Clayton J. Whisnant (Auth.) - Male Homosexuality in West Germany - Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945-69-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors: John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady

Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, aims to accommodate and fos-
ter new approaches to historical research in the fields of genders and sexualities. The series
promotes world-class scholarship that concentrates on the interconnected themes of gen-
ders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, class formations, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been treated as disconnected fields,
while in recent years historical analyses in these two areas have synthesized, creating new
departures in historiography. By linking genders and sexualities with questions of religion,
civil society, politics, and the contexts of war and conflict, this series will reflect recent devel-
opments in scholarship, moving away from the previously dominant and narrow histories of
science, scientific thought, and legal processes. The result brings together scholarship from
contemporary, modern, early modern, medieval, classical, and non-Western history to pro-
vide a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and
sexualities in history.
Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945–69 is a ground-
breaking study of male homosexuality in the neglected period between World War II and
the advent of the Gay Rights movement in the late 1960s. In this original book, Clayton
Whisnant provides a meticulously researched, incisive, and fascinating analysis of the for-
mation of male homosexual life and homosexual institutions in the new West Germany,
following their near-total destruction during the Nazi era. Through its focus on the creation
of intensely masculinist gay identities in West German urban subcultures, especially that of
Hamburg, and campaigns for legal reform and decriminalization of male homosexuality in
the 1950s, Whisnant repositions our understanding of the significance of this period in the
broader history of homosexuality in Germany—and in Europe. This book challenges schol-
arly assumptions about the inevitability of repeal of the notorious Paragraph 175 of the West
German penal code, inherited from the Nazi era, and offers a new and often moving account
of gay men’s lives in the socially conservative Adenauer years. It is a significant contribu-
tion to the debates on contemporary European concepts of male homosexuality, and of the
history of sexual liberation. In common with all volumes in the Genders and Sexualities in
History series, Clayton Whisnant’s Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution
and Freedom, 1945–69 presents a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly study,
and is a sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the past.
Titles include:
John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (editors)

WHAT IS MASCULINITY?
Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World
Heike Bauer and Matthew Cook (editors)
QUEER 1950s
Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton (editors)
INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, RELIGION AND ETHNICITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Chiara Beccalossi
FEMALE SEXUAL INVERSION
Same-Sex Desires in Italian and British Sexology, c. 1870–1920
Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
FRIGIDITY
An Intellectual History
Jennifer V. Evans
LIFE AMONG THE RUINS
Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin
Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (editors)
BODIES, SEX AND DESIRE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE PRESENT
Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (editors)
CONFRONTING MODERNITY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE
Bodies, Minds and Gender
Dagmar Herzog (editor)
BRUTALITY AND DESIRE
War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century
Andrea Mansker
SEX, HONOR AND CITIZENSHIP IN EARLY THIRD REPUBLIC FRANCE
Jessica Meyer
MEN OF WAR
Masculinity and the First World War in Britain
Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (editor)
NEGOTIATING CLERICAL IDENTITIES
Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages
Hester Vaizey
SURVIVING HITLER’S WAR
Family Life in Germany, 1939–48
Clayton J. Whisnant
MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN WEST GERMANY
Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945–69
Forthcoming titles:
Matthew Cook
QUEER DOMESTICITIES
Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London
Rebecca Fraser
GENDER AND IDENTITY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA FROM NORTHERN WOMAN
TO PLANTATION MISTRESS
Julia Laite
PROSTITUTION AND REPRESSION IN THE METROPOLIS
Criminalization and the Shaping of Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960
Melissa Hollander
SEX IN TWO CITIES
The Negotiation of Sexual Relationships in Early Modern England and Scotland
Genders and Sexualities in History Series

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Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Male Homosexuality in
West Germany
Between Persecution and Freedom,
1945–69
Clayton J. Whisnant
Wofford College, USA
© Clayton J. Whisnant 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-35500-2
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For my family
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations and Translations x
Note on Terminology xi
1 Introduction: The Neglected Postwar Period 1
2 Policing and Prejudice after 1945 15
3 The Homophile Movement 64
4 Struggle over the Gay Scenes’ Boundaries 112
5 Reforming Paragraph 175 166
6 Conclusion: Between Persecution and Freedom 204
Notes 213
Select Bibliography 246
Index 253
vii
Acknowledgements
Several institutions gave me research money, without which I could

never have completed this book. The German Academic Exchange Ser-
vice (DAAD) provided a year-long scholarship in 1998–9 so that I could
work extensively in the Staatsarchiv and the many university libraries
in Hamburg. Support from the History Department and the Graduate
School at the University of Texas, Austin, allowed me to finish my
research in Hamburg and make a short trip to Koblenz. Last, two profes-
sional development grants from Wofford College allowed me to make a
final visit to Germany in 2002 and then to devote a summer to writing
in 2008.
The staff at the following archives and libraries helped me hunt
down sources for my project: the Staatsarchiv in Hamburg, the
Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg,
the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and Wofford’s Sander-Teszler Library. In par-
ticular, I would like to thank Frau Irmgard Mummenthey in Hamburg’s
Staatsarchiv, who patiently helped me acquire the necessary permissions
to see the many documents necessary for my research. I also wish to
express my appreciation to Manfred Baumgardt and the rest of the
staff at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, who welcomed me twice into
their archive, clearing some space for me to work as I read through
their impressive collection of gay magazines from the 1950s and other
assorted material. The work they have done in both collecting historical
documents and then presenting them in a number of publications and
exhibitions has been invaluable to all of us interested in German gay
history. Last, I should mention the Interlibrary Loan staff, whose service
makes it possible to carry on research at small institutions of learning
like Wofford College.
In addition, a number of individuals have given me assistance in
various ways since I began work on this project. Uwe Lohalm at the
Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg gave me a number of good
ideas about where to begin looking for sources; Norbert Finzsch agreed
to act as my Betreuer at the University of Hamburg during the year that
I was there and was immensely helpful in making contacts in the first
few months; and Stefan Micheler and Jakob Michelsen were extremely
friendly, providing me with a bibliography of books to read and intro-
ducing me to the small but growing circle of scholars working on gay
viii
Acknowledgements ix
and lesbian issues in Hamburg. I am also thankful for the work of the
now defunct Arbeitskreis schwule Geschichte Hamburg, which in the early
1990s interviewed several men who lived through the mid-twentieth
century. Finally, I could never forget the five men who gave up an after-
noon of their time in the summer of 1999 so that I could talk with them
about their experiences of West Germany’s gay scenes. Their stories were
sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always enlightening; I hope that
my analysis does them justice.
A number of teachers, scholars, colleagues, and friends have been gen-
erous with advice, critical comments, and many years of encouragement
and support at different stages of the work: Ken Banks, Kit Belgum,
Mark Byrnes, Alan Chalmers, Judy Coffin, David Crew, Jennifer Evans,
Lisa Heinemann, Dagmar Herzog, Peter Jelavich, Paul Hagenloh, Sally
Hitchmough, David Imhoof, Standish Meacham, Geoffrey Parker, Phil
Racine, Tracy Revels, Anne Rodrick, David Sabean, Tim Schmitz, Julia
Sneeringer, James Steakley, Robert Stephens, and a number of others
who participated in the Young Scholar Forum of March 2001, in the
Southeast German Studies Workshop in 2009 and 2010, and Wofford’s
Writing Group. Thanks, also, to the readers and editors at Palgrave
Macmillan, who helped me to streamline this book and fix many of
its mistakes. Last, I want to express my deep gratitude towards my fam-
ily. My wife Megan DeMoss has given me endless amounts of love and
encouragement; she also gave a great deal of time towards editing this
manuscript in its final stage. Her parents and grandparents have wel-
comed me into their family, providing me with love, all sorts of new
experiences, and at times much needed financial support. My own par-
ents have been exemplary in encouraging both me and my brother to
be creative and to pursue our interests; they nourish us in every way
imaginable, always supporting the choices we have made. I hope I can
do the same for my own children.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Portions of Chapters 2 and 4 were previously published as ‘Styles of Mas-

culinity in the West German Gay, 1950–1965,’ Central European History
39 (2006), 359–93.
The author and publishers wish to thank Wolfgang Voigt and Klaus-
Peter Adamczik for giving permission to use small selections from the
transcripts of four unpublished interviews carried out by the Arbeitskreis
Schwule Geschichte Hamburg in 1992.
Abbreviations and Translations
Bundesrat Federal Council, the upper house of West Germany’s

parliament
Bundestag Federal Congress, the lower house of West Germany’s
parliament
CDU Christian Democratic Union, West Germany’s
conservative party
FDP Free Democratic Party, which tends to stand for secular,
free-market policies
Hausverbot ban on entering a location (in this case, public
bathrooms)
ICSE International Committee for Sexual Equality
Rechtsstaat rule of law (literally, a state based on law)
schwul gay
Sexwelle the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s
SPD Social Democratic Party, the traditional socialist party
of West Germany
Tunte slang for an effeminate homosexual, perhaps roughly
equivalent to ‘fairy’ or ‘poof’
x
Note on Terminology
The issue of terminology is a significant challenge facing any histo-

rian studying evidence of same-sex desire in the past. The work of
French philosopher Michel Foucault has rightly made scholars of sex-
uality very aware of the role of language in organizing, shaping, and
even generating experience. Contemporary usage of terms such as ‘gay’
or ‘homosexual’ tends to assume that there are clearly identifiable per-
sons who can be erotically excited by members of the same sex and who
have a preference for having sex with them. However, this assumption
cannot easily be applied to the past. Other cultures have held very dif-
ferent notions about the organization of the numerous desires, feelings,
acts, and interpersonal relationships that we lump together under the
term ‘sexuality.’ The present work cannot ignore this problem, even if
it deals with a time period a full century after the term ‘homosexual’
was invented. Although there were many men who clearly understood
themselves as having a preference for sexual contact and loving relation-
ships with other men, I will show that they did not necessarily agree on
the terminology that should be employed, nor on what this preference
meant for their sense of self.
In the end, though, I have chosen the term ‘homosexual’ (homo-
sexuell) because it had emerged as the dominant term in the German-
speaking world by the middle of the twentieth century. Even those who
preferred other descriptions, such as ‘friend’ or ‘homophile,’ acknowl-
edged the term’s ascendancy. I will use the term in largely the way they
would have used it; that is, to describe the sexual activities between
men (or between women), the social relationships and institutions that
they created to pursue these activities, and the people who at some
level preferred having sex with members of the same sex. Unlike many
men at the time, though, I will not assume a strict division between
the categories of homosexual and heterosexual; instead, as suggested
by many contemporary queer theorists, I will assume that individual
sexuality is in fact a ‘fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possi-
ble sexualities.’1 Self-defined heterosexual men were capable of pursuing
and even enjoying sex with other men, and men who understood them-
selves as homosexual were capable of carrying on relationships with
girlfriends and wives.
xi
xii Note on Terminology
As a synonym for ‘homosexual,’ I will also use the term ‘gay’—

although I will admit that this choice is more problematic. Although
its German equivalent, schwul, is a term that was also used in the mid-
twentieth century, at the time it was one of the more pejorative of
words, the connotations of which can perhaps be suggested best by the
American slang ‘fag.’ However, failing to find another suitable synonym
besides ‘gay’ that would keep me from overusing the word ‘homosex-
ual,’ I have chosen to employ it. It is one with which both German and
English speakers will be familiar, and indeed today we often feel more
comfortable with ‘gay’ than even ‘homosexual,’ which often sounds
quite clinical to our ear.
1
Introduction: The Neglected
Postwar Period
The period between the end of World War II and the emergence of
the contemporary gay rights movement around 1970 has long been
neglected by historians of same-sex desire. Scholars have devoted much
time to the nineteenth century, which witnessed the rise of sexological
investigations into homosexuality and the appearance of some of the
earliest opponents of the sodomy laws. The nineteenth century also
allows for a consideration of the fascinating question of the place of
same-sex desire in a society that was only beginning to be affected by
modern scientific conceptions of homosexuality. The early twentieth
century, on the other hand, holds out the lure of the vibrant Bohemian
scenes located in Berlin, New York, Paris, and London, as well as the
fascinating material produced by the early homosexual movement. The
1930s and 1940s raise questions about the relationship between state
power and sexual regulation in the context of totalitarian regimes and
world war. German historians of the gay past have inevitably been
drawn to the Nazi era, which offers the archetypal story of homosex-
ual repression in the modern era and, at the same time, intriguing hints
of homoeroticism within the movement. And for gay scholars interested
in a more recent topic, the events surrounding the birth of the contem-
porary gay rights movement after the Stonewall riots of 1969 provide
ample material.
In contrast, the 20-year period following World War II seems to
have little to offer. The conservative, family-oriented atmosphere of
the so-called ‘Golden Fifties’ appeared unpromising for historians look-
ing for subcultural activity. The small, conservative ‘homophile’ groups
(as the movement of this era is generally called) represented most
prominently by the United States’ Mattachine Society lacked the orig-
inality and glamour of early twentieth-century organizations, and also
1
2 Male Homosexuality in West Germany
the energy and radicalism of the post-Stonewall organizations. And in

Germany, there were enough questions about the fate of homosexual
men and lesbians under the Nazis to keep historians busy for some
time. For those who were interested in homosexuality in the 1950s and
1960s, there were serious obstacles to research. Most countries have
privacy laws that make it difficult to examine archival material deal-
ing with personal information of a sensitive nature until a considerable
time has passed. Exceptions to the rule can occasionally be made, but
it often requires a great deal of effort and luck to receive these special
permissions.
Two notable pioneers, Jeffrey Weeks and John D’Emilio, together con-
structed a framework for our understanding of the 1950s and 1960s.1
Only by the mid-1990s, though, did a significant number of scholars
begin to follow their example. Neil Miller’s Out of the Past offered a
much needed survey of gay and lesbian history from the mid-nineteenth
century until the present.2 Numerous studies of specific urban gay
communities in the twentieth century yielded new insights into the evo-
lution of gay life in the metropoles of the gay landscape (San Francisco,
New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin, for example) and also a
number of less well known gay scenes (Philadelphia, Washington, DC,
Cologne, and Hamburg).3 In Germany, a group of independent schol-
ars associated with Berlin’s Gay Museum (Schwules Museum) produced
a series of oral interviews with gay Germans who lived through the
mid-twentieth century, as well as a number of microhistories of critical
institutions within the homophile movement.4 Robert Corber published
two fascinating books that offered a queer reading of American film
and literature during the Cold War. More recently, Julian Jackson and
Scott Gunther have published two important works on homosexuality
in post-World War II France, while Martin Meeker has produced a fas-
cinating perspective on the networks of information exchange among
gay men that proliferated in the United States.5
This book will pull together many of the insights gained from these 15
years of research and apply them to West Germany after World War II.
It will argue that the significance of the mid-twentieth century for the
long-term history of homosexuality in Germany has generally been
underappreciated. This period does not represent merely a brief inter-
lude between the early 1930s, when the gay scenes and homosexual
institutions were destroyed by the Nazi state, and the early 1970s, when
the energy and freedoms of the Weimar era were resurrected. Instead, it
made three major contributions on which the homosexual movement
and gay scenes of the post-Stonewall era would build.
Introduction: The Neglected Postwar Period 3
First, it was a period in which gay scenes were re-established after

being virtually destroyed by the Nazis during the 1930s and early 1940s.
These returned some vitality to gay life in the major cities of West
Germany, and in Hamburg’s case the excitement associated with this
scene in the 1950s was temporarily able to challenge Berlin’s position as
the center of the German gay landscape. Second, it witnessed a trans-
formation of the concept of homosexuality, allowing for a masculinized
vision of same-sex desire to become widespread. This concept would
ultimately affect both the wider social prejudices against homosexuality
and the identities that same-sex desiring men themselves embraced.
Last, this period culminated in the decriminalization of adult male
homosexuality with the reform of Paragraph 175 of the West German
criminal code—a fact that is relatively well known but still not all
that well understood. Too often this reform is seen as the simple and
inevitable culmination of a general process of sexual liberation tak-
ing place in twentieth-century Europe. Uncovering the actual debates
that surrounded the reform of Paragraph 175 will reveal the sexual
revolution to be not simply the product of New Left radicals and coun-
tercultural hippies. Equally importantly, this study will cast new light
on the legal transformation that enabled the formation of the modern
gay movement.
Each of these three transformations will be analyzed in terms of
power struggles that took place in distinct social and political arenas.
Like most historians of sexuality, I have learned a great deal from the
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, who argued, among
other things, that sex can be seen as invested with a ‘multiplicity of
force relations.’6 Investigating these force relations reveals the strategic
importance that homosexuality represented for several distinct groups.
For men interested in pursuing same-sex contact, it was an activity that
could forge human relationships, social spaces, and symbolic meanings
that worked against the culture, social structures, and political insti-
tutions of the world around them. For the political leaders, policing
institutions, and social figures who wielded authority over the country,
homosexuality constituted one element within a larger arsenal of fears
and concerns that was useful in managing and shaping West German
society. For the homosexual activists of the era, homosexuality was the
key to recreating society in a more genuinely democratic fashion and
opening up masculinity to a wider range of sexual behavior. Last, for
the forces of political progressivism that gradually emerged in the 1960s,
the legal treatment of homosexuality was the cause that could mobilize
energy behind a project to initiate West Germany into a modern world,
and one that would guarantee more social justice, personal freedom, and
individual self-development than the Germany of the past. The intense
conflicts between these groups help to explain some of the incongruities
of the period: a thriving gay scene alongside persistent state repression;
conceptual struggles over the nature of homosexuality that could pro-
duce new identities but also new prejudices; and, finally, the gradual
success of arguments for sexual liberalism despite the prevailing sexual
conservatism of the 1950s and early 1960s.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The criminalization of homosexuality in Germany has a long history,

theoretically going back to the sixteenth-century Carolina criminal
code of the Holy Roman Empire, but more recently embodied in Para-
graph 175, passed into law soon after German unification in 1871. This
criminalization, though, did not stop nineteenth-century homosexual
men from gradually laying some claim to a whole series of physical
spaces—specific bars, parks, streets, and public baths—in several large
cities, especially Berlin and Hamburg. The social networks and pat-
terns that revolved around these sites were not unique to Germany,
of course, and historians of gay life have spent a great deal of time
analyzing these ‘subcultures,’ as they are still generally called. This
term—coined in the 1940s by sociologists associated with the Univer-
sity of Chicago, and then further developed in the 1970s by scholars
at the Birmingham School—seems in many ways apropos because it
suggests that small groups can appropriate urban space for themselves
with a range of linguistic, symbolic, and material strategies peculiar
to the specific subculture. The notion that subcultures represent a
kind of resistance against the hegemony of the dominant culture at
the symbolic level also makes it attractive to scholars searching for
signs of assertiveness of same-sex desire outside a specifically political
movement.
By the early 1990s there were a number of scholars associated with
social constructivism who used the sociological and anthropological
methods associated with subcultural studies to produce outstanding
research on homosexuality in the context of everyday life. Works
by Jeffrey Weeks, Randolph Trumbach, George Chauncey, and others
served as a model in many ways for my own research.7 Like these
earlier works, this book reveals how gay men resisted the dominant
notions of sexual order. They created social spaces to pursue their sex-
ual interests in small and often subtle ways, employing what Michel de
Certeau has called local ‘tactics’ to ward off the larger-scale ‘strategies’ of
the police and other government authorities designed to enforce their
(hetero)sexual order.8 Such methods allowed homosexual men to create
their own culture—their own language, histories, stories, poems, paint-
ings, sketches, and forms of silent communication. This culture often
involved a ‘tactical redeployment’ of the dominant culture, as can be
seen in the styles of dress and behavior fashioned by men in the gay
scene.
The culture of the gay scenes, one might argue, was a ‘subculture’ inso-
far as it was clearly marginalized: there was little to no space for it within
the workplaces, family homes, popular media, churches, social clubs,
professional organizations, or other institutions of West Germany’s het-
eronormative society. I will avoid the term, however, since there are real
limitations to the concept as applied to gay social spaces. The notion
of subculture as developed by the Birmingham School always suggested
a subset of a particular class, whereas men who come together in cities
in search of same-sex contact normally originate from different classes,
and often different ethnicities, nationalities, and ages. Indeed, ‘subcul-
ture’ suggests a coherence and identity that would be misleading if it
were applied to the gay social spaces that men constructed in Germany
during the 1950s and 1960s. Instead they were diffuse spaces that even
in a single city could be spread out over numerous neighborhoods,
parks, and locales. They often blended into other social areas, such as
red-light districts or entertainment quarters. Finally, the people who
constructed them were dissimilar. As this book will reveal, they not
only had different social backgrounds but also adopted many different
styles of behavior and dress that implied alternate understandings of
their masculinity and sexuality.
Because of the problems with using ‘subculture,’ I will opt to use
another term instead—‘scene.’ This word deserves some attention since
it is frequently used in colloquial German and English but rarely used
yet in a scholarly sense. In contrast to ‘subculture,’ the term ‘scene’
suggests a space in which several people meet to pursue a common
interest. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this usage was ini-
tially introduced sometime around the early 1950s in the social milieu
that surrounded black jazz musicians. From here, the slang term was
extended to include other leisure-time activities, especially rock music,
drug use, and other elements of the 1960s youth counterculture in both
English- and German-speaking areas. In the course of the 1970s, the
term also increasingly became applied to the public areas of the city in
which gay men met.
While gay men in the 1950s and early 1960s were not familiar with
the German term die Szene, they certainly had some working knowledge
of such public spaces. In some cases, the gay scene may have included
exact physical locations; for example, the many parks, public bath-
rooms, bars, and other sites used by men searching for same-sex contact.
Yet this may obscure the fact that the scene was really an abstract space
constructed by the knowledge of the participants—knowledge about
where to go, what signals to look for, how to react to these signals, and,
in general, how to interact with other participants. One did not enter the
scene, therefore, simply by setting foot inside a gay bar or a public bath-
room; one had to be in the know. Participants in the scene understood
it to include people who were pursuing a central interest, namely same-
sex contact, as well as others who in one way or another consciously
and actively promoted this central interest, including the occasional
straight bartender or bar owner. The relationships between these indi-
viduals could be fleeting ones constructed on the fly in parks or public
bathrooms; they could also be longer-lasting relationships constructed
in clubs, gay bars, or informal social circles.
I will always talk about scenes in the plural. They were always local
phenomena, with a complex relationship with the neighborhoods, the
specific physical topography, and the patterns of policing and law
enforcement that existed in the city in which they took shape. The peo-
ple they comprised—their preferences, habits, and choices—often left
their mark on the patterns of interaction within any given scene. And
yet I was also struck by the many similarities between the many scenes
that developed in West Germany, and indeed between this country’s
scenes and those that one could find in London, Amsterdam, New York,
San Francisco, or any other significant city of the Western world since
the end of the nineteenth century. These similarities hint at the connec-
tions between them—the tourists, sailors, soldiers, and immigrants who
moved between the scenes and sometimes maintained long-distance
relationships with men in other cities—but more concretely reflected
social and cultural transformations that crossed national boundaries to
create similar assumptions and experiences.
In particular, historians have drawn multiple connections between
modern urban life and homosexuality. As Matt Houlbrook has recently
made clear, the studies of gay scenes are as much histories of the city
as they are histories of gay life. Urbanization was involved in complex
ways with other kinds of sociological processes essential for the emer-
gence of the ‘homosexual’ as ‘an identity, state of being, and social
world’: the disruption of traditional patterns of life, the loosening of
familial authority, and the creation of modes of living free from the
subtle modes of surveillance and control associated with small commu-
nities. Cities offered both public and commercial sites for the emergence
of gay scenes. In the midst of such urban social spaces, through symbolic
interactions that were shaped by the ‘flux, anonymity, and visuality of
the crowd,’ homosexuals formed both identities and an entire ‘way of
being.’9 Thus, as historians are increasingly exploring in an explicit way,
urban gay scenes are bound together with the ‘trajectory of modernity’
through their connections with ‘modern experiences of urbanity,’ the
larger nation-building process, and the proliferation of networks of
information exchange.10
Although recently there have been a growing number of calls for
historical research into the same-sex experience of men in rural areas
and small towns, I have chosen to focus again on the major cities of
West Germany, in part because of the limitations of source material,
but mainly because of the questions that guided my research. How did
homosexuals rebuild the social networks and social institutions that
had been destroyed by the Nazis? In what ways did their identities
change in the mid-twentieth century? How did the sexual conservatism
of the 1950s and early 1960s affect homosexuals? How successful were
the political efforts of homosexuals in this era? Such questions nat-
urally pointed me to the cities, where gay scenes could provide the
environment for building social institutions and potentially a political
movement.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
By reconsidering the importance of the mid-twentieth century for the

long-term development of homosexuality, this book contributes to an
already sizeable body of work examining the fate of Germany after the
destruction of World War II and the collapse of the Nazi regime. As sex-
uality is the issue at hand, this study naturally must look beyond the
‘formal institutions and the processes of political policy-making’, which
was the topic of so much excellent work before the early 1980s.11 The
political history of the country will not be ignored, but the book’s focus
is on the social and cultural life of West Germany in the decades after
World War II.
Investigating postwar German history from the point of view of gay
men will provide an interesting perspective on the larger problem of the
continuities and discontinuities of German history. This is an issue that
has special significance for German historians because of the way that
the Nazi era has affected how we potentially view all of German his-
tory. Since the 1950s, German historians have been debating whether
to view the Nazi period as something integral to German history—that
is, the product of larger trends and forces at work potentially since the
sixteenth century—or as a serious rupture in the historical development
of the country, when the nation of ‘poets and thinkers’ was transformed
through the traumas of a lost world war and the Great Depression into
a country of barbarians. For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, German
historiography was powerfully shaped by the notion of a Sonderweg, or
‘special path,’ that Germany took on its way to modernity. Historians
influenced by Weberian social science argued that the failure of the
1848 Revolution and the persistent social and political influence of the
German aristocracy left the country tainted with antidemocratic social
institutions and habits of mind. These national characteristics under-
mined Germany’s first attempt at democracy in the 1920s and ultimately
paved the way for the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s.
The Sonderweg thesis has been substantially challenged since the mid-
1980s as the modernization theory undergirding the thesis was increas-
ingly questioned on a number of fronts. Today, German historians are
faced with the challenge of constructing a new historiography based not
on a single metanarrative but as an accumulation of intertwined (but
not necessarily coherent or comprehensive) histories. Instead of look-
ing for the kind of linear continuity assumed by the Sonderweg, Konrad
Jarausch and Michael Geyer have suggested embracing the many rup-
tures of German history and making ‘the very instability of the German
condition’ an integral part of these stories.12 Choosing themes that cut
‘across politics, economy, society, and culture’ could provide interesting
paths through the shifting terrain of German history, ultimately allow-
ing the ‘fragments of a central European past’ to be reassembled into
new patterns.13
Homosexuality provides just such a theme. Focusing on homosexuality
allows us to see a series of struggles that were certainly affected by regime
changes and war, but which could be equally influenced by more subtle
social and cultural processes that often proceeded despite major polit-
ical ruptures. In particular, homosexuality will provide a perspective
on the expanding consumerism, the proliferation of popular cultural
styles associated with the United States, and the transformation of sex-
ual morality. Understanding such trends is critical to appreciating the
nation Germany became by the end of the twentieth century. These
transformations also operated on a much wider scale than simply the
nation state, and so understanding the role they played in Germany
in the 1950s and 1960s will also allow us to see Germany’s place in a
Europe that would become increasingly integrated through Cold War
pressures, the logic of consumerism, and the institutions of economic
coordination.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
My choice to study male homosexuality was very much influenced

early on by my desire to make a contribution to the research on mas-
culinity in the years after World War II. My thinking on the topic was
influenced by a number of fascinating works by Robert Moeller, Heide
Fehrenbach, Uta Poiger, Dagmar Herzog, and others.14 These works have
shown that gender and sexuality were of great importance for the con-
servative ‘family politics’ of the era associated with West Germany’s first
postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, whose personality and policies
guided the country between the end of the 1940s until his retirement
from power in 1963. Like Moeller’s work, which reveals how the dom-
inant notions of gender and sexual order affected family policy in the
early Federal Republic of Germany, my research demonstrates how these
notions influenced law and government policy as it affected homosex-
uals in the 1950s.15 It suggests that a mutually reciprocal relationship
existed between the prejudices against homosexuals and the Adenauer-
era family politics. On the one hand, the desire for sexual order and
the anxieties about youth provided new justifications for the legal per-
secution and social stigmatization of homosexuality now that the racial
hygienic arguments favored by the Nazis had been officially discred-
ited. On the other hand, long-standing prejudices against homosexuals
strengthened by years of Nazi oppression also bolstered Adenauer’s
project of rebuilding the country based on strong, German families.
I hope to make a contribution to the already sizeable body of litera-
ture that outlines the norms of hegemonic masculinity in the Adenauer
era by suggesting that it was powerfully influenced by the heterosexist
image of the ‘corrupting homosexual’ that became the most common
stereotype of same-sex desire. My focus on power struggles, though,
will reveal some of the resistance against these hegemonic norms. Both
these norms and the stereotype of the ‘corrupting homosexual’ were
implicitly disputed from within the gay scene by the ‘marginalized
masculinities’ that took shape here.16 The analysis of these styles of
masculinity should challenge historians to move beyond the public
discourses that shaped hegemonic masculinity and instead look for evi-
dence that might suggest to what extent this version of masculinity
was either accepted or contested at the level of the ‘everyday’ (Alltag).

