Gays in history frankfurt

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. This chapter tells the story of the homosexual movement and the fight against Paragraph during the Weimar era. It considers how the First World War and the German revolution of created both new opportunities and new challenges for the homosexual movement.

The implementation of this statute triggered fervent activism from German homosexuals and scientists fighting for its repeal. According to Robert Beachy, Berlin was uniquely suited to become a global epicenter of homosexual culture after the Great War, due to the intersection of advocacy efforts by scientists and self-identified homosexuals, lax police enforcement of anti-sodomy laws, and the relatively free press which facilitated public debate of homosexual acceptance1.

Emanzipation hinter der Weltstadt: Adolf Brand und die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. Keilson-Lauritz; R. Berlin-Friedrichshagen: Müggel-Verlag, p. Brand was one of the most colourful, militant and controversial activists of the prewar homosexual movement in Germany. As has been described elsewhere, he got mixed up in public quarrels, scandals, and trials many times.

From untill he edited and published Der Eigene, the first homosexual journal in Germany and in the world. Brand was also the leader of the second gay organization in Germany, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, which he founded in , six years after the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee had been established.

Contrary to Magnus Hirschfeld's Komitee, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen was not so much a political organisation as a literary circle. Brand's journal was for a large part devoted to literature and the visual arts. In her Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte: Literatur und Literaturkritik in den Anfängen der Schwulenbewegung Marita Keilson-Lauritz has pointed out the role of literature in the development of homosexual self-consciousness and emancipation.

However, in Der Eigene next to poetry and fiction also essays on social and political aspects of male homosexuality were published.

Gays in history: berühmte persönlichkeiten und ihre geschichten in frankfurt

In this article I will focus on some of the ideological and political issues that were raised by Brand and other authors in Der Eigene. Their views differed substantially from those of Hirschfeld and his supporters. The contrast between Brand's Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and Hirschfeld's Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee, which I will highlight-although admitting that there were also similarities between the two movements-might still have some relevance for present-day debates on homosexuality.

At the same time, however, the political views of prominent spokesmen of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen are rather controversial. Several contributions to Der Eigene show that homosexuals need not always be on the liberal or left side of the political spectrum. On the contrary, in Germany before the Second World War some homosexual men seem to have opted for extreme nationalism as a way to realize their ideas on male bonding.

German Studies Review 34 No. The publication of the Vorentwurf caused considerable controversy. The article analyses various feminist standpoints and shows that the silence about female homosexuality to the outside world was often preceded by internal debates and negotiations.

Gay Life and Culture: A World History, ed. What does it mean to queer German history? More provocatively, how might queering it move us to ask new and different questions of our work, regardless of whether we write about matters of intimacy, eros, sexuality or love?

At the same time, in the spirit of two decades' worth of scholarship that sees queer as much as a methodological intervention as an epithet, it seeks to go a step further. If the ultimate point of a queered German history is not simply to chronicle the exploits of same-sex identified people over time for an audience already open to the history of sexuality, then this introduction aims to suggest ways in which queering German history might aid us in thinking more critically about how conventions, ideals, norms and, above all, practices gain traction and resonance in our history writing, often as unquestioned truths.