Katie Sutton
Sexuality in Modern German History takes up shifting ideas of the “normal” as a way of understanding the fundamental significance of sex and sexuality as factors shaping German history, politics and culture. It shows how sexual behaviours, desires, and identities have both been shaped by, but also crucially shaped ideas fundamental to modern German society: nationhood, citizenship, imperialism, fascism, and memory culture, for example, and how these are tied up with ideas of marriage, family, and licit or illicit sexual encounters. The book looks at how and when ideas about sexed bodies and behaviours emerged as norms that could be policed, and what happened to people who found themselves situated outside of those norms. After all, what constitutes a “normal” marriage, or family, or negotiation of a sexual encounter, has changed a lot over this period.
NOTCHES: Why will people want to read your book?
Katie Sutton: I hope people will want to read the book because of the way it puts sexuality at the heart of our understanding of how modern Germany came to look the way it does, but also for the way it shows the global influence of German-speaking thinkers, activists and movements, into the present day. As a survey book, I hope that readers might discover new scholarship and find new rabbit holes to go down to keep growing the field!
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
KS: This is a book that shows how sex and sexuality can’t be disentangled from political, cultural, economic or social history. As NOTCHES readers know so well, these concepts not only shape human interactions and identities at the most personal, intimate levels – what we get up to in bed, who we chat up in a club – but how we structure our households, spend our free time, often also the choices we make in our work and politics.
The book spans over two centuries and covers a lot of ground, from the early modern persecution of people branded as “witches,” through Reformation-era marriage and divorce, to the rise of post-World War II youth and resistance movements, and it ends in the 21st-century present. Its chapters look at things including the early 20th-century emergence of sexual science and how this linked to growing LGBTIQ+ movements; queer love and sexual nonconformity under the shadow of Nazi persecution; while later chapters consider not just East-West differences, but also how those horrific experiences of war, persecution and genocide have been taken up and memorialized through a lens of sexual politics, including HIV/AIDS activists taking up the Pink Triangle symbol from the Nazi concentration camps.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book? Were there any especially exciting discoveries, or any particular challenges?
KS: I did a lot of the research for this book as the Covid lockdowns were coming into place and we needed to turn inwards with our work – and our lives! – for so long. It was a contemplative time, and one of the plusses – there were also plenty of minuses – was that both I and this book benefited from extended periods sitting with the literature, reading new work as well as older texts I’d long wanted to go through, but hadn’t had the chance. I remember sitting in the autumn sun as Australia was closing its international borders reading Lyndal Roper’s fabulous Oedipus and the Devil and feeling excited and grateful for the chance to engage with that work amidst the frustration and anxiety.
Archival sources play an important role for sure – from medieval woodcuts to Weimar-era trans ID certificates to photographs of the GDR nudist scene – but as a survey of a wide field, this is a book that is also indebted to the existing scholarship out there, based on many thousands of hours in the archives spent by scholars before me. Its newness lies in bringing that wider field into explicit dialogue. As I noted already, I centred that conversation around the idea of norms: how they come into being, shift, are contested and policed, how they are used to define some people and practices as “pathological” or “deviant,” and others as morally upstanding. This lens offered a way to bring together very different sources that might otherwise have seemed disjointed: from histories of bourgeois marriage to abortion activism and trans identity politics.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
KS: Working on a survey like this brings into focus whose lives and stories have left a bigger mark on the historical archives, and whose experiences we know much less about. Both primary and secondary sources tend to favour – no surprises here – the stories of people in cities, people of means, those who had access to education, who were overwhelmingly white, able-bodied, and middle-class. And where the stories of working-class or rural experiences emerge, we know that this is often when those people came into conflict with the authorities or for other reasons had reduced capacity to tell their story in their own terms. I’ve tried to problematize some of these omissions and skewings of the historical record throughout the book; even so, the lives and themes in it inevitably represent an uneven cross-section of the true diversity of how people in Germany across two hundred years have experienced sex and sexuality.
NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?
KS: I’ve always been fascinated by questions of gender and identity, and felt an urge to interrogate how these categories shape people’s lives in historically contingent ways. For me these questions are at the heart of the history of sexuality. They have informed my work on gender nonconformity since beginning my PhD, which looked at female masculinities and anxieties about shifting gender roles in the Weimar Republic, and have stayed with me since, even as I’ve ranged across different historical and literary archives and methods, from queer and trans Weimar histories to contemporary literature. I’m intrigued by the grey zones – the spaces where our labels, past and present, fail to register the full complexity of people’s lived experiences of their gender and sexuality – and how looking deeply at the sources can give us a fuller sense of both what has been, and what could be, possible.
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
KS: This depends what you’re teaching, of course! I structured the book fairly chronologically, so people teaching a course on Weimar or Nazi Germany could pick out the relevant chapter, but made an exception for the last two chapters on the post-World War II decades. After all, how does one tell the history of sexuality in a country that was actually two, working with very different political and economic systems for forty years, despite deep cultural and linguistic commonalities? I decided there was benefit in taking a comparative and thematic approach here, and approach the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany/ West Germany) and GDR (German Democratic Republic/ East Gernany) together. One chapter focuses on love, sex and marriage – seemingly “normative” topics, though this was of course a time of considerable experimentation and upheaval – while another homes in on movements that explicitly resisted inherited structures, like feminism and gay liberation.
I think the book also has lots of rich material for students interested in critical histories of gender and sexuality who might otherwise know very little about Germany. Not many countries have been as influential in shaping the history of modern sexuality as Germany – from seeing the birth of new medical-scientific labels like “homosexual” and “masochist” in the late 19th century to the world’s first organized LGBTIQ+ activist organizations. So a broad survey course could also assign, for example, the chapter on Wilhelmine sexuality along with a classic theoretical reading like early sections of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, to offer a critical, but also more empirical take on the era of the scientia sexualis. Or one could assign the Nazi chapter as wider context along with one of the great recent microhistories of gender nonconforming experience and persecution during this period by scholars like Bodie Ashton, Laurie Marhoefer, or Zavier Nunn.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
KS: This history has always mattered, but at a time when trans rights are coming under attack globally and so-called ‘gender-critical’ movements are lining up with right-wing extremists and religious fundamentalists, and when there have been contestations in around the extent of trans people’s persecution by the Nazis in Germany’s highest courts, it is more important than ever to return to the kind of careful analyses driven by archival research that this book brings together.
More broadly, the book encourages readers to critically engage with the norms that continue to shape us in all sorts of ways today, by taking a long-lens look at the hugely varied ways that seemingly common-sense structures like marriage, family, or nation, or concepts such as race, pathology, or gender, have been understood within the context of a single European “country” during the modern era. It reminds us that norms can and do change, and that individuals have the power to actively intervene in this process.
NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?
KS: I’m working on finishing a book with Birgit Lang on how photography and film shaped modern sexual science – not just presenting a new form of scientific “evidence” that moved away from the older emphasis on case histories, but also a new way for sexual subjects and communities to engage in self-expression and advocacy. I’m also busy exploring neuroqueer theories and am interested in how to bring the field of critical neurodiversity studies, and neuroqueer and neurotrans approaches in particular, into more robust dialogue with histories of gender and sexuality. That’s where I’m headed next.
Katie Sutton (she/they) is Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies at the Australian National University. She works on German queer and trans history and culture, sexual science and psychoanalysis, especially in the early 20th century. They have also written Sex between Body and Mind and The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany.
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