Gay men, we will see, performed a range of gendered styles, includ-
ing the effeminate Tunte’s (‘queen’) assertive rejection of normative
masculinity, the respectable homosexual’s difficult efforts to accommo-
date masculine norms while also making room for his sexuality, and
the leatherman’s creative construction of a sexually charged version of
masculinity, borrowing elements from American popular culture and
working-class masculinity.
My interest in West German masculinity led me very early on to delib-
erately exclude the consideration of female same-sex desire. This deci-
sion was confirmed by other legal and social factors that became clear as
my research progressed. Germany’s laws against homosexuality inher-
ited from the early modern period focused specifically on males. These
laws were originally organized around the notion of sodomy, which was
based on the concept of penetration and was therefore difficult to apply
to women. By the end of the nineteenth century there was some dis-
cussion about extending Paragraph 175 to include women; eventually,
though, it was decided that criminalizing female same-sex acts might
actually be counterproductive since it would inevitably draw great atten-
tion to female same-sex activity. The result was that lesbian sexuality was
never criminalized, and lesbians faced a radically different set of legal
circumstances than men. Their social circumstances were also distinct.
Lesbians in my period largely stayed away from the areas of the male
gay scene in, especially, the bathrooms and parks. Consequently, their
social networks developed largely independently of the gay male scene.
By considering the role of gender and sexuality in the postwar social
order, this book addresses not simply the research into postwar mas-
culinity but also the rapidly expanding literature on European sexuality
in the second half of the twentieth century. Along with many other
historians of sexuality, I will assume that the changes that took place
during the Sexual Revolution (or in German, the Sexwelle) of the 1960s
and 1970s were just an episode within a long-term process dating back
at least a century, if not more. During the second half of the 1800s, the
intellectual impact of Malthus and Darwin, the growing interest of sci-
ence in issues of sexuality, and the public debate stoked by both moral
purity advocates and sex radicals contributed to an escalating struggle
over the meaning of sexuality—its relationship to society, happiness,
morality, and self. At the same time, the expansion of state regulation
and policing of sexual behavior; the impact of birth control, advertis-
ing, sex manuals, and other sexually oriented consumer products; and
urbanization and secularization all left their mark on sexual behavior.17
And yet for too long scholars have assumed a ‘steady liberation and
the gradual overcoming of obstacles to sexual freedom,’ as Dagmar
Herzog has observed.18 Recent work has emphasized that what we once
thought of as a singular process should in fact be conceptualized as ‘a
series of competing struggles, each with different agendas and widely
varying results.’19 Progress in one series of confrontations did not nec-
essarily bring success in others. Distinct differences can also be found
between different nations; sexual development in Europe did not pro-
ceed evenly across the continent, but in fact had a ‘syncopated quality.’
Setbacks were common, a reminder that sexually conservative attitudes
still could hold a great deal of appeal for certain segments of the popu-
lation and at certain moments in history. And attitudes that we might
today call sexually progressive could be identified in surprising contexts,
as Herzog’s work on sexuality in Nazi Germany has revealed.
This book enhances our understanding of the transformations of
sexual attitudes by examining same-sex desire across two transitions:
the political transition from the Nazi state to the Federal Republic
of Germany that took place at the end of the 1940s, and the social-
cultural transition from an atmosphere of sexual conservatism to the
more relaxed era of the late 1960s. Like recent research by Elizabeth
Heinemann, my work will locate certain undercurrents amidst the oth-
erwise sexually conservative Adenauer Era—the steady expansion of the
urban gay scenes, the formation of novel sexual identities, and the small
stream of debate around the criminalization of homosexuality in the
1950s—that will point forward to the explosion of images and debate
that came at the end of the 1960s.20 Yet, my study also reinforces an
observation made recently by Dagmar Herzog, namely that laws have
a significant impact ‘in shaping national and local sexual cultures and
individuals‘ self-conceptions alike.’21 For homosexual men, the reform
of Paragraph 175 in 1969, ending a nearly century-long struggle over
the criminalization of homosexuality, was going to be just as important
as the rupture in the legal context and methods of policing that came
with the collapse of Nazism in 1945.
The importance of the legal framework provided by the structures
of the nation state will help explain one final parameter I set for my
research, namely my decision not to include East Germany. This deci-
sion was partly pragmatic because East German documents are generally
not housed in the same locations as West German documents; going
through these documents would have taken more time, and explain-
ing their context would have made this book appreciably longer. More
important, though, were the considerable legal, social, and political
differences between East and West Germany. The East German com-
munist government reverted to an earlier version of Paragraph 175
instead of using the Nazi-era law from 1935; this version was much
more relaxed, making it more difficult to convict men of the law and
also threatening less severe punishment upon conviction. In spite of
this leniency, there were real, serious restrictions on organizing any
sort of public life or institutions outside of state or party control in
East Germany. The result was that homosexual organizations and mag-
azines were forbidden and remained so even after the East German
government decriminalized adult male homosexuality in 1969. Other
aspects of a gay scene—gay bars, parks, and public toilets—did exist,
but in general activities remained more subdued than in West Germany.
Gay East Berliners, in fact, often visited West Germany to take advan-
tage of opportunities there—that is, before the erection of the Berlin
wall in 1961.22 Censorship restrictions meant that public discussion of
homosexuality was extremely limited. In short, the situation was dif-
ferent enough from West Germany to warrant its treatment as truly a
separate country.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
This book focuses on various, often intense, struggles over homo-

sexuality in the era between the end of severe Nazi persecution in 1945
and the legal freedom promised by the reform of Paragraph 175 in 1969.
As the purpose of the book is to show the contribution that this period
made to the history of homosexuality in West Germany, it is orga-
nized thematically. It begins by examining the social, legal, and cultural
context in which gay men lived. The upcoming chapter looks at the
transition from war to peace and from dictatorship to democracy that
made an immediate impact on the lives of gay men. And yet it will sug-
gest that 1945 cannot be understood as a ‘zero hour’ for this population
of Germans, since memory and effects of the Weimar and Nazi years
continued to be felt for years to come. In particular, the Nazi version
of Paragraphs 175 and 175a continued to be enforced, although admit-
tedly in a legal and political environment that was very different after
1945. Nevertheless, there were some real changes taking place in terms
of the conceptualization of homosexuality. It was in these decades that
a more masculine image of homosexuality cemented itself. Although
the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual did not entirely vanish,
in general it was this new understanding of male homosexuality that
increasingly shaped the anxieties of West Germany and the identities of

gay men.
Chapter 3 turns to the homophile movement of the 1950s. This move-
ment was very much affected by the changing conceptualization of
homosexuality. Its chief strategy was focused on respectable, masculine
behavior as a means of achieving wider social acceptance. Although the
achievements of this movement were not as striking as the Weimar-era
associations or as enduring as 1970s gay liberation, they still need to
be remembered for reviving a political tradition that had been utterly
destroyed by the Nazis, for bringing a truly international dimension to
homosexual politics, and last for reworking arguments for decriminal-
ization in ways that in the long run will be important for the fate of
Paragraph 175.
Chapter 4 examines the recreation of the West German gay scenes
after their near eradication under the Nazi regime. This rebirth built
upon the legal guarantees of democracy enshrined in the West German
constitution, but also was driven by many of the same social pro-
cesses responsible for the initial birth of the scene in the second half of
the nineteenth century: urbanization, consumerism, the circulation of
information on homosexuality, and the development of the homosex-
ual movement. The reappearance of gay scenes in West Berlin, Hamburg,
Cologne, Munich, and elsewhere did not occur without conflict, and
indeed from the beginning homosexuals faced a legal environment
shaped by continued prosecution by a police force that over time proved
very creative in coming up with new techniques of enforcement. The
scene survived, though, and even grew. The bathrooms, parks, streets,
and bars provided space in which sexual encounters could be pur-
sued, friendship networks could be pieced together, and sexual identities
fashioned.
Chapter 5 demonstrates that the mid-twentieth century was impor-
tant for producing arguments for decriminalization that eventually
yielded the reform of Paragraph 175 in 1969. Although this moment in
Germany’s gay history is certainly appreciated, too often it is connected
with what came afterwards—namely the birth of the gay liberation
movement of the early 1970s—instead of with what came beforehand.
This perspective on 1969 has led to an underappreciation of both the
role that the homophile movement of the 1950s played in circulat-
ing arguments for legal reform, and the significance of progressive
professionals in the 1960s in generating a widespread debate on the
issue.
The conclusion will offer some observations on the legacy of the

1950s and 1960s for the period that followed the reform of Para-
graph 175 and the rise of a new generation of gay activists. It will
also return to the issue of why the gay history of postwar Germany is
important not only for the development of the homosexual commu-
nity, but also for German history and our understanding of the sexual
revolution.
2
Policing and Prejudice after 1945
As a child living in the early 1960s West Germany, Christian M. remem-

bered hearing his stepfather say to a group of friends around the kitchen
table, ‘Under Adolf, the warme Bruder were sent to the work camps. And
if that wasn’t enough, then they were thrown into the gas chamber,
and the problem was solved.’ Given this attitude, it is not surprising
that Christian was terrified to tell his stepfather about his attraction to
men. In fact, he believed that if his stepfather had ever learned of his
homosexuality, he ‘would have beaten me to death. Without doubt.’
This frightening memory suggests how long memories of the Nazi era
lingered in the minds of West Germans, influencing public impressions
and personal reactions to homosexuality. Such memories overlapped
and influenced other understandings of homosexuality inherited from
the past. Christian discourse defined it as a sin; scientific and medi-
cal discourse treated it as an illness and a perversion. Sexual activities
between men were ‘unnatural,’ hinting at very old ideas inherited
from ancient Stoicism and medieval Christian philosophy. A man who
found himself irresistibly drawn to homosexuality was often portrayed
as effeminate—a Tunte, to use the German slang equivalent of ‘sissy’
or ‘fairy.’ Above all, though, he was a criminal whose social marginal-
ity made him prone to murder, child abuse, and even major political
crimes.
All of these prejudices were articulated repeatedly in the first half of
the twentieth century and were eventually used by the Nazis to justify
their massive assault on Germany’s gay scene and homosexual organi-
zations. They were not specifically German, though—their impact was
noticeable in the United States, the rest of Europe, and elsewhere at the
same time—and so it is no surprise that the Allied powers made no real
effort to uproot these prejudices after their victory in World War II. The
15
conceptualization of homosexuality as a sign of criminality, a mark of

effeminacy, a sickness of mind and body, and an inner corruption that
threatened the nation would continue to influence West German cul-
ture in the 1950s and 1960s. Explicitly or implicitly, these ideas would be
used to justify the continued enforcement of Paragraph 175, a law that
predated the Nazis but that was altered in substantial ways by Hitler’s
government to make it easier to impose.
Many gay men saw this legal continuity as a reason to be skeptical of
the democratic claims of the new West German state. The injustice of
the situation was real, but it should not lead us to overlook some real
changes of the 1950s. This chapter will examine two sets of changes tak-
ing place as the country made the transition from Nazi dictatorship to
parliamentary democracy. One was directly involved with the political
transformation as it entailed the resurrection of certain legal principles
that would alter police enforcement in the country. This set of changes
was to be absolutely critical for the resurrection of the West German gay
scenes, as will be seen in a later chapter.
The other set of changes moved at a slower pace, involving longer-
term socio-cultural transformations that had started to make themselves
felt already during the 1930s but that were producing a noticeable shift
in the conceptualization of homosexuality by the 1950s. More specif-
ically, the spread of scientific knowledge about sexuality, the growing
power of the metaphor of homosexuality as illness, and the increasing
public anxiety that homosexuals represented a danger to youth created
a cultural context in which it was easier to imagine homosexuals as
masculine rather than effeminate. In connection with specific condi-
tions of postwar West Germany, these long-term trends caused the old
cluster of ideas and prejudices that had previously grouped themselves
around the image of the effeminate Tunte to disintegrate, and a few
of the strands—especially the notions of illness, sinfulness, criminality,
and moral putrefaction—to regroup, this time around the figure of the
corrupting homosexual.
The emergence of a more masculine conception of male homosexuality
was an international phenomenon that has also been observed in
Europe and the United States. This is not surprising given that the
trends listed above all had an international range, affecting nearly the
entire West in the mid-twentieth century. The international networks
of the scientific community led to a rapid spread of scientific and
medical ideas about homosexuality across national borders. The same
networks spread new information about adolescence that reinforced the
growing attention to youth taken up by art and literature, religious
Policing and Prejudice after 1945 17
and educational discourse, and finally political and legal debates.1 The
international context of the Cold War was also a significant backdrop,
as widespread anxieties about communism fueled the so-called ‘lavender
scares’ in many countries.2 Last, we might also mention the global dom-
inance that Hollywood films achieved after World War II.3 Though some
US-made films continued to include characters that epitomized the
older stereotype of the effeminate homosexual, a number of important
ones disseminated a more masculine image.
Conceptions of homosexuality in West Germany, therefore, altered
along lines very similar to the rest of Western Europe and the
United States in the decades after World War II. Yet, the meanings
of homosexuality still resonated in unique ways with the particular
German context. Discourses from the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century still frequently resurfaced, bringing with them language
and memories from the Weimar and Nazi past. Just as important, the
specific environment of a country recovering from war and yet anxious
about modernization and Americanization often gave homosexuality a
set of associations very specific to the country.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Although there is evidence of a nascent scene of Warme (the warm ones,

as homosexuals were often called) in Berlin going back to the end of
the eighteenth century, this scene did not really begin to take shape
until the 1860s, when rapid industrialization set in and the country was
transformed by what might be called a ‘revolution of consumption.’4
Berlin was utterly transformed as the German economy surged for-
ward and the city took on new significance as the center of a unified
nation. It is from this era that we have the first reports of homosex-
ual masquerade balls, and by the 1880s a number of gay bars had
begun to appear. Streets such as Friedrichstrasse became known for
attracting both female and male prostitutes. By the turn of the century,
other German cities were also exhibiting signs of the ‘German sick-
ness,’ as some foreigners began to refer to it. Munich’s grand park—the
English garden—and several busy squares in the city attracted homo-
sexuals in search of sexual partners.5 More impressive, though, was
Hamburg’s scene. Abraham Flexner, an American social observer of pros-
titution in Europe who worked with one of America’s anti-vice societies,
observed in 1914 that Hamburg was outdone only by Berlin and Paris
in the number of ‘notorious resorts’ that it offered to those ‘addicted to
homosexuality.’6
By the early twentieth century, a third factor besides urbanization

and consumerism had begun to fuel the development of the coun-
try’s gay scenes: the increasing amount of printed material dealing with
homosexuality. In the midst of the newspapers and magazines that
flooded the country around the turn of the century, one could find a
growing amount of material aimed at an audience interested in same-
sex desire. Inspired by the rising interest in the sexological literature of
Albert Moll and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Max Spohr’s press in Leipzig
brought out a large number of books and pamphlets on the topic in the
1890s, including the first work by the scientist and gay activist Magnus
Hirschfeld. Also in the 1890s appeared Der Eigene, published by Adolf
Brand in Berlin, which in contrast to the sexological literature focused
on cultural material—short stories, poems, sketches, and photographs.
These publications were certainly not the first to break the taboo of
discussing homosexuality, but they were significant for signaling the
emergence of a homosexual public. In a complicated dynamic traced
by the queer theorist Michael Warner, these texts circulated within the
growing commercial space of the late nineteenth century, distributing
their knowledge and leaving an impact on both individuals and social
formations. Homosexuals recognized themselves within this prolifera-
tion of texts. In the process, new personas began to emerge, and the
vague outline of an ‘imagined community’ (to use Benedict Anderson’s
phrase) became apparent.7 Much of the information homosexuals found
in the emerging gay publishing industry as well as in the wider public
sphere would have directed them towards the urban gay scenes, espe-
cially Berlin’s. In this way, this growing amount of printed material
functioned as a crucial communication network, linking scattered indi-
viduals together into new social formations and yielding an ‘imagined
geography’ of Germany’s gay world that increasingly lifted up Berlin as
its metropole.8
The communication network provided by the print media was supple-
mented by other channels of information being created by the emerging
homosexual movement. The earliest group was Magnus Hirschfeld’s
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose members generally kept
their faith in the power of science and enlightened education to
change people’s minds about homosexuality. By the early twentieth-
century, it was joined by a second group, the Society of Self-Owned
(Gemeinschaft der Eigenen), whose membership was primarily com-
posed of readers or contributors to Brand’s Der Eigene. The presence
of both of these organizations in Berlin would have also played some
role in raising the prominence of this city in the minds of German
homosexuals. Although the patterns of migration among German gay

men in the early twentieth century is a topic that needs to be stud-
ied more closely, there are certainly hints that by the beginning of
World War I Berlin had already become ‘an enticing space of affirma-
tion and possibility.’9 As Hirschfeld observed in a survey of the city’s
gay scene around 1900, ‘Homosexuals from the countryside who visit
such bars for the first time have been seen crying from being so deeply
moved.’10
Berlin’s reputation as a center of gay life was reaffirmed during the
1920s. The freedom won during the November Revolution of 1918,
which replaced the German monarchy with a constitutional, republi-
can form of government, gave new energy to the country’s gay scenes
and the homosexual movement. Hirschfeld estimated that between 90
and 100 gay bars could be found in Berlin by 1923, a number confirmed
by other sources.11 Homosexuals in Cologne, Hamburg, Hannover, and
Munich could also enjoy new bars and other locations for meeting.12
Many of these clubs received publicity from a mass of new homosexual
magazines with titles such as Die Freundschaft, Freundschaft und Freiheit,
and Der Hellasbote. The most successful of them, Die Insel, reached a
circulation of 150,000 a month by 1930.13
The vibrant gay scenes of the Weimar era were not a welcome sight
for many Germans. Indeed, as the historian Stefan Micheler has recently
observed, the 1920s were never as ‘golden, liberal, or tolerant as has
often been assumed.’14 For many, the prominence of the gay scenes was
a glaring sign of the decadence and degenerate behavior that democ-
racy, military defeat, and revolution had allowed to run rampant. Berlin
in particular seemed to represent the condition of the country, if not
Western civilization at large. Drawing on centuries-old discourses that
described the city as a seat of sin, vice, and disease, Germany’s cap-
ital became a symbol of decay, where ‘everything is topsy turvy.’15
For everyone who saw the city as ‘enticing, promising, fascinating’—a
conglomeration of ‘endless possibilities’—there were many others who
complained of the ‘whoring of Berlin.’16 Increasingly, right-wing leaders
warned about a world in which numerous forces—democracy, Marxism,
the ‘masses,’ modernism, the women’s movement, sexual licentious-
ness, and the Jewish race—were all in league to bring down the German
nation, the German race, and quite possibly, if one believed Oswald
Spengler’s predictions in his popular book The Decline of the West, all
of occidental civilization. The efforts of conservatives left their mark.
In 1926, they managed to pass a law against ‘trash and smut’ that made
it increasingly difficult to publish homosexual magazines. Policing too
seems to have become more repressive in the mid-1920s, leading to

higher conviction rates for homosexuality.
The real blow against Germany’s homosexual scene, though, came
as the Great Depression and political chaos of the early 1930s set
in. In 1932, Chancellor Franz von Papen issued emergency laws that
enabled him to seize control of the regional government of Prussia.
With his new wide-ranging police powers, Papen went to work trying
to restore law and order, which included cracking down on some of the
more ‘dangerous’ aspects of Berlin’s infamous nightlife. Berlin’s police
force carried out a series of raids against the gay bars, causing many
of the best-known establishments to close down by the beginning of
1933.17
These efforts paled in comparison with what came after the emer-
gence of the Nazi regime on 30 January 1933. As the Nazis crushed the
trade unions, arrested political enemies, burned books, and dissolved
rival political parties, the police were busy clearing the streets of ‘dan-
gerous’ characters and closing down areas of ‘ill-repute.’ On 23 February
1933, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior issued an order to the Berlin
police to shut down any remaining bars suspected of harboring ‘those
circles that revere the unnatural vice.’18 The order was soon circulated
to other areas of the Reich. In the wake of ‘Operation Clean Reich’ that
led to the closing of most gay bars, the police began to target leaders of
the homosexual movement. Adolf Brand had his house searched no less
than five times by the police, during which all of his photographs, 6,000
copies of his various magazines, and countless books were carried off.
‘I was completely plundered by these five confiscations,’ reported Brand
in a letter written in February 1934 to the British Sexological Society.
‘I have nothing more to sell. My business is ruined. I have no idea how
I or my family will continue to live.’19
Homosexual publishers were shut down. Organizations such as the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the Society for Others were dis-
banded. Some of the most visible gay men in Germany—well-known
male prostitutes or open transvestites—found themselves arrested and
thrown into some of the earliest concentration camps. However, the
full weight of the Nazi police state did not come to bear on homosexu-
als until 1935. That year the Nazi government modified Paragraph 175
so that it applied not only to sexual acts that resembled coitus (beis-
chlafsähnliche Handlungen) but also other sexual acts. Indeed, the courts
could even base a conviction on a simple glance at the penis of another
man or on evidence that the accused had asked another man to undress.
At the same time, the Nazi government added an addendum to the
law: Paragraph 175a, which specified certain aggravated cases involv-

ing youths or subordinates and which brought much longer prison
sentences.
The Nazi state also greatly expanded the powers of the police to deal
with homosexuals. In Berlin, the government established the Reich Cen-
tral for the Fight against Homosexuality and Abortions in 1936, which
took over the coordination of police efforts against homosexuality and
worked closely with the Gestapo.20 This central office oversaw the coor-
dination of a German-wide crackdown on homosexual meeting places.
Many arrests resulted from police raids in parks, around public toi-
lets, and in areas frequented by male prostitutes. They also frequently
resulted from denunciations made by neighbors, relatives, co-workers,
vengeful students or employees, and even angry or jealous boyfriends.
The Hitler Youth and other self-appointed ‘morality guardians’ were
known to take it upon themselves to entrap homosexuals. 21
Once in the hands of the police, men accused of breaking Para-
graph 175 were subjected to intimidation, curses, beatings, false
promises, and long interrogations until, normally, they broke down and
gave a confession. They had their lives turned inside out, as the police
had no need to worry about privacy or civil rights. Many submitted
to ‘voluntary’ castration, often misled into believing that this would
lead to lesser prison terms or even release from concentration camps.22
In the end, thousands were incarcerated in prisons, and unknown num-
bers were compulsorily confined in psychiatric institutions. Roughly ten
thousand were taken by the police into ‘protective custody’ and placed
into the Nazi concentration camp system. Here, they experienced some
of the worst conditions that humans have ever been forced to endure.
Alongside Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses, political enemies of the
regime, and other ‘asocials,’ the ‘175ers’ (as the homosexual inmates
were known) were exposed to hunger, thirst, cold weather, disease, and
cruel, random acts of violence. Some in the Buchenwald camp were
drafted into the notorious medical experiments of the endocrinologist
Carl Vaernet. Unsurprisingly, the mortality rate in the camps was stag-
gering. The most detailed study to date suggests that roughly 7,000 of
the 10,000 died.23
Underneath this massive police assault, the German gay scene shrank
considerably. The fact that any traces of the scene remained says some-
thing about the resilience of the scene itself, and above all the effective-
ness of the tactics developed within the scene to hide or disguise homo-
sexual activity. Police records from the 1930s and early 1940s reveal that
male prostitutes continued to ply their trade, though certainly more
carefully than they had done in the 1920s. Homosexuals continued to

