondary literature, helpfully integrated to enable further insight and analysis. This is a vital volume for all students and scholars with an interested in modern Germany or the history of sexuality in modern Europe.

To provide a critical overview in a comparative German-American perspective is the main aim of this volume, which brings together experts from both sides of the Atlantic. Through case studies, it demonstrates the extraordinary power of the gender perspective to challenge existing interpretations and rewrite mainstream arguments.

Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany’s Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world’s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized – however misleadingly – in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar’s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation. Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen’s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable. Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded “immoral” sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Röhm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer’s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.

Although “entanglement” has become a keyword in recent German history scholarship, entangled studies of the postwar era have largely limited their scope to politics and economics across the two Germanys while giving short shrift to social and cultural phenomena like gender. At the same time, historians of gender in Germany have tended to treat East and West Germany in isolation, with little attention paid to intersections and interrelationships between the two countries. This groundbreaking collection synthesizes the perspectives of entangled history and gender studies, bringing together established as well as upcoming scholars to investigate the ways in which East and West German gender relations were culturally, socially, and politically intertwined.

This long-awaited work reconstructs the ways in which the meanings and uses of sex changed during that important moment of political and social configuration viewed as the birth of modernity. Isabel V. Hull analyzes the shift in the "sexual system" which occurred in German-speaking Central Europe when the absolutist state relinquished its monopoly on public life and presided over the formation of an independent civil society. Hull defines a society's sexual system as the patterned way in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through institutions. She shows that as the absolutist state encouraged an independent sphere of public activity, it gave up its theoretically unlimited right to regulate sexual behavior and invested this right in the active citizens of the new civil society. Among the questions posed by this political and social transformation are, When does sexual behavior merit society's regulation? What kinds of behaviors and groups prompt intervention? What interpretive framework does the public apply to sexual behavior? Hull persuades us that a culture's sexual system can be understood only in relation to the particularities of state, law, and society, and that when state and society are examined through the sexual lens, much conventional wisdom is cast in doubt.

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany'. Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.