look for opportunities for quick, anonymous sex in public bathrooms,
parks, and busy streets, despite the ample risks. Berlin’s scene proved
an especially difficult one for the police to manage, given the city’s size
and complexity.24 Yet even in smaller scene such as Hannover’s, homo-
sexual men had found a local pub—Burghardt’s—where they were able
to quietly meet as late as 1944.25
Like other Germans, gay men found their lives transformed by the
coming of World War II. Those absorbed into the Nazi war machine
witnessed—and no doubt in many cases committed—atrocities of war
across the European continent and beyond. In the army, gay men might
occasionally find opportunities for sexual contact with other men.
Given the strict penalties for those who were caught, though, the wis-
est avoided sexual contact with fellow German soldiers, instead seeking
out partners among the civilians of occupied lands. Back in Germany,
legal and social order gradually broke down, especially beginning in
early 1943 as the general mood of the country was negatively affected
by the military loss at Stalingrad and by the sharply escalating bomb-
ing raids. The impact on homosexual men was somewhat contradictory.
On the one hand, the social chaos and the general breakdown of law and
order, especially in the final years of the war, might have created some
opportunities for sexual encounters that had been missing since the
mid-1930s. On the other hand, the Nazi regime’s anxiety about main-
taining control over its population led to a rapidly escalating savagery
towards its own people. Criminals of all types were increasingly exe-
cuted by 1945, and men caught having sex with other men—especially
those in the military or the SS—were certainly not spared from such bru-
tal sentencing. And as the end of the war approached, gay men watched
with some mixture of remorse, fear, grief, and relief as their nation lost
yet another world war.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The German surrender on May 7, 1945 left the country under the con-
trol of the Allies, who quickly divided it into four occupation zones
controlled by a military government. The Allied occupation authorities
understood that the country that they now controlled faced dire eco-
nomic problems. They tried to manage the problems of scarcity through
careful rationing and rigid price controls, but the economic and social
chaos of the postwar era left most Germans dependent on their own
resources for survival. The reality of desperation and nearly worthless
currency forced people into the black market, where barter became the
basic mechanism of exchange until mid-1948. The Allied occupation
authorities did what they could to bring some semblance of law and
order to their respective occupation zones, but in the context of famine,
disease, homelessness, unemployment, and general uncertainty, legality
and crime blurred into one another.
Amidst this social chaos, local police departments were simultane-
ously reorganizing as part of the denazification process and also dealing
with the challenges of co-operating with the new occupation powers.
Not surprisingly, then, enforcing Paragraph 175 and its addendum 175a
was not exactly a top priority in 1946 and 1947. Moreover, there were
serious doubts among judges and jurists about whether these laws were
still valid because the current versions dated to the Nazi era. The ‘Gen-
eral Instructions to the Judges’ issued by the Allies forbade the use of
laws passed under the Nazis; however, a more specific piece of legisla-
tion (Law Nr. 11 from 30 January 1946) that specified the rationale for
suspending certain Nazi-era laws did not mention Paragraphs 175 and
175a at all. Then, to add to the confusion, in mid-1946 the military
government issued an outline of a new penal code that included the
pre-1933 version of Paragraph 175.26
This ambiguous situation gave room for the courts to step in, but the
courts were not united on their stance towards this law either. While
the regional supreme courts (Oberlandesgerichte) of Hamburg, Celle,
Hamm, and Düsseldorf decided that convictions under the 1935 ver-
sion of Paragraph 175 should stand, the supreme courts in Oldenburg,
Braunschweig, and Kiel were of the opinion that, as a Nazi law, this
version was innately unjust. With regard specifically to Paragraph 175a,
these same courts maintained that the addendum represented a Nazi-era
‘sharpening of punishment’ (Strafverschärfung); therefore, as per instruc-
tion Number 1 of the Allied ‘General Instructions to the Judges,’ they
reduced the maximum punishment from ten to five years, although
they did maintain the penalization of the acts enumerated under the
law.27 A similar line of reasoning helped one man get his sentence
reduced on appeal to a higher court in North Rhine-Westphalia in
1948. In the same year, another man, who had been sent to prison
only for touching the genital area of a clothed man, convinced the
judges to overturn his conviction.28 Even the German Supreme Court
for the British Zone (temporarily set up by the British occupation
authorities during the late 1940s) eventually rejected the 1935 version
of Paragraphs 175 and 175a, using instead the pre-1935 law for its
decisions.
Given the legal confusion and administrative chaos of the postwar

years, it is not surprising that homosexual men who lived through these
years often remember it as an exhilarating time of freedom. After years
of persecution and hiding, after seeing their friends taken by the police
and then having to fear for their own safety, homosexual men could
once again begin to meet, form friendships, and find lovers. Jakob Kron
recalls hearing about the first meetings between old friends in private
circles not long after the end of the war. At first only hesitatingly, gay
men emerged from their ‘mouse holes’ and started to look up friends
they might have not seen in years. As time passed and they became
bolder, they arranged meetings in more public locations, such as local
bars and nightclubs, though again this was still only done ‘in whispers
behind the hand.’29
For these men, the rubble around them may have looked like the
broken bars of a cage. Though gay men also faced destroyed homes,
lost loved ones, constant hunger, and frequent periods of joblessness,
in their memory physical and emotional hardship was frequently soft-
ened by a tremendous sense of relief. ‘Yeah,’ remembers Albrecht M.,
who had lived in Berlin at the time the war ended before moving soon
thereafter to Hamburg, ‘those of us who had made it through the Third
Reich, naturally we weren’t afraid afterwards. Sure, we had to be careful
and so on, but in Berlin one was not nervous at all thanks to the connec-
tions with Allied gay men. I wasn’t afraid in Berlin, and I wasn’t afraid
in Hamburg either.’30 Gay men were unusual in this respect. For most
people, the insecurity of life during the late 1940s caused the freedoms
brought by the social and legal chaos to go unappreciated. As much
research has suggested, women too experienced a loosening of social
norms when it came to sexuality; however, they were more likely to
associate sexual permissiveness with rape or prostitution. In both cases,
sex would rarely bring any sense of fulfillment or personal liberation.31
Gay men, on the other hand, were generally in a better position to
appreciate the sexual freedom the immediate postwar period offered.32
Without the fear of rape and, in some cases, the worries about providing
for a family that burdened many women, gay men could take advan-
tage of preoccupied police officials and the uncertainty about the fate of
Paragraph 175.
Destroyed buildings and mounds of rubble provided ample cover for
sexual encounters. Moreover, the maintenance of a military presence in
Germany by the Allied occupational powers also contributed to making
this an exceptional time for men looking for sexual opportunities with
other men. Konrad L. recalled: ‘I had a great time after 1945, for I was
15, the war had ended . . . and all the Americans, the English, and the
Germans wanted to make up for everything they had missed for years.’33
For gay men, the relative freedom of the postwar era came gradually
to an end with the re-emergence of economic and political stability
in 1948 and 1949. With the help of Allied manpower and resources,
Germans gradually rebuilt the basic economic infrastructure, and indus-
trial production began to revive. The cities were slowly cleared of rubble,
and new housing was built. Britain, France, the United States, and a
recently elected West German Parliamentary Council began to make
plans for the unification of the three Western occupied zones into a
sovereign country. The Basic Law, as the new West German constitu-
tion was known, was drawn up and then approved by a majority of
the regional German governments as well as the United States, British,
and French military governors in May 1949. The first elections of the
Bundestag, the lower house of West German parliament, were held in
August. This led to Konrad Adenauer being chosen as the country’s first
chancellor on September 16, 1949. His victory signaled the emergence
of a new conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), as
the dominant party of the country. Founded by numerous Catholics
and Protestants committed to forming an interdenominational party
that would give Germany an ‘infusion of Christian ethical principles
in economic, social, and political life,’ the CDU formed a coalition with
the liberal Free Democratic Party that enabled it to maintain control
of the government for a decade and a half.34 Adenauer’s ‘vision and
personality’ gave West Germany ‘clear, firm, imaginative, and realis-
tic leadership.’35 His commitment to Christian values also left a strong
imprint.
Adenauer’s success was related to the revival of the Christian churches
in West Germany after World War II. Although the Catholic and Protes-
tant churches did not come out of the Nazi era entirely untarnished,
their leaders quickly went to work to reclaim their influence in German
society. In particular, pastors, priests, and other public figures associ-
ated with the two churches asserted a leading role in the many debates
about the ‘limits, as well as social and moral implications, of the new
democratic order.’36 Since the German churches were the only national
institutions to remain intact after the war, they immediately took on
the role of German ambassadors to the Allied powers. Their willingness
to aggressively confront occupational policy, combined with a vigor-
ous self-promotion that exaggerated the role that the Protestant and
Catholic churches had played in resisting the Nazi state, gave Christian
institutions a great deal of prestige among many Germans.37
A heightened level of co-operation between the Catholic and Protes-

tant churches that was rare before 1945 was an important feature of the
postwar era. Above all, the churches worked together to fend off what
they saw as the two major threats to traditional culture: ‘godless’ com-
munism coming from the East and the insidious influence of American
culture emanating from the West. At the level of national politics, they
worked with the CDU to keep the still-nominally-marxist Social Demo-
cratic Party (SPD) out of power. The two churches also fought to shape
public life in the Federal Republic, most notably in the area of mass
media. They were particularly successful in mobilizing fears about the
burgeoning commercial culture attaining influence over the country’s
film industry during most of the 1950s.38 Moral purity organizations
such as the League of People’s Guardians (Volkswartbund)—a group dat-
ing back to 1898 that was closely associated with Cologne’s heavily
Catholic population—resumed their work of fighting ‘ethical decline,’
‘immorality’ of every sort, and ‘trash and pornography.’ This orga-
nization in particular focused on protecting young Germans through
education, public health work, and welfare projects.
Such work was connected in complicated ways with the effort of
refashioning the past into a usable memory.39 In West German cul-
ture of the 1950s and early 1960s, the Nazi past was repeatedly defined
by memories of sexual and gender disorder. Although the Nazi ideol-
ogy had exalted the family as the ‘germ cell’ of the nation and had
promised to protect the German family from the forces of modernism,
in practice the party’s social policies encroached on familial decisions,
undermined parental authority, and created rival social institutions that
competed for both the time and the loyalty of family members.40 After
1945, this erosion of the family defined people’s memories about the
Nazi years and was associated with the immediate postwar years. The
evils of Nazism, then, were identified with the erosion of the family and
attacks on Christianity. They were also connected with licentiousness
and extra-marital heterosexuality.41 These characterizations sidestepped
touchier subjects like police persecution and genocide during the Nazi
era. They also allowed Germans to avoid considering other contribu-
tions to Nazi evil such as capitalism (the favorite explanation given by
Soviet communism) or the inherent faults of German culture (pointed
to by many American and émigré historians) that might have created
problems for the new West German social order.
This deliberately cultivated public memory of the Nazi past suggested
that the way to rebuild a society destroyed by totalitarianism and war
was to restore the German family to its place of honor. Adenauer’s
government was deeply committed to Familienpolitik, or family politics

as it will be translated. It is a useful German term, since Politik can mean
both ‘politics’ and ‘policy.’ In this case, Familienpolitik implies both the
ways that politics became focused around language and concerns related
to family, and the specific government policies that were intended to
promote the reconstruction of healthy German families. Although most
associated with Adenauer’s CDU, family politics was widely embraced
by spokesmen and leaders from all parts of the political spectrum, who
argued that the traditional family, with its strict division of sex roles and
its limitations on sexuality, would enable the country to rebuild. Strong
families, moreover, would demonstrate West Germany’s moral superi-
ority to the rival German state being established in the East.42 With
such goals in mind, the country embarked on a ‘project of normaliza-
tion, promoted by politicians and clergy, academics and reporters, [that]
suffused the public and private realms of the 1950s.’43
The family became a topic of intense discussion, invested in the course
of the 1950s with numerous (and at times contradictory) meanings.
It was described as a site of romantic love, which would supposedly
tame the unruly sexual urges of both men and women; it was a bond of
companionship, but one in which women, despite receiving expanded
legal rights within marriage under the new 1957 family law, were clearly
expected to take a subordinate role in many respects.44 The emotional
bonds between husband and wife as well as parents and children would
allow families to become the building blocks for constructing a new,
democratic socio-political order. As a foundation for this new order, the
family was supposed to combine elements of tradition and modernity:
tradition, insofar as the women were expected to be mothers and house-
wives within the home while men were expected to be fathers and
breadwinners; and modernity, insofar as the home itself was reconceived
by marketers and advertisers as a site of consumption where modern
conveniences and consumer appliances could be integrated into the
routine of daily life.45
Just as in the United States, the restoration of the stable nuclear family
was perceived as playing a crucial role in the Cold-War fight against
Communism.46 Konrad Adenauer asked voters before the elections of
1949, ‘Will Germany be governed in a Christian or a socialist fashion?’
In questions like this, he and the rest of the CDU implicitly accused
East German communists of destroying the economy with centralized
planning and destroying the family by rejecting Christian values and
by forcing women into the labor force.47 The CDU also suggested that
the communists were continuing the social destruction of the Nazis.
Thanks to a widespread equation of Communism with Nazism under

the rubric ‘totalitarianism’ in the 1950s, many West Germans were able
to easily associate the social system of East Germany with the assault
on the family that had occurred under the Nazis. In this way, the CDU
was able to put forth their program as the best way of both leaving the
past behind and protecting themselves against the aggressions of the
East. Franz-Josef Wuermeling, Adenauer’s Family Minister from 1953 to
1962, used such descriptions of the family as the ‘power source of the
state’ and the ‘original cell of human life’ to suggest that the family
would be the foundation for a strong, morally sound Germany. In 1953,
he said, ‘Millions of spiritually healthy families with upright, well-raised
children provide just as much security against the child-rich peoples of
the East as any kind of military force can.’48 At the same time, economic
growth and prosperity would allegedly bring a return to ‘normalcy’ and
allow families to thrive, thereby leaving the ‘incomplete families’ of the
postwar period in the past.49
One clear result of the normalization promoted by family politics was
that the ‘sexual freedom and avid and open discussion of sexual issues’
common in the late 1940s gave way to an atmosphere of sexual con-
servatism in the first half of the 1950s, as the historian Dagmar Herzog
has persuasively shown.50 Efforts within the government to liberalize
abortion laws failed, as did the attempt to legalize the marketing of
birth control. Even establishments that sold birth control in vending
machines became the target of Christian activists in 1953. Increasingly
the popular media and marital advice books promoted ‘conservative
ideas about gender roles, familial relations, and sexual mores.’ Even
pedagogical and sex advice literature stressed restraint before marriage
and fidelity afterwards, with their discussions of sexual practices grow-
ing more and more sketchy. These shifts matched what was happening
in the family itself: parents were obsessed with controlling the sex
life of their children through restriction and prohibitions. They were
instructed to be vigilant against masturbation and premarital sexual
relations. Girls were to be taught the value of their virginity, while
boys were told to value women who saved themselves for their future
husbands.51
A clear sign of this shift towards sexual conservatism was a series
of court cases that validated the usage of the Nazi-era Paragraphs 175
and 175a for West Germany. There were a few notable exceptions: in
Hamburg in 1951, for example, the director of the regional district court
(Landgericht) set aside the prison terms that two homosexual defen-
dants had been given by a lower court, opting instead for the lightest
penalty possible in a case involving Paragraph 175, namely a fine of

three German marks. In this ‘Three Mark Decision’ (Drei-Mark-Urteil) as
it became known, the court suggested that any law demanding individu-
als to suppress their sex drive was asking too much of them.52 However,
this judicial protest against Paragraph 175 was ignored by the Federal
High Court (Bundesgerichtshof ), which rejected arguments made by the
appellants in another 1951 case that the law represented a ‘realization of
national socialistic goals or thoughts.’ The law, the court insisted, had
come into existence ‘in an orderly fashion.’ Moreover, the occupation
authorities had not felt it necessary to revise or repeal the law, which
the court interpreted as supporting the law’s constitutionality.
In later decisions in 1951, 1952, and 1954, the Federal High Court
went even further when they employed arguments made by Nazi-era
courts that it was not necessary to have actual corporal contact, or
even the intention of corporal contact, to fall under the purview of
the law. Consequently, simultaneous masturbation could be punished
under Paragraphs 175 and 175a, as could masturbation that occurred
while watching others carry out a homosexual act. The only real lim-
itation was that the sexual activity must have ‘a certain strength and
duration.’53 By extension, these decisions suggested that neither men
who had been convicted under the Nazi government nor the men con-
victed under the Nazi version of the law after 1945 should be considered
victims of Nazi ideology. By 1954, the previous legal confusion was
finally settled, with a judge on the Federal Constitutional Court remark-
ing that ‘case law nearly unanimously takes the view that Paragraph 175
is compatible with the Basic Law.’54
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Legally there was a tremendous amount of continuity between the Nazi

and Adenauer eras. Furthermore, the number of convictions under Para-
graphs 175 and 175a remained quite high in the 1950s and 1960s—not
as high as during the Nazi era, but considerably higher than in the
Weimar era. According to statistics put together by Rainer Hoffschildt,
the number increased from 2,158 in 1950 to 3,804 in 1959, falling back
gradually to 2,261 in 1966 and then dropping off quickly from there.55
Homosexual men living in the Adenauer era also pointed to specific
police tactics as bearing some resemblance to the Nazi era. In particu-
lar, many complained about the homosexual lists—or pink lists (Rosa
Listen), as they are commonly known today. Although these files gen-
erally dated back to the mid-nineteenth century and were used quite
extensively by nearly all large city police departments by the 1920s,

their usage by the Nazi Gestapo to carry out massive rounds of arrests
and interrogations made them a rather notorious feature of this era.
In the 1950s and 1960s, these files looked largely as they had before:
they included an extensive system of criminal files and rogue galleries,
all organized with index cards that listed basic personal information
with attached pictures and fingerprints.56 As in the Nazi era, accumu-
lating information on the activities of local homosexuals in these files
was one of the most important routine tasks of the police.
The homosexual files were brought to bear if a homosexual was ever
brought in front of the court. As one vice squad officer noted, it was
much harder for a man to insist he was simply using the bathroom at
the time he was arrested if the police could pull out a large amount of
evidence indicating his past participation in the gay scene.57 These files
also acted as a deterrent. The fear of ending up on such a list was great
enough to keep some men from even visiting gay bars. This fear was
understandable, given that the files were accessible to others within the
government, both city and federal, and especially to government work-
ers within the municipal youth welfare offices and the local clerk’s office
(Ordnungsamt), as well as the prosecutor’s office. This information could
be used for all sorts of purposes without the subject of the files having
any idea. This was especially dangerous for those in any kind of public
office or teaching in a school, but it could also have implications for ‘the
little man.’ One taxicab driver who was unfortunate enough to get in an
accident found his taxi cab medallion (Personenbeförderungsschein) taken
away from him once the responsible government agency discovered his
homosexuality.58 Furthermore, from an article in Berlin’s newspaper Der
Tag we learn that the police department by 1957 had taken to revoking
the driver’s license of anyone convicted of a sexual offense and who, it
was feared, might use their car for further transgressions.59
The pink lists could be quite large. West Berlin’s was reported to have
included some 3,500 names in 1954.60 Cologne’s, it is known, included
information on 4,679 people at the very end of 1955, with a large major-
ity of these (3,586, to be exact) being only ‘suspected’ homosexuals.61
It was in large part the injustice of being included in these files without
having necessarily been convicted of any crime that bothered so many
gay men. Outrage about this situation was expressed by one German
reader of Der Kreis in a letter to the editor. ‘Regarding the real situa-
tion with us in Germany,’ he began, ‘I would like all similarly inclined
men to know that there is barely any difference between the methods of
the Nazi police and those that are used today by the officers of Federal
Republic.’ Noting that many of the same officers who had served in the
vice squads of the Nazi era (who the letter writer calls the ‘Gestapo tor-
turers’) were back in office by 1950, he went on to protest that in many
cases ‘the mere suspicion is enough to be arrested’ for breaking Para-
graph 175. Taken down to the police station, ‘one is photographed and
fingerprinted, just like your average murderer.’ Even when the arrest did
not lead to a trial because of the lack of actual evidence of any wrong-
doing, ‘the photo and fingerprints remain in the police files forever, at
least until one’s death.’62
Another police tactic that attracted comparison with the Nazi past
was the use of agents provocateurs. In Munich, a man calling himself
‘Colon’ sent a copy of a court decision made by the local magistrate
court (Amtsgericht) to the gay magazine Freond. The decision dealt with
a middle-aged businessman (identified only as H.) who was accused by
a police officer of ‘pursuing vice’ (Unzucht treiben).63 On the night of
August 1, 1952, the officer was patrolling an unnamed park; from the
document we can tell it was clearly along the Isar river and also crowded
with strollers. Having been specifically assigned to the park to watch
over homosexual activities in the area around public restrooms, he was
dressed in plainclothes, indeed shorts as becomes clear later. Around ten
in the evening, he was approached by the defendant H., a local busi-
nessman. The two of them struck up a conversation and sat down on
a bench. Apparently feeling comfortable with the officer, H. made his
initial move, tickling the officer a little on the chest. The officer did not
act shocked or rebuff him in any way, and soon H. suggested that they
find a more secluded spot. The officer agreed, and the two of them went
off together. At this point H. became more confident, slipping his hand
in the front-left pants pocket of the officer and, with the other hand,
tickling one of the officer’s hands. After being groped some, the officer
demurred and found a park bench to sit down on. Apparently H. now
felt his catch was playing hard to get, for the businessman followed the
officer and continued to make sexual advances. The officer suggested at
this point that they move towards one of the local restrooms. H. took
this as a good sign, but it was clearly just an excuse to get the accused to
a more visible location where it would be safer to arrest him.
It is unclear how ‘Colon’ was related to the case, though we may
guess from the speech that follows the court decision that he was the
defendant’s lawyer: ‘How does the judge—indeed how does every decent
human being—respond to these methods of the Munich police (insofar
as the officers have the assignment of proceeding in this fashion) or to
those “safety constables” who be have this way on their own?’ Should
not the officer also stand trial as an instigator to crime under appropriate
law, Paragraph 48? ‘Without doubt,’ the lawyer concluded, ‘the police
officer in the case played the ignoble role of the agent provocateur, a
mainstay of the Nazi “injustice-state” (Unrechtsstaat).’64
Such comparisons ignore some real differences in how men suspected
of violating either Paragraph 175 or Paragraph 175a were handled by
the West German police in comparison with their Nazi predecessors.
To begin with, there was no Gestapo with its extensive powers to both
apprehend individuals considered dangerous to the German people and
also take them into ‘protective custody’ (Schutzhaft). The police reor-
ganizations and administrative confusion that had characterized most
postwar police departments did come to an end, and by the early
1950s their criminal detective bureaus had re-established the homo-
sexual squads (Homodezernaten) that had been a standard feature of
most departments since the end of the nineteenth century. However,
the work within these departments changed drastically, as local and
regional departments were stripped of the extensive powers that they
had enjoyed under the Nazis.
The most fundamental transformation for the enforcement of Para-
graphs 175 and 175a was the new West German constitution, with its
reassertion of the rule of law (Rechtsstaat) and human rights. Such legal
guarantees protected homosexuals from arbitrary arrests, warrantless
searches, indefinite detention without trial, and physical torture, not
to mention the innumerable horrors of the concentration camps. Police
raids of bars and parks frequented by homosexuals were not unheard of,
but they were less common. Without the aggressive interrogations that
had allowed the Nazi police to easily convert arrests into convictions
and long-term incarceration, such raids rarely did more than catch ado-
lescents who were too young to be hanging out in gay bars and provide
names to add to the files kept on homosexuals.
As prior to the Nazi years, the police found once again that Para-
graphs 175 and 175a were often in practice difficult to enforce, since
sexual acts between men left little evidence, most commonly occurred
in locations removed from the sight of witnesses, and generally involved
people who had some interest in hiding their involvement. More exten-
sive research on how the police actually enforced these laws will need to
be done once more archival material is available. The current evidence
suggests that the police depended a great deal on denunciations or other
reports from third parties. These resulted sometimes when gay men were
not careful enough about their behavior in public. Sometimes this was
a flagrant violation of public norms, such as when men were caught
having sex in a public bathroom or other public site.65 More often, the
breach was more innocuous: bachelors with numerous male visitors, for
example, could attract the attention of neighbors. Such denunciations
had been common under the Nazi period as well, but now there was
no longer an atmosphere of political terror to intensify the denuncia-
tions. These denunciations appear to have been less likely to occur for
the petty, self-serving reasons that had been common under the Third
Reich.
Beyond depending on denunciations, police officers kept their eyes
out for any ‘suspicious’ figures or happenings. Evidence of homosexual
activities could easily emerge as the result of investigations into other
crimes. A good example comes from Cologne, where criminal detec-
tives in May 1955 found the address of a ‘Manfred C.’ by searching
through the correspondence of a local pornographer. Manfred, who
had long been suspected of homosexual activity, was subjected to a
massive search of his house, which turned up ‘immoral written mate-
rials and books.’ Manfred lived with another man, although the police
had trouble getting information from Manfred about their relationship
(interestingly, attributed by the police to Manfred’s ‘arrogance,’ and not
to his completely reasonable reluctance to incriminate himself or his
friend). At first Manfred denied any sort of homosexual activity, but he
was eventually counseled by his lawyer to make a confession. This con-
fession brought about police investigations of 14 separate individuals.
Manfred himself was sentenced to prison for five months, though the
sentence—thanks in part to his confession—was eventually commuted
to probation.66
The case of Manfred C. suggests how the police and prosecutors could
build a case through material evidence that would eventually be used
to leverage a confession. Given such methods, it is no surprise that
lawyers in West Germany warned homosexual clients not to keep love
letters, gay magazines, or other pieces of evidence that might be used
to incriminate themselves or friends. Another case from Salzgitter-Bad
again demonstrates the ways that police could utilize correspondence
as evidence. In July 1951, the head of an apprentice shop in an iron
plant informed the police about a number of pornographic pictures he
had found in an apprentice’s bag. The pictures belonged to 17-year-old
Karl St., who said he had received them from an office worker named
Georg J. When Georg J.’s apartment was searched, police found a num-
ber of pornographic photos, including some that depicted men together
in sexual positions, which evidently had been taken in his house.
Indeed, closer inspection revealed that Georg himself was in several of
the pictures. A long investigation ensued in which the police tried to

find the other men in the photos. The police opened several letters that
arrived for Georg, one of which came from an orthodontist named Peter,
who announced that he would be visiting Georg later that month. From
the content of the letter, the police could tell that Peter ‘also belonged
to homosexual circles and desired during his visit with J. to have homo-
sexual contact [unzüchtigen Verkehr]. Furthermore he promised to bring
a suitcase full of “surprises” with him. These were supposed to consist of
improper photos, drawings, and a cream to enlarge one’s member.’ The
police occupied Georg’s apartment and waited for Peter’s arrival. When
he never showed up, the police surmised that Peter has somehow gotten
wind of the trouble.67
In the course of an investigation, police interrogations obviously took
place, but in contrast to Nazi times the police more commonly used
trickery and other kinds of psychological tactics to acquire informa-
tion. The young and naïve were the most vulnerable targets for these
kinds of tactics. After being accused of homosexual activity by a jeal-
ous boyfriend, Konrad L. was taken down to the police station where
the vice squad had their offices. At first, Konrad denied everything. But
when a detective gave him a document and said, ‘Just sign here and
you can go home,’ he innocently signed a confession. ‘I fell for a com-
pletely stupid trick that you would play on countryfolk (Bauerntrick),’ he
remembered with some embarrassment. ‘Like a complete idiot, I signed
it, and they arrested me. Then they had a reason. I was so naïve and
dumb then. Man was I ever.’68 Homosexuals who happened to come
into the hands of the police could sometimes be persuaded to give up
the names of casual contacts. Most frequently this happened when the
informant was young or otherwise had only a tentative relationship to
the gay scene.
In summary, conditions of police enforcement had changed greatly.
So too had conditions of court sentencing, as the historian Jennifer
Evans has demonstrated. Potentially, someone who broke Paragraph 175
could be sent to prison (Gefängnis); however, in contrast to the practice
under the Nazis, judges generally handed down short prison sentences,
ranging from several days to a few months, which according to Para-
graph 27b of the Criminal Law Code could be routinely commuted
into a fine. Indeed, in many cases arrested men without prior con-
victions would be handled through a system of summary punishment
(Strafbefehl), according to which they would be released from the police
and later receive a statement of the criminal charge and a fine amount,
which the defendant could choose to pay to avoid a court case and its
potential costs. The exact range of the fines is currently unknown, but
evidence from the Tiergarten magistrate court suggests that they gener-
ally ran between ten and several hundred marks. If the accused wanted
to contest the charges, a court date would be set; however, in most cases,
the accused declined representation to avoid excessive legal costs.69
Only in more serious cases that involved a previous record or perhaps
multiple indictments was a jail term required; in these instances, legal
counsel was obviously a more usual occurrence.
Paragraph 175a was a more serious charge since it involved cases in
which money or positions of power were used to attain sexual favors.
Not only could those convicted of breaking this law potentially be
imprisoned in a hard-labor penitentiary (Zuchthaus) for up to ten years,
but the mildest sentence one could receive was a three-month term in
a jail (Gefängnis), which was too long to be commuted to a fine. These
cases always went to court, and since youths were frequently involved
in one way or another, defendants could potentially face an extremely
hostile court room. Youthful defendants, namely those between the ages
of 14 and 18 (and after the 1953 Youth Court Law was passed, poten-
tially also those between 18 and 21 who showed signs of immaturity),
were handled by a separate court system regulated by their own legal
code and could be sent to juvenile detention facilities.
Policing practices and sentencing habits of the courts may have been
more lenient in the 1950s, but for a good number of homosexuals at
the time it meant little when compared to the injustices of still being
held accountable to a National Socialist law. For an emerging generation
of homophile activists of the early 1950s, the survival of the Nazi-era
version of Paragraph 175 was a sign that, underneath the trappings
of democracy, Germany had not in fact changed that much. As one
homophile organization outside of Bremen asserted, ‘the century-old
spirit of blind obedience and standing-at-attention (Strammstehergeist),
as well as the dictatorship of uniforms and bureaucratic stamp-wielders
has not yet come to an end.’70 Such comparisons expressed outrage
with the prospect of having one’s private life turned inside out through
police intervention. They also referred to the very real devastation that
could be caused by having one’s life thrown into turmoil by a police
investigation.
This devastation is clear from a massive wave of arrests that came
in Frankfurt in the summer and fall of 1950. This series of arrests is
frequently remembered by gay men who lived through the time as a
major turning point, marking the moment when the state began to
more seriously enforce Paragraph 175. The impetus for the raids came
with the arrest of 17-year-old Otto Blankenstein. He had already been

picked up by the police once for vagrancy, but by the time of his latest
arrest it had become clear that he was making his living at least partially
through prostitution. He admitted to the police that he had had sexual
contact over 200 times with perhaps 70 different men and agreed to help
Frankfurt prosecutors develop legal cases against them. Blankenstein,
as it turned out, had a ‘better-than-average memory’ that enabled him
to make ‘precise statements’ and even drawings. One scholar, Dieter
Schiefelbien, who has done the most detailed work on this case, notes
that Blankenstein avoided implicating some of his wealthiest clients,
with whom he no doubt hoped to maintain a financial relationship after
his release; still, his help, along with the help of other prostitutes who
were taken into custody based on Blankenstein’s memory, led to the
police investigation (Ermittlungsverfahren) of nearly 280 individuals, of
which 100 were arrested and 75 indicted (and mostly convicted) before
the year was over.71
For many, merely an arrest had dire consequences, with as many as
seven suicides resulting from the wave of arrests. Two men moved out
of the country to escape prosecution, while many others lost their jobs
and livelihoods because of the police actions.72 In October 1950, one
contributor to Der Kreis noted that the investigations involved ‘house
searches, confiscations of magazines, letters, etc.’ He also insisted that
representatives from Bonn had been sent to Frankfurt to gather evidence
that the CDU might use to build a case for the continued enforcement
of Paragraph 175; he even pointed out that this political motive was the
main reason for the series of arrests.73
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
For many gay men, the continued existence of Paragraphs 175 and 175a
were just part of a larger continuity that they saw around them. Homo-
sexuals were very aware that many of prejudices of the 1950s were
remarkably similar to those mobilized by the Nazi state. True, explicit
references to racial-biological concepts like the Volkskörper (national
body) were now rare; however, some specific language that had once
been tied to the conceptual framework of the Volkskörper persisted,
especially the descriptions of homosexuality as an epidemic and a
‘cancer.’ Such language was a clear sign that the pathologization of
homosexuality that had begun in the nineteenth century and was then
institutionalized in the practices of the Nazi state did not disappear after
1945.74 This conceptualization of homosexuality was just as common in
the United States and Britain as it was in Germany by the 1940s, and
so after the war it easily sloughed off any connections it had to the
racial-hygienic language of Nazism to emerge as influential as ever.
The equation of homosexuality and illness was a widely held prejudice
in West Germany.75 It was also a conception that was actively promoted
by doctors and scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the failure
of experiments combining castration and testosterone injections during
the 1940s, numerous doctors still recommended this ‘deplorable cus-
tom’ (Unsitte), observed the psychiatrist and homosexual activist Hans
Giese in 1955.76 More up-to-date doctors experimented with the new
practice of estrogen treatment, which had been demonstrated to ham-
per sexual urges among men. In conjunction with counseling, estrogen
treatment could in some cases help men to lead a ‘normal’ life (marriage,
children, etc.), at least when the patient fully desired it.
Homosexual men very often came to the conclusion that they were
ill in part because medical literature and scientific investigation were
some of the few sources of information that were widely available in
the mid-twentieth century. Encountering the widespread notion that
homosexuality was an illness, gay men would often go searching for
answers in medical literature, hoping that it would help them sort
through their internal conflicts. As one man put it, remembering the
tremendous amount of medical treatises he read in his late teens,
‘I pretty much accepted the ideas in these works, since they were my
only qualified conversation partners, so to speak.’77
The metaphor of illness could in fact embrace very different ideas
about the nature of homosexuality. One school of psychology still pur-
sued evidence that homosexuality might be an inborn trait. Although
the theory had been promoted by early homosexual activists such as
Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, by the 1930s its most
influential proponents in Germany were scientists with connections to
the racial hygiene movement who received considerable government
funding from the Nazi government. Prominent researchers such as Theo
Lang, Klaus Jensch, Otmar Freiherr von Versheuer, and Hans Habel
searched for genetic links to homosexuality, while scientists includ-
ing Julius Deussen and Rudolf Lemke pursued endocrinal research into
possible hormonal causes.
Hormonal research failed to diagnose homosexuality, and the results
of hormonal treatment were mixed at best. As these results became
widely known after 1945, this line of scientific inquiry would decline
(until the 1970s, when it would resurface again, this time focusing on
prenatal hormone levels).78 Hormonal treatment was not abandoned
entirely, but after World War II it was normally used in conjunction

with a form of psychotherapy. Those scientists who maintained an
interest in hormonal explanations, such as Walter Bräutigam, generally
tried to integrate them with ‘gender identification’ notions rooted in
psychoanalysis.79
Genetic research, on the other hand, would continue to be influential
in Adenauer Germany. Vershuer, despite having played a prominent role
in one of the Nazi genetic institutes, successfully weathered the denazifi-
cation process and eventually in 1951 was chosen to head up the newly
founded Institute for Human Genetics at the University of Münster. For
the remainder of his career, he continued to pursue his interest in the
genetic basis for sexuality, as suggested by the paper that he gave at Hans
Giese’s sexological conference in 1950. He and his close associates con-
tinued to publish research on the genetic basis of homosexuality using
methods developed in the 1930s, namely with groups of homosexual
twins.80 Similar methods were used by Franz Kallmann, a Jewish stu-
dent who nevertheless studied with the Nazi racial hygienist Ernst Rüdin
before fleeing the country in 1935. Immigrating to the United States,
he went to work at Columbia University’s Psychiatric Institute, where in
the years after World War II he put together an extensive study of homo-
sexual twins that seemed to suggest that genetics played a large role in
sexual orientation. Kallmann never explicitly called for the sterilization
of homosexuals, as he had for schizophrenics in Germany; however, he
did make remarks in 1959 that ‘eugenic considerations’ should be kept
in mind when dealing with homosexuality, which causes one to suspect
that he was quietly in favor of such methods.81
Kallmann’s work in genetics gave substantial support to the claims
of the biological school of psychology in West Germany and helped
to maintain its prominence after 1945. Increasingly, though, argu-
ments about the genetic origins of homosexuality were overshadowed
in Adenauer Germany by theories emerging from psychiatry—most
notably from phenomenological psychotherapists. By far the most
widely respected psychiatrist in the 1950s was Hans Bürger-Prinz, a
previous Nazi party member who already had earned some recogni-
tion in the 1930s as director of the University of Hamburg’s psychi-
atric clinic. At the end of the 1930s, he authored several articles on
homosexuality that fit in very well with the Nazi position that most
homosexual men had been seduced into this lifestyle at some early
age by another homosexual.82 Bürger-Prinz worked in the tradition of
the early-twentieth-century phenomenological psychiatrist Victor von
Gebsattel. Like this forerunner, Bürger-Prinz argued that homosexuality
was a failure of self-realization rooted in an impulse towards addic-

tive, self-destructive behavior. Above all, homosexuality was supposedly
marked by a desire to stay ‘in one own’s bodily sphere without the risk
(Einsatz) and self-discipline that pursuing a heterosexual relationship
always demands from a man.’ Homosexuals, he believed, usually could
trace their sexual preference back to an early sexual encounter with a
man. Various factors in their wider milieu—including the ‘family situa-
tion, personal encounters, the mental-spiritual atmosphere of the time
and place [in which he lived]’—might inspire them to make this first
sexual encounter into the basis for an entire ‘style of life.’83
Like Vershuer, Hans Bürger-Prinz also made it through the denazifica-
tion process unscathed, keeping his position as head of the University
of Hamburg’s Psychiatric Clinic and Institute. He continued to publish
essays on homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s; more importantly,
though, his writings were extraordinarily influential on other postwar
intellectuals. They would leave a mark on Medard Boss, a Swiss psychi-
atrist whose work reflected the postwar enthusiasm for existentialism
in the 1950s. Boss described sexual perversions as a covering up of the
‘fullness of the loving mode of existence’ by the ‘mode of being as
an isolated, autocratic, petty and fear-laden individual.’ Bürger-Prinz’s
ideas also blended very easily with the work of the American social psy-
chologist Abram Kardiner, who in the early 1950s laid the groundwork
for the ‘adaptational’ theory of homosexuality.84 According to Kardiner,
rapid transformation in social norms could create a wide-scale ‘flight
from masculinity,’ which was often associated with irresponsibility and
immaturity.85 Incidents of homosexuality would supposedly increase
rapidly in such an era.
In contrast to phenomenological psychiatry, Freudian-inspired psy-
choanalysis remained weak in West Germany for some time. It is not
true, as it is often assumed, that the Nazis had successfully suppressed
psychoanalysis in Germany.86 However, as many of psychoanalysis’s
supporters were Jewish, and as the Nazis were deeply hostile to what
they considered to be their un-German and sex-obsessed ideas, many
of the most famous practitioners of this type of psychotherapy were
driven into exile in the 1930s. After World War II, some of these exiles
did return. The individual most known for bringing new life to West
Germany’s psychoanalytic tradition was Alexander Mitscherlich, who
came back from Switzerland to train a whole new generation of ther-
apists at the University of Heidelberg and later at the Sigmund Freud
Institute in Frankfurt.87 By this time, psychoanalysis had grown to
include a number of different perspectives, thanks to the contributions
of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Edmund Bergler, Edward

Glover, and others. Nearly all of them saw homosexuality as rooted
either in an overdeveloped infantile sexual drive—usually oral, leading
through the mechanism of projection to a fear of being devoured by
women and the vagina—or in complications arising out of the Oedipus
complex, which can produce fear of a castrating mother or of a punish-
ing father.88 Either way, these psychoanalysts described homosexuality
as a mental illness that was ‘incompatible with a reasonably happy life,’
in the words of one of the foremost American authorities on the subject,
Irving Bieber.89
Freudian psychoanalysis, phenomenological psychiatry, and bio-
logical psychology were very different from one another in their
theories and methods. However, in the mid-twentieth century a
degree of consensus was worked out between them with the help
of the commonly made distinction between ‘true homosexuals’ and
‘pseudohomosexuals.’ The former supposedly possessed sexual orien-
tations that were deeply ingrained, either because their sexuality was
mapped out in very early childhood or because their homosexuality
was biologically determined before birth. Pseudohomosexuals, on the
other hand, developed homosexual behavior much later in life, through
some combination of social interactions and specific experiences. Most
biological psychologists were prepared to accept Freudian or phe-
nomenological arguments when it came to explaining pseudohomo-
sexuality. There were even some Freudians who accepted that the
homosexuality of a small minority of men could be explained by genetic
factors.90
Along with this growing consensus came an optimism that most
homosexuals could be helped by psychotherapy. Counselors from both
the phenomenological and the psychoanalytic school firmly believed
that their treatment methods worked, especially in the case of pseu-
dohomosexuality, but also in cases where they had the co-operation
of the patient. Machiel Zeegers wrote in 1961, ‘A treatment is possi-
ble. That is the first and most important thing that must be said on
the subject . . . The only possible treatment is psychiatric . . . The young
homosexual who wants treatment and who can be helped to get over
his fears and neurotic repressions can thereby have his heterosexual
component activated.’91 Given the individual nature of any given psy-
chic constitution and the complexities of psychoanalysis, a cure was
never guaranteed. Nevertheless, Helmet Thomä—one of Mitscherlich’s
students at Heidelberg and later a professor at the University of Ulm—
believed that ‘around a fourth of all homosexuals who were treated
psychoanalytically could count on being healed.’92 The specific meth-

ods would differ based on the particular school as well as the individual
patient. In all instances large amounts of counseling would be involved,
which would aim at establishing both the ‘root problem’ behind the
homosexual desire and the ‘ultimate meaning’ of homosexuality for the
patient.93
Certainly not all gay men felt that they were sick or that they wanted
to be healed. Indeed, most men who sought out psychiatric or medi-
cal treatment showed at least some ambivalence. Franz B., for example,
was convinced for a long time that his attraction to men was some sort
of illness. In the years after he returned from his stay as a prisoner of
war in France, Franz visited a series of doctors with the hope that he
could be healed. He had a girlfriend at the time, so he told his doctors
that he was having some problem becoming sexually aroused. ‘I just
don’t feel any real desire,’ Franz said, ‘and I always have this feeling
that I might be homosexual.’ ‘Nonsense,’ the doctor replied, ‘usually in
such cases you are just worn out.’ The doctor gave him some stimulants
(Verstärkungsmittel), which did help him to become sexually aroused, but
did not make the sexual act feel natural to him.94 Even though Franz
visited many doctors, there was also some part of him that clung to
his feelings and refused to accept that they could change. Years later,
he described his ambivalence as a split between his inner feeling and
external actions: ‘On the inside, I knew from the beginning that noth-
ing at all could be changed—it just is and will remain that way. On the
outside, though, I acted as if I could change it, and I even tried to fool
myself into believing it.’95
Other men could be even more assertive. Walter Bräutigam noted
that a not insignificant number of gay men who came to therapists
were unwilling even to discuss their homosexuality.96 Hans Giese found
that, of the 393 gay men that he surveyed for his research, 250 stated
that they would not seek psychotherapeutic treatment even if they
were sure that it could lead to a ‘normalization of their sexual drives.’
Of this group, most justified this rejection with their conviction that
they were not sick, that their desires were completely normal, and that
they were satisfied with their current life.97 One patient told his thera-
pist, ‘My homophile disposition is such an important piece of my being,
not unlike someone else’s phlegmatic or choleric temperament . . . I don’t
feel more abnormal than a young man before he is married or a married
woman who works when she has the chance. Must everyone be normal-
ized to accept normal sexual satisfaction?’98 Giese found that other men
gave justifications that suggested some basic distrust of psychiatrists and
medical treatment. Several said they were not convinced that any treat-
ment could remove their desire for men, or they were worried it might
only produce more difficulties and conflicts than it would solve.99
Still, many did seek out psychiatric counseling—if not to find a cure
for their ‘illness,’ then at least to discover why they felt the way they
did. As in the early twentieth century, some gay men still preferred the
explanations of the biological school of psychology, since the thought
that homosexuality might be inborn could be comforting. This expla-
nation might have accorded with the experience of those men who
knew only that they had felt attracted to men since their ‘earliest child-
hood’ or ‘as long as I can remember.’100 However, if the letters published
in the homosexual magazines of the early 1950s are any indication, a
majority of gay men in this period were drawn towards psychoanalytic,
phenomenological, and social-psychological explanations. One contrib-
utor to Der Weg argued that Hirschfeld’s theory of the ‘born Uranian’
was old-fashioned, having been discredited by much recent biologi-
cal and psychological work. ‘Psychic activity [Das Seelische] has been
reconceived as a more or less independent variable that is not simply
an “appendix” of the anatomical-physiological circumstances.’101 Many
gay men were attracted to the notion that sexuality was both flexible
and mutable. The notion that all people had a ‘bisexual’ potential, or, in
Freudian language, were born ‘polymorphously perverse’ before psycho-
logical development set in, would have emphasized what all men had
in common.102 Kinsey’s studies too might be cited as evidence that large
groups of men have a bisexual potential.
Psychoanalysis held out the promise of ‘discovering’ the secret of
one’s sexuality through dream analysis or other such work—a qual-
ity that made it attractive, we might note, to many for the next few
decades.103 For homosexual men, this ‘discovery’ would have meant pro-
ducing some conceptualization of the origin of one’s difference from
the norm, one’s ‘otherness’ from society as a whole; this constructed
understanding could lead to some sense of satisfaction even if it meant
accepting that you were ‘sick.’ Psychiatrists themselves insisted that
this understanding could only be attained through regular psychother-
apeutic sessions, which, we might note, offered men opportunities for
intimate conversations and developing narratives about one’s self and
past that could have been extremely pleasurable. In the words of one
man who had regular therapeutic sessions with Hans Giese, ‘I soon
developed a good relationship with him through my blunt honesty
and told him my entire adventurous life, which very much interested
him. He helped me greatly to come to myself.’104 And yet, there were
others who disregarded the instruction to seek counseling and instead

looked for insights in books and articles on psychoanalysis, which were
then applied to their own life. In this way they would have come to
some sense of empowerment at having achieved self-understanding on
their own.105
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The widespread notion that homosexuality was a type of illness was not
the only prejudice of the 1950s and 1960s that connected West Germany
with its Nazi past. Also important were the memories of the so-called
‘Röhm Putsch’ of the Nazi era, which continued to color Germans’ per-
ceptions of homosexuality by linking it with criminality, sexual excess,
and political betrayal. Ernst Röhm, an early leader of the Nazi party who
was outed by the Leftist press in the early 1930s, had been executed
by the Nazis in the summer of 1934 during an operation against the
Nazi stormtroopers aimed at eliminating them as a potentially danger-
ous power base in the country. At the time, Röhm had been accused of
being a ‘degenerate’ who was plotting against Hitler.106 Decades later,
Röhm was still being used to support harmful stereotypes about gay
men, especially the belief that they were untrustworthy and tended
to become engaged in conspiratorial groups. Even gay men sometimes
found themselves troubled by the alleged offenses and eventual demise
of this Nazi figure. In a period in which homosexuality was rarely spo-
ken of in public, occasional mentions of this scandal on the radio or in
other media could serve as one of the few moments in which young gay
men came across any sort of public recognition, albeit a distorted one,
of their feelings.107
Men who had come of age under the Nazis often had to deal with
a self-perception tainted by the publicity that surrounded the figure of
Röhm produced by both sides of the political spectrum.108 Albrecht M.
had been 13 in 1931 when he came across some brochures published
by the SPD about the moral depravity of Ernst Röhm. When he tried
to read them, his sister stopped him. ‘ “Why?” I asked. And then she
explained to me there were men who love other men, but that this was
very rare. Röhm, however, belonged to them. Naturally, this hit me like a
lightning bolt, for I thought to myself, “You love in this way.” ’ Albrecht
had had only a few sexual experiences at this point in his life—the kind
of sexual play common among adolescent boys—but he seemed to sense
already that he was perhaps different from other boys. Later, he stole the
brochure and tried to learn something about his ‘condition’ from it, as
well as from encyclopedias. One can imagine what kind of self-image

this material must have produced in this young adolescent. It led him
to feel very isolated and alone: ‘I never thought that I would find any
kind of contact with anybody.’109
For gay men, collective memories of the ‘Röhm Putsch’ often blurred
with more personal memories of raids followed by missing friends and
neighbors. These events were recalled to serve as a reminder of the fate
that could await homosexuals. Werner ‘Therese’ Landers—a man who
would eventually become one of the more notable personalities in the
Hamburg gay scene—heard such warnings from his mother in the late
1940s. Learning about her son’s homosexuality from a neighbor, she
pointed out that several homosexuals she had known had disappeared
into the concentration camps.110 That homosexuals had been locked up
in such camps under the Nazis only emphasized their criminal status.
‘Germans in general,’ wrote one author in the gay press, ‘tend to see
the former inmates of concentration camps as morally and ethically
inferior . . . and it is obvious that one cannot have any sympathy for
criminals!’111
Given that the legal status of Paragraph 175 had not changed after
World War II, it is not really surprising that no collective effort was
made to evaluate the fate of gay men under the Nazis. In the 1950s
and 1960s, they were still portrayed as criminals in the police jour-
nals, criminological literature, and more widely read media outlets.
The sensational tabloids such as the Springer Press’s Bild-Zeitung espe-
cially played up the association between homosexuality and other kinds
of illegal activity. Werner Becker wrote in 1949, ‘Characteristic is the
behavior of the daily press. Only a few newspapers practice restraint,
entirely too few speak up for the homosexuals. The majority limit them-
selves to discussing endlessly all the intricate details of sensational court
cases.’112 The newspapers told dark stories of blackmail and murder, sin-
ister excursions through the criminal milieu of the ‘Bahnhof Boys’ (as
male prostitutes were sometimes called), and shocking incidents of child
abuse by teachers, youth group leaders, and other trusted figures.113
These stories helped to justify the occasional reports of raids on gay bars
or other locations within the scene. But it was not only in the tabloids
that one could find such stories. One reader of Der Kreis complained,
‘The Social-Democratic press, in other words the Leftist press, deprecates
us just as mercilessly as the others.’114
Few voices in the 1950s confronted the stereotype of the homosexual
as criminal, and only one offered an alternate account of the memories
of the Nazi period that emphasized homosexuals’ victimization rather
than their culpability. Leo Clasen—who had spent the last years of the
war in the Sachsenhausen camp—published a series of articles under a
pseudonym (L. D. Classen von Neudegg) in 1954 and early 1955 in the
gay magazine Humanitas, which depicted the conditions that he had
seen in the Sachsenhausen camp. He recalled the abuse and torture that
gay men had to endure and the fatal experiments that were performed
on Jewish and homosexual inmates.115 Above all, though, he pleaded
for gay men not to forget the fate of homosexuals under Nazis like the
rest of the country had.116
Clasen was unusual, though, in finding a public forum in which to
tell his story. Most men were lucky if they even found gay friends or
lovers to listen to their stories. Some took advantage of the homosexual
organizations that began to resurface in the early 1950s, meeting often
in some of the gay bars in the larger cities. Jakob Kron, for example, was
at the Bronzekeller in Hamburg one evening when a number of men
who had known each other back in the Weimar era happened to be there
but had not seen each other in decades. Listening silently but intently
to their stories, Kron learned that many of them had worn the pink
triangle in one of the Nazi concentration camps. One recalled his days at
the Emsland-Moor camp near the German border with the Netherlands,
where he had seen friends collapse from exhaustion and others who
bled to death after their scrotums were ‘shot off.’117 Friends who had
been forced to give up contact with each other by Nazi persecution and
the confusion of wartime felt the need to catch up in order to tie up
unfinished stories and begin new ones. Men who did not know each
other had the opportunity to compare their own experiences of what
they had seen, felt, and, if they were fortunate, avoided.
Such events, however, appear to have been very rare in the 25 years
after the war. Interviews done with gay men who survived the con-
centration camps indicate that the lack of opportunities to tell stories
about their experiences largely foiled any desire they may have had to
do so. In their families, most men were confronted with a refusal to men-
tion their incarceration in conversation. In some cases, parents probably
thought they were doing their sons a favor by not bringing up a painful
subject. And, in fact, many men were just as happy to leave their expe-
riences behind them.118 As Pierre Seel, a Frenchman from Strasbourg
who had been sent to the camp Schirmeck-Vorbrüch in 1941, recalled,
‘Nightmares haunted me day and night [after 1945]; I practiced silence.
I wanted to forget all the details and all the terrors of those four years
that I had lived through. I was totally exhausted by my multiple encoun-
ters with death, and I painfully realized how powerless I had been in
regard to the deaths of other people.’119 For years, his family lived in an
implicit understanding: he would not talk about his time in the concen-
tration camps, and they would not ask any questions. Only in 1981 did
his ailing mother break the ‘pact of silence’ by coaxing him into opening
up. He spoke only reluctantly but was ultimately glad he did so, since
their conversation provided the basis for a permanent intimacy between
them afterwards.120
Very few gay men who spent time in concentration camps have
related their experiences under the Nazis; even fewer are alive today
to tell their stories now that there is both a growing interest in these
accounts and greater opportunities to make these accounts public.
Therefore, we can never really know how often these gay men found
confidants like Pierre Seel’s mother who could help them unburden
themselves. It is possible that most went through their lives never hav-
ing told a soul. What is certain is that nearly all of them took the cue
given by the people around them and did not attempt to tell their sto-
ries in a more public setting—not that they had much choice. Outside
the gay publications of the early 1950s, the wider media never discussed
such topics. And gay men themselves had a good reason to keep quiet.
After all, they did not want to attract attention to the fact that they had
been punished for breaking Paragraph 175. Heinz Dörmer, who spent
nearly five years in the Neuengamme camp outside of Hamburg, met fel-
low camp inmate Horst Stein while working at the theater in Flensburg.
Stein asked him not to mention their former acquaintanceship in public,
since this could only lead to trouble for both of them. Dörmer agreed:
‘It wasn’t beneficial and could have consequences. Therefore we kept
our silence.’121
For similar reasons, very few of these men dared to register with the
authorities to receive compensation payments (Wiedergutmachung) for
their suffering. Most homosexual men who tried discovered that they
were ineligible according to the series of laws enacted first by the indi-
vidual federal states (Ländergesetze) beginning in 1946 and eventually
taken over by the West German government with the Treaty of Final
Settlement (Überleitungsvertrag) of May 26, 1952. According to the lat-
ter, only those who had suffered persecution because of their race, faith,
world view, or political beliefs were to receive compensation. Homosex-
ual men, in contrast, were viewed as simple criminals whose convictions
and punishment had been just. The same attitude was used in the
Federal Law for the Compensation of Victims of National Socialist Per-
secution (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz) of 1956. Only the General Law
Concerning the Results of War (Allgemeine Kriegsfolgengesetz) passed at
the end of 1957 took a wider view. According to this later legislation,
homosexuals (in addition to minor offenders and asocials) could finally
apply for federal compensation. However, claims were supposed to be
made by the end of 1958 (with a leniency period extended to the last
day of 1959). According to the Federal Finance Ministry, only 14 men
applied within this period.122
Even Leftist organizations such as the Union of the Persecuted of the
Nazi Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Nazi-Regimes) appear to have
been uninterested in homosexual men. Andreas K. recalls trying to reg-
ister with this organization at their Hamburg office in the late 1940s.
‘You should have seen how they acted,’ Andreas huffed. ‘They raised
their hands and cried, “You bunch of dirty pigs!” You see, gay men
were written off. They did not count as any of the persecuted.’123 Heinz
Dörmer knew that he would have trouble being recognized as a for-
mer homosexual inmate, so he applied with the Committee of Former
Inmates (Komitee der ehemalingen Häftlinge) in Hamburg as a ‘career crim-
inal’ (Berufsverbrecher). He claimed that he had been arrested because of
his leadership role in the Pfadfinder youth group, which had been ille-
gal under the Nazis. Yet even in this case, his registration was denied
because the communists who took charge of the committee refused to
recognize this category of inmate as well. ‘The political prisoners in
many instances knew me personally or from the theater performance
[that I had been involved in], but they still did not accept me. This was
the fault of the people in the central office who were not so generous or
agreeable. They wanted to keep the circle of recognized victims as small
as possible.’124
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The experiences of the Nazi and postwar periods, then, tended to

reinforce very old associations between criminality and homosexuality
at the same time that the association between male homosexuality
and illness was absorbed uncritically into the West German culture
of the Adenauer era. Nonetheless, changes were taking place, espe-
cially in regard to the link between homosexuality and effeminacy.
Much historical work suggests that this connection dates back to the
end of the seventeenth century, though it perhaps did not become a
dominant feature of the stereotype of the male homosexual until the
nineteenth century, when it was reproduced in both popular and scien-
tific discourse.125 Through the 1920s, the effeminate Tunte remained by
far the dominant image of same-sex desire, despite the challenges made
by Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedländer, Hans Blüher, and other ‘masculin-

ist’ homosexuals.126 However, during the 1930s and 1940s, its hold over
the culture of Western Europe and the United States showed some signs
of weakening. The scientific work on sexuality that the wealthier and
more educated classes were exposed to made it easier to distinguish
‘anatomical’ sex from how men and women behaved. Furthermore,
psychoanalytic theory and anthropological research generated models
for understanding the ways that sexuality and sex roles are constructed
through experience and culture.127 The most important landmark in this
transition, though, was the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, which indicated that it was not only a small
minority of men who were participating in same-sex contacts, but also
a considerable segment of the otherwise ‘normal’ population.128
This reconceptualization of gender and sexuality taking place on an
international scale left its mark on Germany during the 1930s and
1940s. Sadly, the assumption that homosexuality was a potential in
almost all men was one of the impulses that drove the obsessive hunt
and vicious methods of the Nazi party. After some initial debate, the
Nazi SS committed itself in 1937 to the notion that most homosex-
uals had acquired their sexual disposition through experiences, most
frequently through seduction.129 In the words of one Nazi legal student,
a homosexual could easily become ‘the germ cell from which same-sex
acts would spread further into the society.’130 By this logic, all men were
potentially in danger of being corrupted, not simply those who dis-
played physical or mental signs of effeminacy. By the end of the 1940s,
the metaphor of illness was clearly in the process of displacing gender
deviation as the dominant representation of same-sex desire.131
This does not mean that the stereotype of the effeminate homosexual
vanished. A study by the sexologist Gunter Schmidt in the 1960s found
that West Germans were just as likely to associate male homosexuality
with traditionally feminine traits—weakness, sentimentality, gentleness,
and lack of restraint, for example—as with notions of psychological
illness. Such prejudices found confirmation in many popular films of
the era. The Hollywood film Laura, released in West Germany in 1947,
introduced the effeminate sophisticate Waldo Lydecker, an art critic
and newspaper columnist whose style and personal mannerisms clearly
define him as homosexual for the audience (thereby setting up the plot-
twist that comes at the end).132 Lydecker was played by the actor Clifton
Webb, whose Academy Award winning performance in Laura led him
to be cast in a similar role in The Dark Corner (released in 1954 as Feind
im Dunkel).133 In both, hints of effeminacy and sexual perversion were
revealed by the plot to be indications of criminality.134 The same can be

said of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. This 1951 film, released
the following year in West Germany as Verschwörung im Nordexpress,
introduces the ‘malignantly fey’ Charles Bruno, whose ‘coldness, his
perverse imagination and an edge of elitist superiority’ make him almost
the archetype of the 1950s Hollywood homosexual.135
Gay viewers of these films may have discovered more in them,
though, than simply a condemnation of their desires for men. Images
and texts circulating in popular culture tend to contain an array of
voices, perspectives, pleasures, and contradictions that enable these rep-
resentations to be interpreted in different ways.136 Simply including a
compelling image of a homosexual could be a problem for the hetero-
sexist norms of the prevailing society. As Corber has argued about Laura,
this film returned ‘the gay male body to national visibility,’ thereby
counteracting ‘the project undertaken by the national-security state to
expel gay men from the realm of representation.’137 Webb’s performance
as Lydecker was admired by all; in fact, Webb’s ‘willingness to make a
spectacle of his homosexuality contributed to the transgressive form of
visual pleasure spectators expected from film noir.’138 Yes, Lydecker was
a villain, but compelling villains can offer seductive points of identifica-
tion for any audience. As Theresa Webb and Nick Browne write, ‘evil has
its attractions. The villain’s cunning, norm-transgressing, and power-
ful, ego-gratifying cruelty’ can be a ‘compelling option.’139 The excessive
style of film noir—the visual violence, the spectacular performances, the
multiple flashbacks, the use of lighting and camera angles—might in
fact have encouraged such identification: these stylistic elements frag-
ment the flow of the film’s narrative, thereby giving viewers a chance
to relax their identification with the main character and to experi-
ment with other points of view.140 In both Laura and Strangers on a
Train, gay viewers might have relished the opportunity to adopt a non-
heterosexual perspective within the film, and to thereby feel as if their
own desires were acknowledged by it, even if this perspective came
clothed in heterosexist trappings.
These two films reveal the ways that the image of the effeminate
homosexual could continue to be compelling in the post-World War
II era, both as a symbol of moral corruption and as an available per-
sona that could be assumed and lived out in one’s life. Yet, Hollywood
was also increasingly producing films that suggested that even clearly
masculine men could potentially have homoerotic feelings and partici-
pate in homosexual relationships. Rebel without a Cause, released in West
Germany in 1955 as . . . denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun, may broach
the subject of homosexuality first with the character of mildly effem-

inate Plato, but in the course of the story the film calls into question
the equation of homoeroticism and effeminacy by involving Plato in
an increasingly intimate friendship with the much more masculine Jim
Stark (played by James Dean).141 Another example is Hitchcock’s Rope,
originally produced in 1948 but only released in West Germany in 1963
as Cocktail für eine Leiche. The film revolves around two close friends
who conspire to strangle a former classmate as a demonstration of their
superiority above the ‘crass society’ around them. The two friends reveal
no sign of effeminacy, but their homosexuality is hinted at in other
ways—the fact that the friends live together and take vacations as a
couple.
Vincent Minneli’s Tea and Sympathy might even be interpreted as
an interrogation of the assumption that effeminacy is a clear sign of
homosexuality. Appearing in West Germany in 1957 as Anders als die
andern, this Hollywood film portrays the social problems of young Tom
Lee, a shy, sensitive student who likes ‘Bach more than baseball’ and
prefers the company of women to ‘touch football with the guys on
the beach.’142 Especially in comparison to the rather rough schoolmates
who tease him endlessly, Tom comes off as rather effeminate. Clearly
many people in the film assume that he is homosexual, and much of
the plot revolves around the character trying to dispel these suspicions.
The irony is that Lee is actually a heterosexual who harbors a secret love
for the housemaster’s wife, Laura Reynolds.143 For much of the film,
Laura devotes her energy to trying to help Tom overcome his ‘afflic-
tion,’ and eventually she falls in love with him. The sexual encounter
between them towards the end of the film fulfills both Tom’s need to
prove his masculinity and Laura’s desire for a way out of a loveless
marriage.
Such films hint at the reconceptualization of homosexuality that was
taking place by the 1950s, one happening not simply in West Germany
but emerging in many other Western nations as well. Research from
the Anglo-American world suggests that this process of separating gen-
der from sexuality was very uneven, affecting the educated classes first
and only penetrating poorer classes and ethnic groups sometime in the
middle of the 1960s. Parallel work for Germany in the first half of the
twentieth century has yet to be done; it is possible that Germany might
have been a little ahead of the Anglo-American world. This separation
worked as a wedge to break apart the old cluster of notions that had once
infused the figure of the effeminate Tunte with great meaning. Many of
the old prejudices survived—especially the association of homosexuality
with illness, moral putrefaction, and national weakness—only now they

regrouped around a new core, the image of the adult homosexual
preying on young boys.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Probably the most well known portrayal of homosexuality to come out

of midcentury West Germany is in the 1957 film Different Than You
and Me—The Third Sex (Anders als Du und Ich—Das Dritte Geschlecht).144
Directed by Veit Harlan—best known today for his notorious depiction
of the ‘eternal Jew’ in his Nazi-era film Jew Süss (Jud Süss)—the film
centers on a trial in which a respectable, middle-class mother and house-
wife, Mrs Teichman, is astonishingly accused of procuring sex for her
son Klaus. As the story unfolds, we learn that the mother had only the
best of intentions, wanting to draw her son away from an overly close
relationship with a young man roughly his age, not to mention extract-
ing him from a suspicious crowd of young artists that he had begun to
associate with.
As was common at the time, ‘artistic’ here serves as a euphemistic indi-
cator for deviant sexuality. At the center of this clique of young artists
stands the character of Dr. Boris Winkler. The narrative of the film leads
the viewer to understand that Winkler is the homosexual responsible
for seducing the young men around him into his ‘lifestyle.’ Yet, what
is striking is how externally masculine Dr. Winkler appears. He is well
educated—a sign of respectability—and he dresses and behaves in gen-
eral like any other man. He is gentler than the father in the film, but
since Mr Teichman’s rage is implicitly criticized by the film for driving
the son away from a heterosexual lifestyle, it is not clear that Winkler’s
mildness is intended to position him as unmasculine. Actually, only a
few telltale signs in the film hint at the ‘sickness’ that lay within. As one
reviewer of the movie noted, ‘The Socratic seducer is namely an art
dealer [of modern art]; his hustler boyfriends listen to electronic music,
paint abstract works, and recite modern poetry. Everything else looks
normal and sound, upright and honest.’145 Here, Harlan’s film draws on
the association between modernity and homosexuality.146 It should be
noted that nearly all of the reviewers of Harlan’s film found the associ-
ation between modern art and homosexuality overdone and offensive;
most of them, however, seemed upset mainly at the insult to modern
art. Only a couple questioned whether Harlan had adequately addressed
the difficult problem of homosexuality. No one openly challenged his
depiction of Winkler as a seducer and child molester who attempted to
destroy his victim’s family by having the mother put in jail after she
tried to put a stop to the relationship.
It is Winkler who is ultimately responsible for the court drama of
the film. Learning of Mrs Teichman’s successful effort to encourage a
sexual relationship between her son and the young, attractive house-
maid living in their home, Winkler grows angry at her interference and
takes revenge by turning her in to the police. The evidence seems to
mount against her, but in the end the judge praises Mrs Teichman for
her motherly efforts to protect her son. The court sentences her only
to probation and then orders the arrest of Winkler, who is soon caught
trying to flee to Italy. The film’s ending not only comes down on the
side of heterosexual, family-based marriage, but also highlights the neg-
ative qualities of ‘the corrupting homosexual.’ Besides being defined as a
corrosive force working against healthy families, Winkler also manifests
the dislikable qualities of deceitfulness and cowardliness. These quali-
ties illustrate that, even if the corrupting homosexual did not appear
outwardly effeminate, he could still manifest unmanly characteristics.
As Harlan’s film suggests, homosexual men—even those who were not
markedly effeminate—still had the power in the 1950s to arouse pow-
erful anxieties, especially those surrounding youth, masculinity, and
family that were already inflamed by military defeat and the collapse of
Nazism. Serious worries about the moral condition of West Germany’s
young people were repeatedly expressed in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Many were concerned that the hunger, homelessness, and widespread
crime of the postwar era had left Germany with a whole generation of
‘layabouts’ (verbummelt), ‘undisciplined’ and in danger of ‘going bad.’147
As one author wrote, ‘Although I cannot prove it with statistics, I believe
that the number of children with a faulty character development is ter-
ribly high today. According to what we have heard recently, this seems
very likely, since National Socialism, the war, and the postwar period
have robbed children of the necessary prerequisites for a healthy mental
and spiritual development.’148
At first, public discussion about children focused on the postwar
challenges that they faced: lack of housing, insecure family settings,
inconsistent education, and the frequent need to depend on crime or
black-market activities to survive. However, as the economy revived,
new concerns were raised. Now the danger came from modern society:
prostitution, film, dance halls, and popular music. These threats had
been the object of attack by moral purity groups and youth advocates
since the second half of the nineteenth century. Champions of youth
protection policies in the postwar period very often resurrected tropes
and discourse that might date back a full century. As in the 1920s, the
threats of modern society were often identified with the United States,
especially the many products of commercial culture originating in this
country. In a paper presented in 1957 to the District Committee for the
Protection of Youth in Hamburg’s Youth Welfare Office (Jugendbehörde),
a Dr Klöckner summed up these concerns about modern youth leisure
pursuits perfectly. Radio and television, Klöckner argued, inhibited chil-
dren’s ability to concentrate. Comics, illustrated magazines, and cheap
paperbacks introduced all sorts of ideas that were inappropriate for their
age. Films could also be dangerous: ‘Films initiate youths into a dream
world where they can only get lost morally. False living ideals, illu-
sions, sentimentality, sexuality, and sensations leave impressions on the
unconscious and can give rise ultimately to criminal behavior.’149 Such
dangers were exacerbated by the problems of upbringing. When parents
give up the role of educator, children are drawn by ‘a need for admira-
tion, an inundation of stimulation, and a hunger for experience’ to the
entertainment industry (Freizeitindustrie).
Part of what bothered educators and other youth advocates was the
evidence that children were maturing faster. One doctor informed the
Hamburg committee that oversaw the protection of youth that children
were entering puberty between three and five years earlier, beginning
around the age of ten. Mental and spiritual maturity, however, began
much later, between the ages of 15 and 17, and ended around the
age of 23. This dislocation, it was feared, left a long period in which
new physical and sexual energies were released without the proper
intellectual framework being in place to control them.150
The anxieties about West German youth were closely related to
the intense attention that the family received in the Adenauer era.
They were also rooted in the widespread sense of emasculation that
gripped the country after 1945. As much recent historical research has
uncovered, many men and women believed that the Nazi era and the
immediate postwar period had robbed Germany and its men of their
masculinity.151 Even though the Nazis had come to power by promis-
ing to restore proper gender roles and masculine military honor to the
nation, in the end they undermined family autonomy and led the coun-
try into yet another lost war. In the postwar period, many Germans
worried about the impact that the absence of fatherly authority would
have on the social and moral condition of the nation. Sociologists
claimed to find a disturbing increase in the power of mothers and wives
within the family, who had supposedly grown accustomed to making
decisions on their own.152 This power was magnified by the so-called
‘excess of women’ (Frauenüberschuss) left by the death of so many men in

the war and the imprisonment of numerous others in Allied war camps.
The social and political conditions of postwar West Germany pro-
vided the most obvious context for the country’s masculine anxieties;
however, public discussions of men also rehashed themes from late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about the ‘crisis of
masculinity.’ Gender disorder was associated with consumerism, the
growing importance of women in the economy, and other aspects
of modern life. Many worried about the impact of mass culture and
entertainment on men. In a culture that viewed, on the one hand, con-
sumerism as a feminine activity and, on the other hand, moral educa-
tion (Bildung) as an important marker of middle-class masculinity, many
philosophers and sociologists felt that mass consumer society could only
produce weak men with no independence of thought or appreciation
for true values. Like Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish essayist of the 1930s
who was one of the most popular philosophers in West Germany dur-
ing the 1950s, they worried about the ‘mass man’ who lacked the ability
to reason and control his emotions. Also influential was the American
sociologist David Riesman. Riesman argued that the modern bureau-
cratic society had led to the rise of the ‘other-directed’ personality, who
was soft, pliable, and concerned primarily with what people thought of
him—in other words, not unlike the stereotype of a woman.153
The West German sociologist Helmut Schelsky also blamed the
growing industrialization and bureaucratization of Germany for under-
mining male power in society. Schelsky borrowed heavily from the
psychological theories of Bürger-Prinz and the American social psychol-
ogist Abram Kardiner. He too talked about a ‘flight from masculinity’
supposedly caused by the ‘development of our technical and organi-
zational conditions for production’ and the growing role played by
functional and impersonal interactions in modern life. The result was
a ‘growing gender neutrality of our work conditions and our public and
cultural life,’ which supposedly left men unsure about how to behave
as men. He worried that this desire to escape from the expectations and
responsibilities of masculinity might create pitfalls in establishing sta-
ble heterosexual relationships. This possibility was especially worrisome
considering that rapid social transformations such as those experienced
by the country after World War II could, according to Schelsky, yield a
collapse of moral standards that might make homosexual relationships
‘fashionable’ for a time.154 In his words, eras of economic difficulty and
social instability tended to produce ‘a flood of sexual perversions in their
wake.’155
Such worries were rife in the 1950s, but many also firmly believed
that strong families acted as the best bulwark against such tendencies.
The spiritual and sociological power of a strong family could be enlisted
to suppress homosexual desire and to steer wayward men towards a
respectable life. Sex advice literature often suggested that having sex-
ual urges for other men was not uncommon among male adolescents.
Walter Faber’s Love, Sex, and Sin, a work labeled as a ‘House Reference for
Love and Marriage,’ described homosexuality as a phase that some boys
go through and that most outgrow by the end of puberty.156 Marriage
could play a key role in taming such ‘immature feelings’ by provid-
ing intimacy and security, not to mention the overpowering pleasure
of marital coitus that much Christian advice literature promised. The
ability of marriage to cure homosexuality found support from many
different authorities: priests, family members, doctors and psychother-
apists, and most anyone else whom homosexual men consulted for
help. Even marriage counselors who had concrete experience with mar-
riages disturbed by the homosexual desires of one partner still held out
the hope that psychotherapy could ultimately resolve this problem and
yield a harmonious marriage once again.157 Marriage was widely viewed
as a union between men and women in which their egos were ‘subordi-
nated to higher objectives,’ allowing them to achieve the ‘highest form
of love’ in which sexuality can find its moral expression.158 Of course,
it was a sign of social respectability, as marital partners were assumed
to have taken on the responsibility of maintaining a household and
raising a family. Last, marriage was imbued by religious authorities with
religious significance: ‘[The love of husband and wife] serves as a parable
for God’s love of mankind.’159
The faith placed in the power of family and marriage was intercon-
nected in numerous ways with the image of manhood that was lifted up
as the defining ideal of the Adenauer era. Eager to distance themselves
from the Nazi past, West Germans put aside the image of the German
soldier that had been so important for defining manhood during the
first half of the twentieth century.160 In its place, they emphasized the
need for fathers, who would serve as a backbone for the reconstituted
families of the Federal Republic and would raise their sons to be upright
citizens. Paralleling the ‘domestication’ of manhood that several histo-
rians have argued was a defining marker of American masculinity in the
1950s, West Germans increasingly expected men to define themselves
in terms of their family life.161 Men would not simply earn income to
support their families; some family-advice literature expressed hope that
men would become more active participants in the raising of children
from an early age.162 Reintegrating men into strong families was sup-
posed to restore in them a sense of confidence and strength, while
simultaneously allowing a new generation of sons to be raised as good
democratic citizens. In short, as the historian Heide Fehrenbach puts
it, ‘the West German Vaterland was discursively refashioned as a land of
fathers.’163 Although the country soon rearmed, the martial ideal never
again acquired its lost allure. Indeed, West Germans were generally just
as concerned with controlling the violence of men in the postwar era as
they were with reinvigorating them.164
To focus attention on the ideal German father, two primary figures
appeared that served as foils to this image. The historian Uta Poiger
has already demonstrated that the first was the hoodlum (Halbstarke),
who burst onto the national scene after the ‘hoodlum riots’ of 1956 and
early 1957. These working-class youths loved motorbikes, listened to the
rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, and exhibited an American
casualness combined with tendencies towards violence that were deeply
troubling to a country worried about both consumerism and fascism.165
The other important figure in this constellation was the corrupting
homosexual who posed a threat to youth, to the German family, and
to the nation at large. This image was never given the concentrated
attention that the hoodlums received in 1956 and 1957. Instead, the
image was more diffuse and yet more permanent, emerging in different
debates and media from the early 1950s well into the 1960s.
The homosexual differed from the ideal German father in many key
ways. Husbands earned money for the sake of the family, while homo-
sexuals used their money only to fund their immoral habits. Good
fathers raised their sons to be strong, upright citizens; homosexuals,
on the other hand, were thought to seduce young boys and lure them
into their profligate lifestyle. Finally, the homosexual’s choice of men
as sexual partners supposedly excluded their participation in a fam-
ily altogether, thereby weakening Germany’s attempt to construct a
strong, democratic nation based on moral families. This immediately
made homosexuals suspect as national traitors, a suspicion that was only
strengthened by other ways in which homosexuals were associated with
communism during this period.
In contrast with the effeminate Tunte, the most striking character-
istic of the corrupting homosexual was that he looked like any other
middle-class man in terms of his dress and public comportment. Inad-
vertently, this stereotype was probably promoted by Kinsey himself
with his research, despite Kinsey’s intention of challenging widespread
beliefs about what was ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’ Some writers in West
Germany as well as in the United States were able to use Kinsey’s results
to warn against the danger posed by homosexuals who could not be eas-
ily identified.166 The corrupting homosexual took on some of the same
polluting quality that the eternal Jew had had under Nazism, since both
were thought to infect the community through hidden agents locked
deep within the human body and personality. Both figures were thus
the result of the nineteenth-century medicalization of the body and the
personality, which posited certain ‘internal others’ whose bodies ‘were
believed to carry the germs of ruin.’167
The threat posed by the corrupting homosexual for the German fam-
ily lay not in his appearance, but in the acute danger that he represented
for West German youth. This prejudice was one that many people
encountered at an early age in warnings given by parents or school offi-
cials. Although West German schools in the Adenauer era did not feel
it was their responsibility to instruct children on sexual matters, some
teachers did believe it was important to warn children about the danger
of child abuse. Christian M. had a teacher as a child who once warned
his class ‘very urgently’ about Mitschnacker, men who promised stamps,
pictures, puppies, or some other reward if a child would follow them
back to their home. Mitschnacker were a danger to both boys and girls,
but there was a tendency in this period to associate them specifically
with gay men; this explains why this warning made such an impact on
Christian M., who at ten or eleven years old already had some inkling
about his feelings towards other boys: ‘It touched something inside of
me, though it wasn’t entirely clear what at the time.’168
What little published material was available to advise young people
on sexuality regularly included cautions against the danger of homo-
sexual men. Even Theodore Bovet, who in many ways was a relatively
progressive Christian author who wrote many books on marital and
sexual matters, repeated such warnings. His 1962 booklet From Man to
Mann, intended as an ‘initiation’ for adolescents into the ‘secrets of man-
hood’ (Männerweihe), included a chapter on ‘sexual perversion’ next to
others on puberty, male character, and mastering sexual urges. A small
group of homosexual men, Bovet noted, were born with their condition;
these men could do nothing about their feelings and should not be seen
as ‘morally inferior, depraved, or immoral.’ Yet his insistence that homo-
sexual men could be just as moral as heterosexuals was undermined by
his warnings about the danger that they posed to young men. More
common than the ‘true homosexual’ were young men ‘whose manliness
had not yet developed correctly.’ ‘Seduced into acts of tenderness with
homosexuals,’ these men gradually join their ranks and go on to seduce
other boys. Unlike ‘true homosexuals,’ Bovet thought that these boys
could be returned to a normal line of development with psychological
and medical treatment. Above all, it was important to teach boys about
the danger of being approached by homosexuals and moreover to avoid
too strict a prohibition of contact with the opposite sex, lest these boys
turn to other boys or men as a sexual outlet.169
Another educational booklet, this one aimed at advising parents on
how to talk with their children about sex, depicted several conversations
between a father and his two children. In one of them, which begins
with the danger of having sex outside of wedlock and especially with
prostitutes, the young boy asks what homosexuality is. As a response,
the father tells the story of a 14-year-old boy who developed a close rela-
tionship with a good friend of his father’s. The friend regularly invited
him to the movies and on hikes, as well as giving him small presents,
such as stamps for his collection. The father was not suspicious until
the boy grew more and more reserved. Confronting his son, the father
eventually learned that his friend had been abusing his boy. He forbade
the friend to ever come into his house or see his son again. ‘He did not
report the man to the police, although he should have. Now, other boys
are in danger, since the friend will attempt to find a new victim.’170
The threat that homosexuality posed for young people was a
theme often raised in discussions of male homosexuality. Several
criminological studies of the time connected this crime with the postwar
conditions. Most commonly, broken families and the absence of a strong
father figure was blamed:
During adolescence, especially during puberty, [such factors]

strengthen the desire . . . to find a kind of father figure. In this
way, homosexuality and also prostitution are significantly advanced.
In the midst of such a search, if a young man happens to fall into the
company of homosexuals, who very often have an eye for these kind
of men, then he will almost surely cross over into homosexuality or
prostitution.171
In this way, homosexuality was subsumed under the much larger

problem of Jugendschutz—protecting children and young people from
various physical and moral risks. In the context of such arguments,
the long-standing association between homosexuality and modernity
could again manifest itself. In some cases, such as Karl Saller’s Civiliza-
tion and Sexuality, this connection was stated quite blatantly. With the
overblown rhetoric that is often reminiscent of Weimar-era warnings
coming from conservative circles, Saller asserted that the acceleration

of sexual development, the ubiquity of masturbation, the growing use
of contraception, and the spread of homosexuality were all charac-
teristics of ‘the civilization of our time.’ Such sexual freedoms would
inevitably lead to ‘the end of our culture if they cannot be changed.’172
Saller’s rhetoric seemed out of place in a West Germany that increasingly
embraced modernity after World War II, and yet similar associations
between homosexuality and the ills of modernity could still be found
in popular culture (Dr. Winkler’s enjoyment of modern art and music)
and also among the era’s campaigners for protecting youth.
One of the more prominent youth advocates of the era was Walter
Becker. Born in 1905, Becker began his career as a public prosecutor in
Saxony and after the war resumed legal work in the Westphalian towns
of Bielefeld and Hamm. In the 1950s, he became well known for his
publications on youth problems and juvenile law, which he wrote while
holding an honorary position in the Central Committee for the Inner
Mission of the German Evangelical Church. He helped in the produc-
tion of the journal Jugendschutz and was a founder and chairman of the
national organization Operation Youth Protection (Aktion Jugendschutz).
In 1956, the Hamburg Senator in charge of the Youth Welfare Office
asked him to take over as the Deputy Director of this bureau, a position
that he held until his retirement in 1969.173
In his new job, Walter Becker wrote a number of brochures and
books on the subject of protecting youth, which made him one of
the most widely respected authorities on this subject in the Fed-
eral Republic. Among them was a small work entitled Homosexuality
and Protecting Our Children (1961), in which he tried to suggest the
importance of Paragraph 175 in keeping homosexuality under control.
‘Homosexuality betrays an unmistakable tendency to spread rapidly
[Grassierungstendenz],’ Becker wrote. Here, Becker relied on the same
metaphor of homosexuality as illness that had been so important for the
Nazis. The ‘epidemic-like effect of this criminal activity,’ Becker argued,
was created because adolescents were susceptible to being infected with
the ‘degenerate drives’ of the homosexual.174 Most homosexuals, he
asserted, were the products of being seduced at a young age by older
homosexuals. Most homosexuals were attracted to youth, which only
made the epidemic worse. Citing a study by the criminological stu-
dent Gerhard Kuhn on male prostitution in Hamburg, Becker noted
that a high proportion of hustlers turned to this line of work only
after being seduced by an older man. If the laws against same-sex con-
tact would fall, Becker declared that children and adolescents would
quickly learn about this and respond to their ‘excited curiosity.’ He

imagined children watching as men propositioned each other freely in
the streets, passed around homosexual pornography freely, and flocked
to the explosion of homosexual bars and other meeting places that
would surely result. Such visions implicitly connected homosexuality
with the media, nightlife, and streets of the modern city. Knowledge
about homosexuality depended on the dynamics and fluidity of mod-
ern life to carry it through the city, like a toxin in the bloodstream, to
then contaminate society through a million chance encounters.175
As Becker also suggested, the mere presence of gay men presented a
danger to young people in the eyes of many Germans. Even if adult
gay men were not soliciting or having sexual relations with young boys,
their activities and relationships with each other presented a rival model
of social relations, sexual economy, and ultimately masculinity that
German society found deeply threatening. They magnified anxieties
that some people had about heterosexual relationships, especially in the
late 1940s and early 1950s when many husbands and wives discovered
that they had changed too much during the war and postwar period to
go on living together.176 The thought that men might be able to find
sexual and emotional satisfaction amongst themselves, without having
to support a wife or to create children, seemed to undermine society
as a whole and perhaps even signal the end to the nation. Germans
frequently spoke of temptation or seduction—verführen, literally to lead
astray, a verb they also used to describe the attractions of modern con-
sumer society. The intended meaning, of course, was that this rival mode
of living was immoral, degenerate, or otherwise inferior to the one they
advocated; however, this word also implied that it had some allure and
means of enticement. Like consumer society, homosexuality appeared
to hold out the promise of immediate satisfaction that did not entail
sacrifice or hard work. It was because of this promise that the simple
presence of gay men created so much anxiety.
The danger of homosexuality spreading through impressionable
youths was taken very seriously by youth protection advocates and
government workers. The criminologist Gerhard Kuhn recommended
separating known gay boys and hustlers from the heterosexual youths
in the juvenile homes to keep them from learning about the practices of
these deviants.’177 However, there was also the problem of adolescents
picking up this knowledge from their surroundings in the urban envi-
ronment. A welfare worker from the inner-city area of Hamburg was
disturbed to hear a young boy who visited a local day home (Tagesheim)
say to a friend, ‘So, how is it going, my little homosexual!’ Forgetting
about all of the other places that this boy could have heard this word,
namely from family members or older boys, the worker immediately
jumped to the conclusion that he had learned about homosexual men
from the gay bar in his neighborhood. She also ignored the negative
sense in which the boy was most likely using this word and focused on
her anxiety that the boy would even know what a homosexual was. Her
biggest fear, though, was that adolescents in the neighborhood were
being exposed to homosexuals and acquiring wrong (that is, positive)
impressions of them.178
This threat became the important justification for Paragraph 175 in
the two and a half decades after World War II. It is a prominent theme of
perhaps the most notorious defense of the law from the 1950s, Richard
Gatzweiler’s The Third Sex: The Criminality of Homosexuality. In this
work published by the press of Cologne’s League of People’s Guardians,
Gatzweiler argued that those people ‘who love children will also fight
against homosexuality among adults, for it does not remain between
four walls.’179 With biological metaphors that are uncomfortably close
to language used by the Nazis, he argued that ‘perversions’ were a
‘cancerous ulcer’ that consumed the life of a man unless they were ‘rad-
ically cut out.’ Homosexuals were driven by their desire to meet men
and, inevitably given the insatiable nature of their lust, young boys.180
French Enlightenment and modern medicine should not be allowed to
obfuscate what was important: the pressing need to protect children.
‘We should take care,’ Gatzweiler wrote, ‘not to teach our people to be
abnormal or to tolerate the spread of abnormality. We should not forget
here, that Christians see homosexuality as a deplorable vice.’181
Just as gay men posed a danger to impressionable youth, so were
they a threat to the ‘young German democracy.’ In the final section
of his tract, he denounced homosexual activists as ‘the party of the
inverts’ who represented ‘Moscow’s new guard.’ Alluding to the Röhm
Putsch, he noted that the dangerous tendency of homosexuals to form
‘secret organizations’ (Clubbildung) was already well known in Germany.
During the Second World War, he insisted, the ‘Inverts’ had organized
themselves into an ‘international brotherhood’ that had aided the Allied
cause. Now, in the 1950s, they were again busy in West Germany
building ‘clubs and sects’, which threatened to form a ‘state within
a state.’ Gatzweiler warned, ‘The USA has recognized the danger of
secret homosexual organizations and espionage groups. We must also
be careful!’182
As suggested by this concluding remark, Gatzweiler was in fact echo-
ing a prejudice that was gaining currency on an international scale in
the early 1950s. The identification of homosexuality with communism

in the postwar period can be traced to the United States, where Repub-
lican Senators Joseph McCarthy and Styles Bridges began a massive
witch hunt in 1950 to ferret out communists, homosexuals, and other
‘un-American’ elements from the federal government. Though it began
as a partisan attack on the Truman administration, the fear that ‘sexual
perverts’ provided a weak link in the American defense against commu-
nism took on a life of its own. The armed forces soon intensified their
purge of gay men and lesbians, and many private corporations began
to examine the private lives of their employees. After President Dwight
Eisenhower took office in early 1953, the new administration escalated
its hunt for homosexuals in the government and also encouraged its
allies throughout Western Europe to follow suit. Security measures in
the United States would remain strict through the 1960s.183
The specific connection between communism and homosexuality
might have been American in origin, but it was based on a much wider
fear that gay men formed international networks that could be used
for intrigue. In a sense, this fear had a basis in reality, since gay men
did build up an international network of homophile organizations and
gay magazines, as we will see in the following chapter. These networks
were not used for any political mischief, though, and in fact the politi-
cal influence of the homophile organizations was negligible at best. The
suspicion of these groups borrowed from a long-standing cultural tradi-
tion of conspiracy: secret societies of alien forces plotting to undermine
native traditions and legitimate government. It also built on the tra-
dition of defining homosexuals as an enemy of the state (Staatfeind)
that had gained currency since the early twentieth century.184 The
Colonel Redl scandal—involving an early-twentieth-century Austrian
officer whose homosexuality might have played some role in his work
for the Russians—was occasionally cited as proof of the security risk
that homosexuals in government posed. Such vague memories and old
prejudices lent legitimacy to Gatzweiler’s accusation that homosexuals
were communist spies. Through this accusation, Gatzweiler was able
to reclaim the relation once seen by the Nazi state between sexual
perversion and political adversaries.
Gatzweiler was not the only German to take seriously the fear that
homosexuals might be sympathetic to communism. In an article for
the police journal Kriminalistik, Hans Langemann provided detailed
rationalizations for why homosexuals might be susceptible to commu-
nist intrigue. Langemann began by stating that ‘events in the past as
well as the present show that homosexual and bisexual men are not
infrequently involved in the preparation and planning of traitorous

undertakings.’ The reasons for this were fourfold. First, gay men were
vulnerable to blackmail and consequently to communist spies who
learn of their ‘moral defects.’ Second, they also exposed themselves to
being used by agents who become their lovers. Langemann claimed
that this danger was even greater among homosexuals than among
heterosexuals, as the former were more likely to be lonely and there-
fore easily deceived by a spy posing as ‘someone who shares their
fate’ (Schicksalsgenosse) who promised an ‘intimate and long relation-
ship.’ Third, the ‘isolation of the Uranian’ produced depression, anxiety,
dissatisfaction, and often resentment towards the law, which the homo-
sexual saw as unjust. This produced a budding opposition against the
law of the land at the same time that it forced gay men into societies of
fellow homosexuals, where these rebellious feelings bloomed into ‘full
resistance’ against the state. As proof of this, Langemann mentioned
‘Ernst Röhm, Heines, von Heydebreck, von Spreti, Ernst’ and others
who plotted in the ‘Röhm revolt.’ He even went so far as to say that,
based on the traitorous tendency of gay men, the Gestapo was justi-
fied in their persecution of homosexuals. Finally, Langemann suggested
that gay men were especially prone to all of these mistakes because ‘the
character of man is an indivisible unity.’ Sexual defects led inevitably
to a weakness of the entire psyche, affecting also the ‘ethical and moral
character’ of the homosexual.185
The anxiety about homosexuals being potential ‘security risks’ within
the government was not nearly as widespread as it was in the United
States during the 1950s, most likely because there was no West German
equivalent to the ‘91 sex perverts’ scandal, involving a mass of gay
men and lesbians who were fired from the US State Department under
the Truman administration. Instead, the Germans focused more on the
alleged threat that predatory homosexuals posed to children and fami-
lies. This image—combined with associations between homosexuality,
criminality, and mental illness—was repeatedly invoked during the
1950s to justify the continued enforcement of Paragraph 175. It also was
a key focal point for the discourse of Adenauer’s family politics. Com-
bating such prejudice was one of the challenges facing the resurgent
homosexual movement that would reappear in the early 1950s.
3
The Homophile Movement
Between the 1860s and the 1920s, a homosexual movement had

crystallized and expanded in Germany. By the Weimar years, it had
grown into a remarkably diverse movement. At the forefront was
Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which com-
mitted itself to a strategy of pursuing research and spreading education
in the hope of promoting tolerance. By the mid-1920s, this organiza-
tion was being guided increasingly by the vision of Kurt Hiller, a young,
multitalented lawyer who had already made a name for himself as a rad-
ical writer, a political activist, and even a significant figure within the
German expressionist movement.1 Hiller hoped to increase the political
effectiveness of the committee by bringing it into an alliance with other
sex reform groups.
Next to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, there was a group
of men loosely associated with Adolf Brand’s journal Der Eigene. Often
called the ‘masculinist’ wing of the movement because of its cam-
paign for a ‘Manly Culture’ modeled on the male—male eroticism
of Ancient Greece, this group carried on a tense relationship with
Hirschfeld’s organization. Sometimes the two groups co-operated, but
more often Brand and his colleagues found opportunities to attack
Hirschfeld for his belief that homosexuals mixed male and female
physical and psychic features.2 The Weimar-era homosexual move-
ment also included a host of local ‘friendship clubs’ that dedicated
themselves to social functions and member services. Occasionally
connected, at least informally, with one of the homosexual maga-
zines that appeared in the 1920s, a number of the friendship clubs
were brought together by the publisher and businessman Friedrich
Radzuweit into an umbrella organization called the League for Human
Rights.3
64
The Homophile Movement 65
In the years after World War II, homosexual activists in West Germany
worked to rebuild this movement, which many of them still vividly
remembered from the Weimar period. Much of this had to be done
from scratch, as the Nazi government had successfully shut down all
the 1920s-era magazines and forced the many organizations to disband.
A majority of the most famous leaders had passed away. Radzuweit died
in 1932, shortly before the Nazis took power. Magnus Hirschfeld set-
tled down in exile in southern France, where he was taken by a heart
attack in 1935. Adolf Brand nearly survived the war, only falling vic-
tim to an Allied bombing raid in 1945. A few significant figures from
the past would re-emerge in the 1950s, but mostly the postwar move-
ment was led by a younger generation with few connections with earlier
organizations.
The names chosen by these activists for many of the postwar orga-
nizations (the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the Club of Friends,
the Society for Human Rights) and for a couple of the magazines (Die
Insel and Die Freundschaft) clearly harkened back to Weimar-era counter-
parts. These names suggest how powerful the memories of the earlier
movement still were in the Adenauer era, and how this movement
could serve as an inspiration and model for later activists. And yet,
the organizations of the 1950s and 1960s—today generally remem-
bered internationally as the homophile movement—were never able to
achieve the size or energy of the pre-Nazi groups. Occasional remarks by
homophile activists about the difficulty in getting homosexual men to
turn up at events hint at the hesitancy that men who had lived through
concentration camps and war might have felt in getting involved with
another organization. Homosexual men also might have felt that same
craving for stability and security that kept many other West Germans in
the 1950s away from grass roots movements and ‘political experimen-
tation,’ especially given the persistent anxieties about communism and
renewed war.4
In the end, the impact that such factors had on homosexual men is
difficult to determine. More clearly identifiable are two specific prob-
lems that the West German homophile movement faced: the difficulty
in finding a leader who could serve as a focal point in the way that
Hirschfeld had in the 1920s; and the challenges of creating a new homo-
sexual publishing industry that could draw attention to the movement
and ultimately give it a voice. These problems frustrated the hope that
many activists had of organizing a nationwide movement that could
eventually achieve what the Weimar movement had not been able to
do: decriminalize adult male homosexuality.
Yet this failure should not take away from the two real achieve-
ments of homophile activists. First, they were successful at re-creating
local organizations after years of persecution in the midst of a less
than hospitable social and legal environment. These local organizations,
though they were small and lasted only until the end of the 1950s,
were important for providing social networks and institutions of support
for numerous men. Second, the activists worked through older argu-
ments in favor of legal reform and social toleration of homosexuality,
frequently refurbishing them with updated language and new ideas to
fit the post-World War II era. Although these refashioned arguments
would not successfully mobilize homosexual men on a massive scale,
many of them would be borrowed a decade later by progressives in a
more successful effort to carry out legal reform.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
In the years after World War II, the most significant political accom-
plishment for homosexuals in the United States and Europe was the
creation of a truly international network of associations aimed at fur-
thering homosexual rights.5 Although Magnus Hirschfeld had tried to
build such a network through the World League for Sexual Reform at
the end of the 1920s, his efforts were limited by the fact that one could
find individuals in many countries who were willing to speak up for such
a cause, but rarely viable organizations. Without this institutional frame-
work to build upon, homosexual activists within the World League for
Sexual Reform—overwhelmingly German and British—were soon dis-
appointed to find the issue of homosexuality being neglected in favor
of other issues such as birth control, the equality of women, and the
reform of marital laws. By the time the league disbanded shortly after
the death of Hirschfeld in 1935, its activities had already been seri-
ously obstructed by growing international tensions and the emergence
of Nazism in Germany.6 It was only in the decade after World War II that
a more successful international network emerged, bringing together
individuals and institutions in Germany, Britain, France, Switzerland,
the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Austria, and the United States. This
time the people involved more specifically focused on the issue of
homosexuality.
Above all, it was the Swiss organization The Circle (Der Kreis) that
developed as the center of this network, thanks largely to its multi-
lingual periodical that reached an international audience. The Circle
traced its origin back to a group called the Swiss Friendship League,
formed in 1932 and originally welcoming both homosexual men and

lesbians. The group renamed itself several times, first as the League for
Human Rights in 1935 and later, after homosexuality was legalized in
Switzerland in 1943, as the Circle (which, the group’s leaders hoped,
would sound less Communist to the police). A little before the end
of World War II, the founder and first president, Anna Vock, retired,
signaling a rapid disappearance of lesbians from the group. The new
president, Karl Meier, reoriented the group solely towards homosexual
men. Under Meier’s leadership, the Circle carried on a very success-
ful club life in Zurich during the 1950s and 1960s, promoting books,
producing theater productions, holding poetry readings, hosting social
evenings, and throwing parties and balls. More importantly, the organi-
zation increasingly came to understand itself not simply as a local group
with members from Zurich, but as encompassing all subscribers to the
group’s magazine Der Kreis, no matter where they lived.7
This publication received a great deal of Karl Meier’s energy. From its
first issue in January 1943, the journal was multilingual, publishing texts
in French, German, and (after April 1954) English. It printed poems,
short stories, academic essays, and book reviews; it also reported on per-
sonal attacks and court decisions against homosexuals.8 For a time after
World War II, Der Kreis was the only homosexual journal available in the
world, so homosexual groups from many countries began to report their
activities to it. Soon there were a number of regular correspondents who
wrote in, commenting on the conditions of gay life throughout Western
Europe and the United States. The publication of letters from readers
also turned the journal into an ‘unrivaled platform for the discussion
of homosexuality.’ By 1959, Der Kreis printed nearly 2,000 copies every
issue, with roughly 700 being sent out to foreign subscribers.9
Der Kreis made quite an impression on the generation of homosexual
activists who appeared after the war. As Johannes Werres remembers,
the essays and pictures found in Der Kreis could transform the lives of
men whose desires found little echo in public life: ‘Well, what was this?
My eyes teared up. The phenomenon of homosexuality, which was until
then formless, or even unpleasantly troublesome, suddenly received
noble, beautiful, attractive traits. It was truly exciting . . . For me this
moment was a historic moment in my life that changed everything.’10
How many issues of Der Kreis entered West Germany is not known;
even if this were known, it would not give an accurate picture of the
size of the magazine’s readership because it is impossible to know how
often each issue was shown to a friend, or read in a gay club or bar,
or passed from one person to another. Both individuals’ memories and
the fact that later German gay magazines often republished essays and
pictures from Der Kreis suggest that this magazine remained by far the
most important of the gay magazines in West Germany before 1969.
As other journals came and went, as numerous homosexual organiza-
tions formed and then dissolved, Der Kreis never ceased writing articles
protesting Paragraph 175 and encouraging homosexuals to organize.
The editor Karl Meier traveled frequently through the countries of
Western Europe, meeting with readers and fostering bonds between
them. He also gave the audience of Der Kreis a sense of belonging to a
worldwide movement by his constant reporting on events taking place
in other countries.11 This movement was truly worldwide, thanks to
the appearance in the early 1950s of several new homosexual organi-
zations on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1948, Danish activists with
close connections to Der Kreis formed a small group that eventually
evolved into the League of 1948; by the early 1950s, Denmark’s orga-
nization had helped to organize similar organizations in Norway (the
Norwegian League of 1948) and Sweden (the National Federation for
Sexual Rights).12 In France, a reader and contributor to Der Kreis named
André Baudry founded his own journal, Arcadie, and an organization by
the same name in 1954, followed by a club in 1957 that offered space
for meetings and other events.13
Over in the United States, the first successful effort to organize homo-
sexuals did not happen until the early 1950s, when the Mattachine
Society appeared. Originally founded by the ex-Communist activist
Harry Hay in Los Angeles, by 1953 the group had grown to include
nearly 2,000 participants organized by a network of cells scattered
around the West Coast. That year, a leadership struggle led to Hay step-
ping down and a new group of men coming to the fore. They rejected
the activist tactics and minority-based notion of homosexuality cham-
pioned by Harry Hay and his friends. Instead, they argued that the
best strategy for homosexuals was to emphasize their similarity with
heterosexuals: they urged homosexuals to blend in with the rest of soci-
ety, behaving in ways that were ‘acceptable to society in general and
compatible with [the] recognized institutions . . . of home, church, and
state.’14 In place of activist tactics, the organization would focus on
education, relying above all on the influence that doctors, scientists,
research institutions, academics, and other experts might have on the
public.15
The strategy of the reorganized Mattachine Society was not isolated
to the United States but was increasingly adopted by many European
homosexual activists in the early 1950s. In Germany, older homosexuals
with some memory of the Weimar era might have recognized it as essen-
tially the same position advocated by the publicist Friedrich Radzuweit
and his League of Human Rights.16 Since the end of the 1960s, this strat-
egy has become closely associated with the word ‘homophile,’ although
originally this term was simply proposed as an alternative to ‘homosex-
ual.’ ‘Homosexual’ was widely accepted by the mid-twentieth century,
but there were still some highly educated Germans who objected to its
maladroit mixture of Greek (homo) and Latin (sexualis). Others com-
plained about the way that it seemed to emphasize sexual contact
over the emotional content of a relationship. ‘Homophile,’ a term
coined by Karl Günter Heimsoth in the 1920s, picked up currency after
World War II because it avoided these problems and had none of the
stigma that ‘homosexual’ had picked up under the Nazis.17 In par-
ticular, ‘homophile’ became popular with the homosexual activists or
those sympathetic with their cause. ‘Homophile’ consequently acquired
the function of signaling the political position of those who used it.
It became a politically charged term, in the way that ‘black’ did in the
United States during the 1960s. It is appropriate, then, that it has come
to encapsulate the post-World War II efforts to draw same-sex desiring
men into a political movement.
It is likely that the term ‘homophile’ was first popularized among
Dutch activists at the very end of the 1940s, evidence of the impor-
tance of the Netherlands for the network of homosexual associations
that emerged after World War II.18 In this decade, Amsterdam became
one of the most important gay metropoles of Europe. As before World
War II, the red-light district in the city was a popular place for both
homosexuals and heterosexuals to cruise for sex; increasingly, though,
a distinct homosexual scene emerged, which included a leather bar,
several bars for hustlers, and two large dance-halls that contributed to
Amsterdam’s European-wide reputation. Police toleration allowed this
scene to grow by leaps and bounds in the 1950s and 1960s, despite
the fact that homosexuality remained illegal in the Netherlands until
1971.19
These conditions encouraged the growth of the Dutch Center for Cul-
ture and Recreation (Cultuur- en Ontspannings Centrum, or COC) in
Amsterdam, a group founded in 1946 that organized recreational activ-
ities among homosexuals in the city as well as promoted tolerance
towards homosexuality in the rest of the population. The COC was
remarkably successful in encouraging discussion about homosexuality
in religious, legal, and medical circles within the Netherlands. By the
early 1960s, all their effort had paid off. As Gert Hekma notes, ‘Catholic
and Calvinist psychiatrists and clergymen who had in some cases com-
pared homosexuality with dunge (shit) and irresponsibility in the early
1950s a decade later began to accept homosexuals as normal human
beings whose steady friendships were an important contribution to their
social well-being.’20
The COC established the first worldwide homosexual association in
the postwar era: the International Committee for Sexual Equality (ICSE).
The ICSE, notes historian Julian Jackson, was established to serve as ‘an
umbrella group for the various homosexual rights organizations that
were surfacing in Europe after the war.’21 In May 1951 it held a major
conference in Amsterdam, inviting representatives from Scandinavia,
Switzerland, Italy, Holland, and West Germany. Representatives from
Der Kreis were present, as were several scholars and scientists who gave
numerous presentations, including a major talk on ‘The Meaning of
Homoeroticism’ by Frankfurt neurologist Dr. Wolfgang Bredtschneider
(which later was reprinted in full in Der Kreis).22 The connections made
at this conference became the basis for a regular newsletter, the ICSE-
Kurier, which distributed information world wide to groups in the
United States, France, Scandinavia, and Germany.23 Other ICSE confer-
ences were held in Frankfurt am Main in 1952, Amsterdam again in
1952, Paris in 1955, and Brussels in 1958. The conference in Frankfurt
was an especially significant event for the re-emerging German move-
ment; the list of speakers included several people from Frankfurt—
Bredtschneider again, as well as Hermann Weber and Hans Giese—who
played a role in the efforts to found a new Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee.24
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The first stirrings of life among homophile activists in Germany could be

noticed in 1949. In the early part of that year, Martin Knop successfully
convinced the military occupation authorities to issue him a license to
publish a small paper in West Berlin. His Amicus-Briefbund was a mod-
est publication, as it was never more than a place for local gay bars to
advertise and for gay men themselves to place personal advertisements.
It did not last long, ceasing publication in 1953. By that time, its func-
tion had been taken over by other magazines that could include other
kinds of additional reading material besides the advertisements. Still, it
was a beginning, and for gay men in the city it served a useful purpose.25
Berlin had been the center for homosexual organizing and pub-
lishing in the Weimar era; however, after World War II, other cities
took the lead at first. Frankfurt, in particular, emerged very early as

a center for homophile activism. One of the most successful orga-
nizations was the Association for a Humane Way of Life (Verein für
humanitäre Lebensgestaltung), established in late 1949 along the model
of the friendship clubs that had been so important during the 1920s.
The founder was Heinz Meininger, a bookkeeper who was remem-
bered by one activist as ‘simple, plain, honest, and bourgeois.’ Living
in Frankfurt with his companion, Spengler, he dedicated much of
his life to the association and proved to be an outstanding orga-
nizer. His club quickly became one of the most successful and stable
of the country’s new homosexual groups. Like many of the Weimar-
era friendship clubs, the Association put on dances, festivities, and
social evenings where gay men and lesbians could meet and talk.
‘An extremely good atmosphere reigned here,’ Hans Schmidt recalled.
‘The club house was a place where you could meet men who were
not only looking for sex.’26 Meininger eventually expanded the asso-
ciation’s newsletter into the gay magazine Die Gefährten.27 The club
placed its emphasis on social life, but Meininger hoped that eventu-
ally it could provide a foundation for mobilizing homosexual men for
political work. He personally carried on a tireless campaign to repeal
Paragraph 175. According to Schmidt, he ‘took part in an extensive
exchange of letters with the Bundestag, the Federal Constitutional
Court, . . . Kurt Hiller, and naturally also the Public Prosecutor’s Office
in Frankfurt.’28
Meininger soon made contact with another emerging activist, who
would eventually become the most prominent campaigner for the
reform of Paragraph 175 in the next two decades: the young med-
ical student and sexologist Hans Giese. Born in 1920 into an aca-
demic household—his father was a law professor at the University of
Frankfurt—Giese developed an interest in philosophy, perhaps in part
as a means of intellectualizing his sexual attraction to men. His father,
however, pressured him to study medicine, which he did in Frankfurt
beginning in 1939, but also spending semesters in Jena, Marburg, and
Freiburg. Nevertheless, Giese continued to attend lectures in philosophy,
especially those of Hans Lipps, who introduced him to the phenomeno-
logical ideas that would shape his work on sexuality. Giese eventually
received two doctorates (Promotionen), the first in German philology and
philosophy in 1943 and the second in medicine in 1946.29
Giese’s decision to take a leading role in any renewed efforts to
reform Paragraph 175 came soon after the war. For his doctoral the-
sis in medicine, he had already chosen the topic ‘The Forms of Male
Homosexuality: An Examination of 130 Cases,’ in which he evaluated

the many different explanations for male homosexuality. Then, in April
1949 he took the first major step in establishing his career by found-
ing a new Institute for Sexual Research. At the beginning, it was not
much. Whereas Hirschfeld’s institute had been located in a magnificent
building in Berlin’s Tiergarten near the banks of the Spree River, Giese’s
was at first housed in his apartment in the small town of Kronberg,
not far from Frankfurt am Main. It did not remain there for long. He
encountered some resistance from his neighbors, who objected when
Giese tried to hang a sign with the name of the institute on the build-
ing’s wall. Refusing to give up, he moved the institute to his parents’
apartment in Frankfurt.
After re-establishing the Institute for Sexual Research, Giese’s next
goal was to bring back Hirschfeld’s political organization, the Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee. To generate interest, he turned to Der Kreis.
In an announcement in the October 1949 issue, Giese stated that
the group would provide financial support for his Institute for Sexual
Research and otherwise promote its scientific work. Soundly reasoned
scientific arguments, Giese believed, would be necessary to convince
lawmakers to alter the laws against homosexuality.30 Together, his insti-
tute and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee would offer some
much-needed leadership to the efforts to repeal Paragraph 175.
By working to rebuild the two key institutions of the Weimar sex
reform movement, Giese was clearly making a claim to being Magnus
Hirschfeld’s successor after 1945. And yet, Peter von Rönn has justly
pointed out that this claim was problematic, to say the least. Method-
ologically, Giese was not a follower of Hirschfeld’s argument that
homosexuality was a form of constitutional hermaphrodism. Instead,
he was trained in the phenomenological school, with his clearest model
being Hans Bürger-Prinz.31 As shown by Giese’s contributions to The
Psychopathology of Sexuality—which he edited with another key figure
of the phenomenological school, Victor von Gebsattel—Giese largely
accepted Bürger-Prinz’s characterization of homosexuality as a kind of
lifestyle constructed during childhood and adolescence around a refusal
to leave one’s own limited realm of experience. Giese suggested paral-
lels between narcissism and homosexuality: in both cases, individuals
supposedly remain absorbed in the experience of their own body. True,
homosexuals are attracted to other bodies, but bodies with the same
gender as theirs. Giese concluded, ‘The step into the alien world that
the homosexual makes in the course of his sexual life is in any case
smaller than the heterosexual’s.’32
The importance of Bürger-Prinz’s ideas for Hans Giese’s methodology

has led the scholar Peter von Rönn to draw the conclusion that Giese’s
ideas, like those of Bürger-Prinz’s, manifested the weakness of having
been formed within a Nazi worldview and were consequently incapable
of any real emancipation for gay men.33 His argument might seem to
have some justification: Giese, like Bürger-Prinz, had been active within
the Nazi party, first as a leader of the university’s Nazi Student Orga-
nization (NS-Studentenbund) and then, in 1942, as a full-fledged party
member. Even in the 1950s, he admitted that he had fond memo-
ries of the Nazi takeover, and moreover harbored some admiration for
Mussolini.34 However, it is an exaggeration to suggest that Giese’s think-
ing was permanently ‘stamped’ with fascist characteristics.35 His active
engagement after 1945 for the reform of Paragraph 175 and, by the
1960s, for a more progressive attitude towards all matter of sexuality
suggests that Giese’s thinking cannot be described as conservative in
any straightforward way, even if he (like many members of his genera-
tion) would not be capable of taking the steps made by the gay activists
of the 1970s.
Rönn’s argument ignores the ability of ideas to take on new meanings
in a changed political context. Above all, this potential is suggested by
the changes that Giese made to Bürger-Prinz’s ideas. True, these changes
were small, but the significance was great since Giese was able to use
his theory not to justify Paragraph 175, as Bürger-Prinz had done during
the 1930s, but instead to argue for its repeal. Giese laid out the argu-
ment most clearly in The Homosexual Man in the World (1958). In a work
indebted to the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the psychia-
try of Gebsattel, and even to the sociology of Alfred Kinsey, Giese hoped
to allow the circumstances of homosexuality ‘to speak phenomenolog-
ically for themselves.’ He tried to redefine the popular image of the
homosexual man by collecting a large amount of statistical data about
how the homosexual man lived his life.36 He accepted the perversion
theory of homosexuality passed down from Gebsattel to Bürger-Prinz,
but modified it by introducing a distinction between the existent form
(Existenzform) and its replacement form (Ersatzform). The former was
an authentic version of sexuality that came in ‘a greater human form
[Format]’ and often exhibited ‘higher intelligence’ than the latter, which
arose usually during puberty as a substitute for authentic sexuality.37
In many of his case studies, he found evidence of the destructive
tendency that Gebsattel saw as the mark of perversion. Many homo-
sexual men fell victim to an addictive attitude towards sex, he noted.
They became indiscriminate in their search for sexual partners whose
number often increased exponentially over time, thereby destroying any

chance for a meaningful relationship with another individual. These
were the homosexuals that most psychologists had focused on, and
Giese did not deny that they existed. Yet there was a smaller group of
gay men who had often been ignored and whose love lives revealed
very different characteristics. Here were men ‘living together, staying
together, working together’ without the ‘vicious circle of promiscuity,
the increasing frequency, and so on.’ In Giese’s emphasis on commit-
ment and the ‘constructive impulse’ which opposes the ‘destructive
impulse’ of perversions, there is more than a hint of the ‘Building of an
Us’ (Wir-Bildung) that another phenomenological psychiatrist, Ludwig
Binswanger, saw as the essence of love.38
Giese dedicated his study to revealing the life of the ‘average’ homo-
sexual. He found that at the time of his survey a significant portion
(171, or 43.5 percent) were in what they considered a long-lasting rela-
tionship (Dauerbeziehung). True, these relationships lasted less than an
average marriage, but considering the inability of men to marry and
the opprobrium that they risked, they remained intact for a surprisingly
long time. Of the men who responded to the survey (393), 95 were in
relationships that had lasted more than two years, and 37 already had
had their six-year anniversary. While a majority certainly led unattached
lives, those who found relationships seemed to have spent less time in
jail and had fewer suicide attempts.39
Giese drew two conclusions from his findings. First, society was com-
mitting a crime by hindering homosexuals from forming permanent,
loving, ethical relationships with each other and should accept some of
the blame for the sexual promiscuity of the male homosexual. Equally
important, though, was the lesson for homosexual men themselves.
Despite the obstacles, Giese insisted, gay men could form faithful rela-
tionships with each other if they put their minds to it. In another work,
he gave an impressive example of two men (one in his sixties, the other
in his seventies) who lived and worked together and who had been
open with their parents about their relationship. Having lived together
for 14 years, they adopted a 12-year-old boy, ‘who was raised and edu-
cated in place of a child.’ The family celebrated major holidays together
(Christmas, Easter, and birthdays) just as any other family would. Giese
noted that the son had grown up and was happily married. He had a
‘six-year-old daughter who plays the role of the grandchild for the entire
family. She is well-cared for by the “grandfathers” when she visits. In the
meantime, the adopted son has taken over the family business, which
he participates in and will one day inherit.’40
Such examples, even if exceptional, revealed what ‘human nature can

accomplish.’ They demonstrated that men live according to ethical rules
even when they ignore the norms according to which most people live.
These rules do not vary drastically from those the rest of society obeys.
Giese pointed out that straight men and women admitted that they
often did not act morally within their own sexual relationships. Both
heterosexuals and homosexuals can be ‘called’ to ethical behavior, just
as both can ignore this calling.41
Ignoring the call could be perilous for one’s health, Giese argued.
Homosexuals, in particular, had to worry about falling prey to an endless
series of quick sexual encounters, which Giese described as an addic-
tion. In an essay entitled ‘The Role of Addiction,’ Giese noted that
straight men were also capable of becoming addicted to the ‘intoxica-
tion’ of orgasm. Homosexuals, however, were unusually prone to this
psychological weakness. Referring to the theory that homosexuality is
actually an expression of narcissism, Giese argued that homosexuals
tend to see their partners as only a ‘reflection of [their] self, [their] own
body.’ This self-absorption causes them to focus on the sensual expe-
rience of the sexual encounter rather than as a way of experiencing
or getting to know another human being. Such encounters produce a
‘growing feeling of emptiness, a growing insecurity, disconnectedness,
even extremity’ which only leads to more and more encounters of the
same sort. For some, release from this ‘vicious circle’ comes with psy-
chiatric treatment. Others find it through the accidental discovery of
true love: ‘We know a case in which an addiction led ultimately to
the homosexual patient . . . becoming a male prostitute, not because of
the money but because of his hunger for sexual stimulation. Only the
experience of a deeply felt love towards a man of his own age helped
him break loose from the dangerous, perverse cycle in which he was
caught.’42 In such statements we can see Giese’s attempt, similar to that
of Der Kreis, to redraw the line between respectability and dishonor, nor-
mality and abnormality. Homosexuality itself was not perverse, Giese
insisted, only the promiscuous behavior to which homosexuals some-
times fell victim. This was clearly a political strategy aimed at having
homosexuality accepted as a respectable way to live and love.
If homosexuals were not necessarily perverse, then the task of the psy-
chiatrist was not to transform the homosexual into a heterosexual, but
only to ‘correct his detachment’ from the people around him by coun-
tering the destructive impulse behind his promiscuous behavior. Giese
emphasized, however, that this did not mean encouraging homosexu-
als to marry women. One should instead, he stated somewhat vaguely,
aim at ‘cultivating and socializing the transgression,’ by encouraging

either sexual abstinence or, since this was only possible in rather unusual
cases, permanent relationships with another man.43 His redefinition of
perversity and homosexuality also had obvious legal implications. ‘Only
that which harms sexuality’s “rules of living together” (Wohnordung)
should be punished. Attacking an adolescent sexually, for example, both
deserves and demands punishment, since such an attack can lead to
no permanent bond.’44 Paragraph 175 itself, which punished all forms
of sexual encounters between men, should be abolished, since it only
hindered the creation of long-lasting relationships between consenting
gay men.
Rönn’s evaluation of Giese’s argument underestimates the real power
that it had in the 1950s. Giese’s ideas showed a real affinity with the
attitudes of other homophiles in the 1950s, who might seem very con-
servative in comparison with the gay liberation movement that would
emerge in the 1970s, but who cannot be characterized as fascist in any
meaningful sense. Still, Rönn is right in pointing out the real limits
to the arguments that Giese could make against the criminalization of
homosexuality—limits, though, that had nothing to do with any ‘fas-
cist’ origins of his thoughts. If homosexuality was acquired, Giese felt
compelled to admit that there was a real possibility that homosexuality
might spread, especially if large numbers of men were exposed to it
during adolescence, when they were expected to venture into relation-
ships with women, an experience that many young men apparently
found quite frightening. Giese could only confirm, therefore, the fears
harbored by many in the 1950s and early 1960s that the ‘corrupting
homosexual’ might pose a real danger to children and young men.
Giese’s view of homosexuality also made it difficult to produce any argu-
ments for the repeal of Paragraph 175a, which was supposed to protect
children and other dependents from advances by homosexuals. In fact,
Paragraph 175a might even guard against some of the self-destructive
tendencies of male homosexuals since it criminalized male prostitution.
For Giese, it was only Paragraph 175 that inhibited the development of
healthy relationships between adult males.
In carrying out the research for The Homosexual Man in the World,
Giese had received a great deal of support from Heinz Meininger and
many of his friends. The two of them had met back in 1949, when
Meininger invited Giese to talk with his group at one of the regular
meetings. The men who attended the talk were impressed, and in 1950
the club formally affiliated itself with Giese’s Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee. In the course of the year, Giese regularly helped to find
speakers on legal and scientific topics. Another major success for the
new Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was winning over Hermann
Weber as president. Weber had been both a member of Hirschfeld’s orig-
inal group from the 1920s and the leader of the local Frankfurt chapter.
His memory and presence provided some continuity to the organization
and legitimized its claims of carrying on Hirschfeld’s mission. In a short
history of the original Scientific-Humanitarian Committee published by
Weber in the new group’s newsletter, he concluded with the remark,
‘After the past few horrible years we are again ready to take up the fight
for our natural rights with renewed energy. We hope that large numbers
of valuable people will join our committee and propel our movement
forwards.’45
Giese also had some success at attracting attention in West Berlin.
Erich Ritter, a 69-year-old economist whose close run-in with the
Gestapo in 1936 had apparently convinced him to devote his energies
towards the homosexual cause, had already been at work for roughly
a year exploring the possibility of re-creating Hirschfeld’s old organiza-
tion. Beginning in 1948, he had carried on an exchange of letters with
Kurt Hiller about the idea, and Hiller had been encouraging, although he
did admonish Ritter to keep his activities at a purely scientific level and
not to succumb to ‘dilettantism,’ which in Hiller’s mind meant holding
talks in gay clubs.46 In 1949, after coming across Giese’s announcement
in Der Kreis, Ritter quickly put together a group of activists and doctors
to form a local chapter of the committee. The group initially included a
doctor, two journalists, an attorney, and the 22-year-old medical student
Werner Becker, who was a fellow reader and contributor to Der Kreis.47
By this time, Kurt Hiller was also paying attention to Giese’s work.
Having spent the 1940s in England after narrowly escaping the SS, Hiller
was anxious to dive once again into the work of reforming his coun-
try. Between 1947 and 1955, he resumed his activity as a promoter
of pacifism and independent socialism in West Germany, carrying on
a lively correspondence with other German political activists. During
these years, he was mostly concerned with promoting his vision of a
‘Logocracy,’ a Platonic government of intellectuals that would govern
the population until it was mentally and spiritually prepared to accept
the responsibility of democracy.48 But he had not given up on reforming
Paragraph 175, as was evidenced by the number of pieces he wrote for
Der Kreis.
Unfortunately, Hiller’s limited involvement in the new Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee would be divisive. In late 1949, the organi-
zation’s board elected Hiller as an honorary member. Within months,
though, Hiller broke with the new group, in part because he opposed
Giese’s belief in the need to maintain Paragraph 175a for the protection
of youths.49 Hiller also insisted that gay men adopt an aggressive anti-
church position, which ran counter to the low-profile attitude favored
by Giese and other homophiles. As Hiller wrote in one article in Der
Kreis, a gay man ‘who accepts clericalism is no more reasonable than a
Jew who accepted Nazism in Germany during the 1930s.’50 Underlying
these differences in opinion were tensions over who would take on the
leading role in the group. Hiller, after all, had perhaps a more legitimate
claim to being the successor of Magnus Hirschfeld. At first, though, he
was busy with other concerns, so many people, including Werner Becker
in Berlin, looked to Giese to provide the burgeoning gay movement with
some unity—a unity, several activists noted, that had been sorely lacking
during the Weimar period.
And yet, as people quickly learned, Giese himself was a problematic
leader, being torn between contradictory motivations. On the one hand,
he was committed to working towards the reform of Paragraph 175, but
on the other hand, he craved the respect and attention of his fellow sci-
entists and doctors, many of whom distrusted, if not simply opposed,
all efforts to reform the law. In the early 1950s, just as much of Giese’s
attention was taken up by his efforts to re-establish sexology in West
Germany. In April 1950, he organized a seminar for sexual research that
brought together major researchers in the field, including Hans Bürger-
Prinz. Bürger-Prinz was immediately impressed by Giese’s intelligence
and energy. He agreed to become the chairman of a new organization
planned by Giese, the German Society for Sexual Research, which had
the goal of fostering scientific research into sexuality and ‘making its
results useful for the practical needs of the human community.’ Giese
hoped that this organization would place him firmly in the center of
postwar sexology, while also delivering some much needed recognition
for his Institute for Sexual Research. It would help him publish a new
academic periodical (The Journal of Sexual Research) and a new mono-
graph series (Contributions towards Sexual Research) as well as assist
him in organizing further research conferences.51 This German Society
for Sexual Research kept its distance from political activities, and by
implication the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which Giese hoped
would allow for involvement from researchers who were indifferent or
hostile to legal reform. And yet, after the Germany Society for Sex-
ual Research was formed, the purpose of the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee was quickly called into doubt, since their goals greatly
overlapped.52
Giese’s commitment to the role of science in the reform of Para-

graph 175 was seen as problematic by homosexual activists who hoped
for a more aggressive political approach.53 The story of Giese’s Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee during the last months of its existence
remains rather obscure, but it seems that these many tensions caused
some participants to become disillusioned with the group, including
the Berlin activists, Meininger’s association, and Giese himself.54 When
Frankfurt’s city government refused to officially register the organiza-
tion in late 1950, the short-lived Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
disbanded without much of a fight.
In West Berlin, the group of men who had joined the local chapter
of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee did not disband after the
national organization collapsed. Instead, a leadership change quickly
ensued, with the women’s-clothing merchant Hans Borgward taking
over as chairman, joined by the Karl Schorpp as secretary.55 Borgward,
in particular, was well suited to lead the group, since his ‘much-vaunted
Berlin charm and his dependability’ (in the words of one historian of
the group) brought needed life to the organization in this time of cri-
sis. Borgward was crucial in changing the character of the group by
introducing a social life and a clearer sense of belonging. This gave
the group—which now included more than 50 members—greater cohe-
sion, and allowed it to move on to the next stage of its life.56 And yet
Borgward never lost sight of the political goals of the group, thanks
in no small part to his arrest by the Gestapo in 1935, which led to
a three-month stay in a concentration camp and another nine-month
prison sentence. Borgward was not the only one in this group of men
who had experienced Nazi persecution. At least one other had spent
some time in prison, while two others had had close run-ins with the
Nazi law.57
In July 1951, the West Berlin group registered their organization with
the city authorities, this time under a new name: the Society for the
Reform of Sexual Law (Gesellschaft für Reform des Sexualrechts). In the
organization’s new constitution, the group avoided using the word
‘homosexual’, instead opting for a more general statement: ‘The asso-
ciation works towards the penetration of scientific knowledge into the
sexual life of human society and a reform of the laws regarding sex-
uality, and especially the criminal laws, according to the current state
of sexual research.’58 As this statement suggests, the group certainly did
not give up its role diffusing scientific education among its membership,
despite its new emphasis on social undertakings. Indeed, as the previous
leadership of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee passed into the
background, they still continued to maintain contacts with scientists

and other experts.59
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
At the same time that Meininger and Giese were trying to estab-
lish a new movement in Frankfurt, similar work was beginning in
Hamburg. The earliest attempt to establish a friendship club in this
city came from the psychologist Willy Nilius, who moved to Hamburg
from Berlin shortly after the war and tried there to create a German
Friendship League (Deutschen Freundschaftsbund), similar perhaps to an
organization that had existed during the Weimar era.60 Police opposi-
tion and difficulties in finding funding caused the group never to get
beyond the formative stage.61 A little over a year later, a similar group
tried to organize: the International Correspondence Club of Friendship
(Internationaler Correspondence Club Freundschaft), which was associated
with a new gay magazine, Die Freundschaft, published by Rudolph Ihne.
Unfortunately, the magazine did not last long, and the International
Correspondence Club of Friendship seems to have died along with it.
One scholar doubts that the ‘International’ in its name was ‘more than
a wish or a program,’ since reports in Die Freundschaft suggests that their
activities were limited to parties and occasional outings.62
Some of the men associated with these earlier groups most likely
found their way over to a third group that formed in May 1951, the
Club of Friends (Club der Freunde). The founder of this club was Johannes
Dörrast, the chief editor of a new homosexual magazine established in
Hamburg, Die Freunde. Prior to the Nazi takeover, Dörrast had been
active in the Weimar youth movement, and after the war he again
became involved with a youth group, working as secretary for the
Pathfinders (Pfadfinder) until he was arrested for breaking Paragraph 175.
He spent a short time in prison, and upon being released he decided to
invest his energy in the emerging homophile movement. Dörrast had
had some earlier experience in the 1930s producing a youth movement
journal, so in 1951 he established a small office in Hamburg’s St. Pauli
district and released the first issue of Die Freunde in May. It included a
short story about a sexual adventure on the Mediterranean, pictures of
nude men running and playing sports, an essay on male beauty, and
a second essay outlining a Kantian critique of Paragraph 175. In an
opening editorial statement, Dörrast declared the purpose of the maga-
zine to ‘address, advise, help, and encourage’ homosexuals in Germany
and throughout the world. Towards this goal, the magazine issued an
invitation in the final pages of this first issue for local readers to join the
Club of Friends, a group that would meet in Hamburg’s Roxi Bar and
provide an opportunity to overcome the ‘fear of being alone.’63
The Roxi Bar hosted meetings of the Club of Friends for almost
two years. Inside the ‘tastefully furnished’ club room, members drank,
talked, played cards or chess, and read books and magazines that
pertained to their interests. Special occasions featured speakers such
as Dörrast himself, who would exhort gay men to unity and polit-
ical action, or the transvestite performer Cheri Hell, who enter-
tained the guests with such humorous poems as ‘Fairy’s Heaven’
(Der Tuntenhimmel).64 Furthermore, original art sometimes decorated
the red-wallpapered walls of the clubroom. On the night of the
club’s foundation, visitors admired the six modernist-style paintings of
Charles Grieger ‘symbolizing the idea of friendship.’ Membership dues
amounted to 1.5 marks a month. The club served as a kind of closed
society, which reassured members that they were among ‘men of the
same mind’ (gleichgesinnter Menschen) so that they could relax and put
aside their anxieties for a time.65 Strangers trying to get into the club
room were shown the sign that read ‘closed society,’ and visitors from
outside the city were warned by Die Freunde to write to the leaders of the
club for a temporary membership before coming.66
An important person for both Die Freunde and the Club of Friends
was Charles Grieger. He became known in Hamburg’s gay scene in part
for his artwork, mostly drawings and prints, which adorned many of
the magazine’s covers and could be found in several gay bars. At his
apartment in Hamburg, one could almost always find his long-term
boyfriend Guschi Leue, whom Grieger had met shortly after the war at
a bar somewhere along the harbor. In addition, one might meet visitors
from around the world who sought out Grieger for friendship, help, and
advice. Shortly after Grieger’s death, a fellow gay activist remembered
his tendency to hand out money to those in need—even sometimes to
those who didn’t deserve it, since they had only come to Hamburg ‘to
have a good time and then went to him looking for money to get them
back home.’ In such ways, Grieger demonstrated a tremendous faith in
‘his fellow man.’67
Grieger was an active participant in the gay scene who before the Nazi
takeover had owned a well-respected bookshop in Berlin’s Hansaviertel.
He had once met Adolf Brand, who inspired him to get involved in gay
publishing. He worked briefly with the late-Weimar-era magazine Bel
ami until it was shut down by the Nazis. In the early 1950s, with the
economy recovering and the gay scene reappearing, he decided it was
time to get involved again. Berlin, Grieger decided, looked unpromis-

ing for gay publishing, so he moved to Hamburg and eventually joined
Rudolf Ihne shortly after Ihne’s failed effort with Die Freundschaft. The
two formed a partnership to produce a small gay literary journal enti-
tled Pan beginning in early 1951. The fact that Pan was advertised in
the first issue of Die Freunde suggests that a close relationship between
Grieger and Dörrast existed from the very beginning. By September, the
publication of Die Freunde was taken over by Grieger’s firm, with Dörrast
now being employed as chief editor.
Circulation of Die Freunde throughout West Germany promoted
the appearance of small associations of readers similar to Hamburg’s
Club of Friends in other cities, especially in northern Germany.
In Hannover, such a club emerged in March 1951, meeting regularly
at the Schwanenburg bar. It sponsored various social activities over the
next year to try to attract members, including numerous parties, cos-
tume balls, and even social outings. A similar group was established
in West Berlin at the end of 1951 by Martin Knop, founder of the
city’s Amicus Briefbund. The club soon set up a club room in a gay bar
called Die Hütte on Goethestrasse. It quickly established a good working
relationship with the city’s Society for Reform of the Sexual Laws.68
The fate of both Die Freunde and the Club of Friends—both of
which had disappeared by the end of 1952—indicates how impor-
tant homosexual magazines were for the movement. Perhaps the first
of the homosexual magazines to achieve widespread circulation, Die
Freunde very quickly became the target of police and public prosecutors.
It attracted attention in part because of the nude photographs of men
that they risked publishing in their earliest issues. Already in May 1951,
a police complaint in Munich led the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in both
Munich and Hamburg to begin investigating the magazine. The investi-
gation led quickly to the confiscation of issues No. 1 through 3 and an
indictment of the editor Johannes Dörrast under Paragraph 184, West
Germany’s pornography law.69 Unlike conservatives, who viewed any
magazine that catered to homosexuals as pornographic, some individu-
als in Hamburg’s government recognized that ‘homosexual magazines
cannot be considered pornographic [unzüchtig] in the sense of Para-
graph 184 of the penal code or as obscene [schamverletzend] in the
sense of Paragraph 184a merely due to their tendencies.’ Still, a con-
sensus existed between the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Youth Welfare
Office, and many other branches of the city government that the pic-
tures and stories found in these magazines justified moving against their
publishers with ‘all means available to [them].’70
The judges in the case did not agree, though, especially considering
the recent changes made by the editors of Die Freunde. Back in September
1951, probably in anticipation of the legal battles they knew they would
have to fight, Johannes Dörrast had started what he called his ‘new line,’
which did away with the nude photographs and attempted in general
to make the magazine more ‘respectable.’ The new policy temporarily
paid off for Dörrast. On October 22, 1951 the Second Great Chamber
of Hamburg’s district court acquitted him given Dörrast’s promises ‘to
maintain this line in future magazines.’71 The judges’ decision set a
precedent for others to follow. Prosecutors in Dortmund, Bremen, and
Braunschweig agreed with the Hamburg decision that Die Freunde was
safe for publication as long as it kept to the new line. Stuttgart’s pros-
ecutors also came around to this position after that city’s courts had
declared issues 2 and 3 (June and July) pornographic.72
Die Freunde’s ‘new line’ was greeted with a mixed reaction by its audi-
ence. Some wrote in support of the editor’s choice. One man told Die
Freunde, ‘I think that we should not only enjoy nude photographs, but
even more . . . pictures of manly comradeship and love from our daily
life. And we should also not forget the master artworks and creations of
past times.’73 A second letter reminds us that readers interested in main-
taining an air of respectability could find nude photographs as offensive
as conservative heterosexuals. ‘The disappearance of nude photos from
our magazines,’ this man wrote, ‘can only be welcomed. We do not want
any pornographic sheet, but an ethically upright magazine that defends
our view of life. If many readers do not believe that they can get by
without erotic photographs, then they can order them directly from the
publisher.’ This reader believed that publishing nude photos only gave
an improper impression of homosexual feelings: ‘The goal of our maga-
zine should be to bring spiritual nourishment to men of our disposition
and to give them the sense that they do not stand alone. But no eroti-
cism, if for no other reason than to show that the love of friends has a
better foundation than a sexual one.’74
However, some clearly missed the ‘beautiful nude photos.’ One man
remarked that they used to bring ‘so many people happiness. Why are
they missing now? Are you afraid that a few puritans [Sittenrichter] might
turn up their nose? Have you looked at the magazines and journals that
the so-called “normal” people buy and read? What a display of female
flesh! Why do they want to deprive us of this truly innocent pleasure
that harms or hurts no one.’75
Unfortunately for Charles Grieger and Johannes Dörrast, the ‘new
line’ was not successful in protecting the magazine for long. Judges
in Cologne and Koblenz were unrelenting. This left the magazine in

a precarious position. In a letter to the Federal Minister of Justice, the
lawyer for Charles Grieger & Company, Dr. Franz Reinhard, complained
that the magistrate’s court in Nuremberg had ordered a confiscation
of the June and July 1951 issues of Die Freunde for the entire coun-
try. Hamburg’s police department had had to comply, even though
‘the responsible public prosecutor’s office [in Hamburg] had nothing
against their publication.’ This legal situation, Reinhard felt, left their
magazine at the mercy of courts in the most conservative areas of the
country: ‘In Hamburg it is well known that Hamburg’s criminal detec-
tive bureau, primarily on the orders of Bavarian courts, must carry
out the seizure of magazines that the Hamburg officials have no prob-
lem with.’ This problem, Reinhard implied, went against the federalist
spirit of the nation’s new constitution. Equally important, it repre-
sented a serious danger to his client’s company: ‘Their financial risk
is too large when they are constantly in danger that a far-off state
government . . . might order a confiscation for the entire country.’76 He
concluded by asking whether a reform of Paragraph 184 might be
considered by federal officials. In reply, a representative from the Fed-
eral Ministry of Justice was sympathetic but not encouraging. He was
aware of such difficulties and promised to consider how they might
be overcome; however, he doubted that any change could be made to
Paragraph 184.
More conservative members of the federal government were equally
concerned about the problem of differing regional attitudes towards
what was considered pornographic, but for very different reasons. In an
argument written in support of establishing legal barriers to stop youth
from being exposed to dangerous printed material, the Federal Minis-
ter of the Interior noted, ‘The train from Munich to Kiel crosses two or
three states that enforce rules [protecting youth from dangerous mate-
rial] that will most likely soon be made rather strict; it will go through
just as many German states in which such material is freely available.
This would make an effective battle against this danger for our children,
which must be taken very seriously, entirely impossible, as the Bavarian
Ministry of Justice correctly argued.’ Whether or not a magazine or book
was actually pornographic, the Minister suggested, what was needed was
a government body that could make a ‘general judgment’ about the risk
to youth that this work posed.77
In the meantime, Hamburg’s government had not given up its efforts
to hamper the distribution of Die Freunde. If they could not ban it out-
right, perhaps they could stop it from being sent through the mail.
According to Paragraph 4 of the Postal Regulations (Postordnung), matter

sent through the mail whose ‘exterior visible content goes against the
law, the public welfare, or morality is to be excluded from delivery.’
On December 4, 1951 the West German Post Office informed Charles
Grieger & Company that it would no longer deliver Die Freunde since its
‘content is in our opinion immoral in the sense of the already men-
tioned regulation. Due to its homosexual tendencies, it is suited to
offending the modesty (Schamgefühl) of any impartial third party.’ The
Post Office recognized that its editors had made some effort to make
their magazine more ‘reserved,’ but it insisted that this did not alter the
‘morally offensive basic attitude’ of the magazine—in other words, its
central focus, homosexuality.78
The Post Office’s case was based on the fact that magazines delivered
by it had to be sent in an unsealed envelope so that officials could check
to make sure that basic regulations allowing the magazine to be sent
at a cheaper rate were followed. Accordingly, every article and picture
in the magazine could be described as ‘visible content.’ Post officials
noted that youths who were postal employees regularly checked the
contents of magazine envelopes (thereby supposedly exposing them-
selves to the hazardous content of Die Freunde). Furthermore, anyone
could get hold of the magazine after it was delivered, since the enve-
lope was unsealed. In this way, it was possible for youths to ‘acquire
knowledge of the homosexual content of the magazine against the will
of parents and so on.’79 This knowledge, in turn, enabled the spread
of homosexuality to a new generation. Homosexuality, postal officials
explained in later justification of their actions, was not a ‘natural dispo-
sition.’ Most gay men are ‘sucked in [eingezogen] through contact with
homosexual circles or magazines such as [Die Freunde] primarily out of
curiosity.’80
Charles Grieger & Company immediately filed a complaint with
the Federal Ministry of the Postal and Telecommunications System.
After this complaint was rejected on December 18, 1952, the publisher
took its case to the state administrative court (Landesverwaltungsgericht
Hamburg). Reinhard, once again acting as lawyer for the firm, referred
to the Hamburg court decision that the magazine did not violate Para-
graph 184. If the law courts, after all, did not see a work as pornographic,
who was the Post Office to say otherwise? Yet this was beside the point,
Reinhard continued. What was crucial was that the envelope in which
the magazine was sent through the mail was plain. One could not
discern what was in the envelope simply by looking at it. The Post
Office could legally open the package, but Paragraph 4 of the Post
Office Regulations was not designed to protect postal workers, but the
public. The public, in turn, could not legally open the envelope without
invading the privacy of the person to which the envelope was addressed.
In other words, Reinhard had a completely different interpretation of
what ‘exterior’ or ‘visible content’ should mean than that of the Post
Office.81
To make its case, the Post Office asked for the support of the League
of People’s Guardians, who were only too happy to help. Dr. Michael
Calmes, the chairman of the organization, prepared an official state-
ment of his opinion of these magazines, once again registering his
belief that the magazine was pornographic. Yet sensitive to how the
League’s views might be seen by a liberal Hamburg court, Calmes
emphasized, ‘One does not have to be anxious or prudish to admit that,
precisely in today’s climate with the weakness of our young people,
special measures are needed to protect them from becoming familiar
with homosexual tendencies at too early of an age.’ If the mail car-
rier could bring such magazines ‘directly in the house, it would be
all too easy for them to find their way into the hands of unautho-
rized readers, namely youths and children.’82 A leader from a youth
home in Hamburg also related his experiences with gay magazines.
He related the story of a boy who brought Die Freunde into a youth
home in September 1951. The boy gave several ‘sex-education talks’
to a friend with the help of one magazine and was eventually caught
lying with a friend on a bed ‘with red-flushed faces.’ With such exam-
ples, the home leader believed that he had demonstrated the way that
gay magazines spread homosexuality and unruliness throughout the
home.83
The administrative court’s final decision, which came on June 23,
1952, was complicated. First, the judges agreed with the Post Office
that all of the pictures and articles of the magazine counted as ‘visi-
ble content.’ They reasoned that the Post Office had to be empowered
to exclude all illegal or potentially dangerous material from delivery,
even if one could not see it without opening the package. In this
instance, however, they recognized the Hamburg decision that the mag-
azine was not legally obscene or pornographic. In reference to the claim
that the magazines were immoral in a more general way than that
defined by Paragraph 184, the judges declared that they did not have
to make this decision since the Post Office’s regulations were themselves
unconstitutional. The Post Office could no longer rely on this aspect
of Paragraph 4 section 1 since it hindered freedom of speech. The con-
stitution, after all, ‘protected not only the free expression of opinion,
but also the circulation of opinion [Meinungsverbreitung] . . . Circulation

means making it available to a wide group of people . . . passing on a
work in its physical form.’84
The Post Office appealed the decision but lost this case too. Unfor-
tunately, Die Freunde had less luck in the renewed attack of Hamburg’s
public prosecutors. In March and April 1952, Dörrast was again brought
into the city’s district court for an infraction against Paragraph 184 in
the recent issues of his magazine, which had been renamed Freond in
April. According to the summary of the case that Dörrast published in
Freond, the prosecutors accused him of publishing pictures that were ‘in
themselves harmless, but that in connection with the tendencies of the
magazine Freond were immoral.’ The lower magistrate’s court in which
the case was originally tried found that neither the pictures nor the
tendency of the magazine was immoral. The prosecutors appealed the
case. This time the district court handed down a decision that, accord-
ing to Dörrast, ‘had to make one shake his head in wonder.’ Contrary
to the prosecutor’s argument, the court decided that the pictures were
obscene ‘in themselves.’ Left to marvel at the inability of the many
courts and prosecutors to define what was immoral or pornographic,
he was sentenced to paying a fine of 1,000 marks.85
The last issue of Freond appeared in December 1952. What exactly
brought Charles Grieger & Company to the point of bankruptcy—
whether it was the persistent police harassment, the mounting legal
costs, flagging sales, or some combination of the three—we may never
know. The magazine provided no explanation, nor did it announce the
end of publication in its final issue.
Dörrast was temporarily out of a job, but he did not give up yet on
homosexual publishing. He turned to Gustave Leue, who owned a small
publishing company and already had taken on a limited role. In the
summer of 1951, Charles Grieger had decided that including personal
ads in the widely available Die Freunde was too risky, as the ads might
be easily acquired and misused by blackmailers. Grieger had turned to
Gustave Leue to print up the ads as a separate publication which was
then sent only to Die Freunde’s subscribers. After Grieger’s company
closed, Leue set up his own business and hired Dörrast to come work
for him as his editor. Together, they started a new magazine called Vox:
The Voice of Free Men. In the issues that came out in the spring of 1953,
the magazine printed, among other things, an essay on Plato’s view of
love, an article on the biological basis of gender and sexuality, a review
of recent American cultural anthropology dealing with sexuality, and a
book review of the Kinsey report.
Vox did not last long. By the summer of 1953, Gustav Leue Publishers
was running into economic troubles. The last issue appeared in June. For
a short period in the spring of 1954, the company experimented with
reviving Grieger’s old title—this time as Dein Freund. The new publica-
tion was only available by subscription, and it looked very different: this
time, it was printed in ‘postcard’ format, which was small enough to be
sent inconspicuously in any envelope. The experiment was not enough
to save the company. Only two issues of Dein Freund were ever printed.
By this time, the hope that the Club of Friends might become a
national network of associations had long disappeared. Watching the
trouble that Die Freunde was having, the Hamburg club had held its last
meeting around July 1952. The Hannover and Berlin clubs continued
to meet, affiliating for a time with Frankfurt’s Association for a Humane
Way of Life. Eventually, these clubs would get caught up in the next
effort to build a nationwide homophile organization, this time centered
on Bremen.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
In September 1951, a group of gay activists in Bremen, several of whom

had been active in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, founded two dis-
tinct organizations: the International Friendship Lodge (Internationale
Freundschaftloge, or IFLO) and the World League for Human Rights
(Weltbund für Menschenrechte). The IFLO was to serve primarily as a
homosexual social club, not all that different from Frankfurt’s Associa-
tion for a Humane Way of Life or Hamburg’s Club of Friends. At first
it held regular meetings in a couple of rooms at a popular bar, the
Deutschen Haus; then, in August 1952, the IFLO took over the second
floor of the only gay bar in town at the time, the Hotel Schliefmühle,
which it used for educational talks, group discussions, parties, and office
space.86 The World League for Human Rights, on the other hand, took
on the political work. Members of this group dedicated themselves to
the protection of all political minorities, but in particular the organi-
zation singled out the rights of the ‘German homophile minority.’ The
World League vowed to defend this minority against a ‘foolish law based
on incorrect presuppositions that criminalizes the sensuous love rela-
tionship between grown men.’ It specifically invoked the crimes of the
Nazi era to demand that the present democratic state live up to the
promise of providing freedom for everyone: ‘After the horrible murders
that were committed against homophile men during the time of the last
dictatorship, it has now become impossible to tolerate the public scorn
and imprisonment to which men who have done nothing but obey the
command of nature are subjected.’87
Like the Club of Friends, the Bremen activists were interested in build-
ing a nationwide homophile organization. In early 1952, they began the
gay magazine Die Insel, published by Rolf Putziger’s Press, to announce
their program and their desire to bring together similar-minded people
across West Germany. They soon attracted enough interest to inspire
the formation of local chapters in other cities, often beginning with
the readers of Die Insel. A Hamburg chapter of the IFLO was estab-
lished on March 2, 1952 at the Bronzekeller, which met every Tuesday
at 8:00 in the evening. Hannover’s Club of Friends would affiliate itself
with the IFLO by June 1953, at roughly the same time that the rem-
nants of West Berlin’s Club of Friends also re-created itself as a local
version of the IFLO. In July, a chapter of the IFLO was established in
Stuttgart.
The IFLO had mixed results. West Berlin’s chapter quickly died out
for lack of interest, and Stuttgart’s IFLO did not do much better.88
In Hamburg, the local group was carrying on but reported that it suffered
from lack of interest after the original excitement dissipated. In Novem-
ber, the group reported some hope that recently elected leadership
would deliver more initiative as well as ‘humor and charm.’ Recent
meetings had exhibited a more ‘cordial and friendly tone,’ at which ‘dis-
cussions were led, readings were recited, dances were held, and the first
party—under the theme “When the heather blooms”—was a complete
success.’89 Nevertheless, three months later, Hamburg’s group regretted
that it still had a small membership. The leaders had not yet given
up, insisting that it ‘made up for its size with the quality of its meet-
ings.’ The officers worked hard to provide their membership not only
with entertaining evenings, but also with legal advice and a friendly
ear when needed. They were clearly discouraged, though, by the turn-
out on evenings on which a dance was not planned. They had more
serious intentions for the group, after all, than simply offering oppor-
tunities for socializing. In the last report, they tried to reassure people
that there was no risk involved in visiting the more sober meetings.90
After April 1953, we hear nothing more about the Hamburg chapter
in Der Weg. Other chapters of the IFLO had more luck, though. Inter-
est in Hannover’s chapter apparently also declined in early 1953, but
new leadership revived the organization in November and moved the
group to the gay bar Wielandseck, where it met regularly afterwards.91
Bremen’s home organization grew at a healthy rate in 1953, eventually
picking up around 150 members. Their events were well attended, and
evidently several hundred people were known to show up for the group’s
regularly held costume balls.92
Bremen’s World League for Human Rights had another fate in store.
Having changed its name in September 1952 to the Society for Human
Rights (Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte)—its membership thought ‘World
League’ sounded pompous—it was then visited in the course of 1953
by Erwin Haarmann, chief editor of the gay magazine Humanitas.93
Haarmann came up with a plan to transform the Society for Human
Rights into an umbrella organization that would coordinate all the
homophile groups in the region, and perhaps eventually in the nation.
He was an inspirational figure in many ways, as Johannes Werres
recalled: ‘I was at first greatly impressed by him, because he thought and
acted objectively. He possessed leadership characteristics and knew what
he wanted.’94 Haarmann took over leadership of the Society for Human
Rights and, in November 1953, moved its headquarters to the office
rooms of Humanitas in Hamburg (Neustädter Strasse 48). Humanitas now
became the official organ of the society.
Johannes Werres joined Haarmann around this time and became his
secretary. Werres was a bit younger than some of the other major figures
in the movement, having turned 21 only about the time the war ended.
Werres had spent several years in the German army; when the war was
over he returned to his hometown of Cologne, and to his conserva-
tive Catholic family, in order to study theology. He eventually decided
that his desire for men excluded him from the priesthood. When his
parents discovered from Werres’s diary why he had stopped his studies,
his mother had a nervous breakdown and his father wanted to throw
him out of the house. Only the intervention of an understanding Jesuit
priest helped the family to make peace. In early 1950, Werres began his
career as a journalist, taking up work at the South West Radio station in
Freiburg.
By this time, he had already made several forays into the gay scene
in Cologne but had been unimpressed by the Tunten he found in the
gay bars and the unpleasant men he met in the parks. Werres’s one
remarkable experience in the gay scene was his introduction to the
Swiss magazine Der Kreis. It changed his life forever: ‘I began to become
interested in scientific matters and to inform myself about them. I read
books and made the decision to do something for “the cause” [die Sache]
(which was the internal terminus technicus of the homosexual movement
of the time).’95 In 1950, he began to write for Der Kreis and several other
gay magazines under many pseudonyms, but primarily under the name
Jack Argo.
Three years later, Werres found himself right at the center of the
emerging homophile movement of West Germany. Together with
Haarmann, he made frequent trips to Bremen, Berlin, and other cities to
encourage pre-existent groups to incorporate themselves into the Soci-
ety for Human Rights as ‘circles’ (Kreise). In April 1954, Berlin’s Society
for the Reform of Sexual Law affiliated itself with Haarmann’s group, at
the same time that a local ‘Berlin Circle’ was established, quite possibly
out of members of Berlin’s old Club of Friends as it also met weekly at
the bar called the Hütte.96
In the summer of 1954, the Society for Human Rights hit its first
major challenge: Haarmann was arrested and spent two months in
prison for having sex with an 18-year-old. Werres, however, kept up
the work, keeping the energy alive until Haarmann was released.97 Both
Hannover’s and Bremen’s chapters of the IFLO affiliated themselves
with Haarmann’s organization in October, changing their name to the
Hannover and Bremen Circles.98 By November 1954, the anniversary
of the society’s move to Hamburg, Humanitas claimed that all rele-
vant groups in West Germany, including Frankfurt’s Association for a
Humane Way of Life, had affiliated themselves with the Society for
Human Rights. According to Werres, 3,000 men now belonged to the
organization. In the society’s first annual report, Werres announced that
the group had founded a scientific committee that would ‘grow con-
stantly and take over increasingly extensive tasks.’ They planned to
continue the counseling sessions with doctors and lawyers that had
helped thousands ‘regain their faith in mankind and justice,’ as well
as their efforts to find jobs for men who had been released from prison
for breaking Paragraph 175 or other related laws. The society also was
working to create an Institute for Sociological Research to investigate
the lives of homosexuals through polls and questionnaires.99 In short,
homophile activists in the country had every reason to be optimistic.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The efforts to rebuild a homosexual movement in the early 1950s were

closely tied with the expansion of homosexual publishing in the early
Federal Republic of Germany. Although the demise of Charles Grieger &
Company and then Gustave Leue’s press were clear blows to the move-
ment, there were nevertheless other magazines on the market by this
time. By 1952, Frankfurt’s Association for a Humane Way of Life had
expanded their newsletter into a more formal magazine, now called
Die Gefährten. In Hamburg, there were publishing companies owned by
Rolf Putziger and Gerhard Prescha. Putziger began publishing Die Insel in
late 1951, changing the name of the magazine to Der Weg zu Freundschaft
und Toleranz (The Path to Friendship and Tolerance) in September 1952.
Gerhard Prescha’s press was a relative late comer. Prescha’s magazine Der
Ring was first released in April 1955.
The most important company of the mid-1950s was the Hamburg-
based Christian Hansen Schmidt.100 The company’s original magazine,
Hellas, was dedicated to remembering and appreciating the culture of
antiquity, with its tolerance and recognition of same-sex love. Publica-
tion of Hellas was stopped, however, in August 1954, as the magazine
threw its resources behind three others—Freond (a title picked up from
Gustave Leue that was now available only by subscription in postcard
format), Das Kleine Blatt (which as before handled only personal ads
and was available only by subscription), and Humanitas.101 As we have
seen, Humanitas was edited by Erwin Haarmann and became closely
associated with the Society for Human Rights. It had a more high
brow image than the rest of the era’s homosexual magazines, focus-
ing on serious essays that examined homosexuality from a range of
legal, religious, philosophical, and scientific perspectives. Its cover was
rather plain: instead of the photographs of attractive men usually found
on the front of homosexual magazines, Humanitas simply displayed a
table of contents. This journal was also self-consciously political: the
producers called it an ‘organ of struggle’ in the fight for homosex-
ual rights, and it tried to reach a wider audience among the West
German public by taking on other progressive topics such as the remil-
itarization of West Germany and the death penalty. This may have
been aimed at preventing legal persecution against the magazine, but it
also lent Humanitas respectability and sobriety that many middle-class
homophiles appreciated.
For a short time during the first half of the 1950s, these numerous
titles—Die Freund, Pan, Vox, Die Insel, Die Gefährten, Der Ring, Hellas,
Humanitas, and others—promoted the rise of a ‘counterpublic,’ in the
words of Michael Warner, in which desires and perspectives could be
affirmed, social and personal personas fashioned and refashioned, and
arguments against legal and social discrimination developed. In such
a counterpublic, ‘a dominated group aspires to recreate itself as a pub-
lic and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant
social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant cul-
ture as a public.’102 This alternate discursive arena allowed for ideas,
images, and language to circulate that were ‘regarded with hostility’ and,
indeed, judged as crude and pornographic within the wider public of the
1950s.103
This counterpublic had an important function for the overall

homophile movement. These magazines announced meetings, summa-
rized recent activities, and printed political essays by their leaders. They
suggested books in German and other languages that readers might
enjoy. They also republished newspaper articles from all over West
Germany that documented the persistent shame and legal persecution
that gay men faced in the new Federal Republic.
Next to this more serious material, most gay magazines tried to pro-
vide entertainment. They generally included photographs and pictures
of men, as well as a selection of poems and romantic short stories. They
also published letters from readers. Some of these letters praised or crit-
icized the magazine for various choices that the editors made. Many
readers simply wanted to relate how much the magazines had affected
their lives. In these letters, one encounters many people who turned to
these magazines as a way of overcoming their feelings of isolation. ‘I am
so happy,’ wrote one Vox reader, ‘to have gotten to know your mag-
azine. I am 22 years old . . . and suffer greatly from the loneliness that
my peculiar fate has damned me to. You have opened up a world that
was previously closed to me. I dare once again to have hope.’104 Others
asked questions about homosexuality or requested advice on problems
that the readers were dealing with, sometimes of a legal nature but more
often about personal matters.
Some material printed in the gay magazines indicates the ways that
these periodicals were a significant feature of the gay scenes across West
Germany. One primary goal of the publications was to foster relation-
ships between homosexual men. They ran advertisements for bars in
Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, and other major West German cities that
catered to homosexuals. They let men know about clubs and other orga-
nizations that brought gay men together. Finally, most of them regularly
printed several pages of personal ads, through which gay men sought
friends and, of course, lovers. Many men who tried to establish mean-
ingful relationships through these ads reported being disappointed by
the results. Still, these personals held out the hope of meeting a good
match in a world where it often seemed difficult enough to locate men
who were interested in same-sex contact, let alone someone who pos-
sessed a desired personality. This hope is illustrated by a short story
printed in Der Weg, in which the central character, Thomas, despair-
ing of ever finding a true love, decides to place a personal ad in a
‘small, courageous’ magazine. ‘And then it was as if he had been sud-
denly plunged into the center of the world. Day after day he received
letters—two, four, once even seven in a day.’ He is not excited by most
of the responses, but eventually he finds one in his postbox written by
a co-worker, of all people. Both had worked in the same office for years
without saying barely a word to one another. Now, thanks to Thomas’s
personal ad, the two were brought together, instead of being forced to
live out their lives in quiet isolation.105
Most startlingly, this counterpublic allowed for a range of images of
men to be circulated that were very different from what could be found
in other media. Whether nude, semi-dressed, or simply at work, the
men pictured in the magazines were clearly offered as objects of phys-
ical desire. This objectification of masculine bodies, so common today
in media and advertising, was almost entirely absent in the 1950s, and
itself represented an important aspect of the counterdiscourse of the
homosexual public. This objectification brought pleasure for gay men,
but more too: in a social-cultural context that only served up female
bodies as objects of visual pleasure, gay magazines implicitly offered
reassurance that male bodies could be objects of desire. For someone
who both enjoyed looking at men and who desired himself to be seen
in such a light, this was enormously validating. One ‘very young reader,’
as he called himself, told Die Insel that this magazine had ‘cast a bright
light’ in his life. He especially appreciated the ‘technically and artisti-
cally successful pictures,’ which helped to make Die Insel the best of its
kind in his opinion.106
It was much more than just the images of men that seemed threat-
ening to the heterosexual society, as is made clear by a letter written by
the League of People’s Guardians complaining about these magazines
to the West German Minister of Justice. Revealing some significant anx-
ieties about the freedoms of democracy and the liberal market place,
the men and women of the moral purity organization argued that
these magazines represented the worst ‘abuse of the freedom of press
and trade’ made available by the young democracy.107 Their romantic
stories and erotic photographs were a dangerous manifestation of the
‘sexualization’ that threatened to overrun German society. Even more
offensive in their eyes was the fact that gay men were openly using
these magazines to meet one another. The chairman of the League,
Michael Calmes, complained in October 1952 in a letter to the Federal
Minister of Justice, ‘The appendix to the magazine Der Weg . . . is par-
ticularly worrisome [bedenklich]. Here, under the heading “Exchange of
Ideas—Correspondence—Job Market,” there are personal ads in which
homosexuals are obviously trying to make contact with one another.
In the enclosed issue from September 1952, there are no less than four
pages of such personals.’ Such a public forum for homosexuals seemed
to Calmes a flagrant flouting of morality and the law. Equally important,
such forums threatened to attract the attention of youths and draw

them into circles of gay men. Calmes ended his letter by pleading ‘in
the name of those youths who are endangered by these machinations’
that the Federal Minister take whatever steps necessary to stop this
‘unchecked recruitment for homosexuality.’108
Last but certainly not least, this counterpublic circulated a range of
essays and letters which attacked the criminalization of homosexuality
embodied in Paragraphs 175 and 175a. There was some hope in the
early 1950s that these laws might be reformed by lawmakers, or simply
thrown out by the courts. The legal standing of the two laws, as we have
seen, was still being disputed in the court system through 1954, and
with every court case there was hope that the law might be thrown out
entirely, or at the very least it would be replaced by the pre-1935 version
of the laws (as had been done in East Germany). This version would
have been much preferable to most homosexuals, given that the earlier
requirement that prosecutors prove that an act of bodily penetration
had occurred would make court conviction difficult and at the same
time would open up a range of decriminalized sexual activity such as
mutual masturbation. Furthermore, the pre-1935 law specified lighter
prison sentences.
Between June and August 1954, Humanitas published in serial form
an essay entitled Hustler Karl: A Criminological Report by Botho Laserstein
that attacked Paragraph 175.109 Laserstein himself was not homosexual,
but a liberal-minded attorney motivated primarily by a desire to remove
the vestiges of Nazism from the West German state. As a German of
Jewish descent, Laserstein had fled to France in 1933 when he was 32
years old, where he had managed to elude the Nazis for the length of the
war. His family, however, was not so lucky: his parents were deported
to Riga in 1942, and his wife and daughter were caught and mur-
dered in 1943. Laserstein returned to Düsseldorf in 1951, determined
to devote his life to the liberalization of Germany. Besides fighting the
proposed restoration of the death penalty and loudly protesting against
West German rearmament, he also devoted himself to the repeal of
Paragraph 175, a cause that would bring him the most notoriety and
personal trouble. Thanks in part to his friendship with the liberal attor-
ney and state prosecutor from Hamburg, Ernst Buchholz, he became a
regular speaker at the meetings of various gay organizations in Hamburg
and Hannover. He soon was writing regularly for the gay magazines
Humanitas, Vox, and Hellas.
Laserstein’s essay Hustler Karl argued that Paragraph 175 turned homo-
sexuals into the victims of hustlers, ‘the most dangerous of criminals,’
who robbed, blackmailed, and even murdered them.110 The abolition

of Paragraph 175 would actually promote public order by lessening the
‘sexual need’ of homosexuals that contributed to the hustler problem in
many large cites. Such a legal change, then, was required not simply by
a sense of decency, but also out of ‘Christian neighborly love.’111
Laserstein’s example reveals the risks that came from taking such a
stance. After the publication of Strichjunge Karl in 1954, the Minister of
Justice in Düsseldorf warned Laserstein that an ‘appointed judge cannot
write something like that in Düsseldorf. Maybe in Berlin or somewhere
else that would be possible, but not here.’112 Laserstein had already been
closely watched because of his criticisms of Germany’s legal system and
his participation in a Leftist discussion group in Cologne. His growing
activism on behalf of homosexuals was the last straw. In June 1954, he
was transferred to Essen to occupy the unglamorous position of deputy
judge (Hilfsrichter). On 31 April 1955 he was forced into early retirement
at the age of 54. Bitter and disheartened, Laserstein took his own life
later that same year.113
Laserstein’s argument that Paragraph 175 actually promoted
criminality instead of hindering it was an old one that had been made
by Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, and other opponents of
the law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.114 Another
argument popular among opponents of Paragraph 175 was that by
isolating, criminalizing, and victimizing homosexuals, the law drove
homosexuals to suicide.115 This was a subject of a play by the author Rolf
Italiaander, performed in 1952 at the Hamburg Kammerspiele Theatre.
Italiaander—who today is probably best known for his many works on
the history and culture of Africa—had moved from Berlin to Hamburg
in 1947, along with friend and lover Hans-Ludwig Spegg. A year later,
he joined Hans Henny Jahnn as one of the founders of Hamburg’s Free
Academy of Arts. Although during the Nazi era he had written primarily
war literature and stories about World War I-era pilots, he now turned
to translating and reworking Maurice Rostand’s play The Trial of Oscar
Wilde from French, a sign that his mind was already occupied with the
West German laws against homosexuality.116
His play The Right to Oneself was written and performed during the fol-
lowing year; it was widely reported on in the homosexual press and even
gained a certain amount of wider media attention.117 It was inspired by a
letter sent to the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper in 1951 and reprinted
by the gay magazine Die Freunde later that year. In it, a mother mustered
the courage to plead for more public understanding of these ‘unhappy
people.’ 118 She reported that her first son had drowned himself in 1930
because he had been in danger of being indicted for breaking Para-

graph 175. Before his suicide, she had known about his ‘unfortunate
disposition’ for some time and had done all she could ‘to make his
difficult life easier.’ Another child arrived in 1928 with a second mar-
riage. She had prayed for a daughter but had given birth to a son.
As she had feared, this boy also showed signs of being a homosexual
despite his ‘strict upbringing’ and her tireless efforts to ‘distance him
from everything that might prove dangerous.’ As she put it, ‘I did every-
thing I could to bring him up in a different way, but Nature is stronger.
What can someone do against his innermost disposition?’ Privileging
the mother–son bond above all others, she declared that ‘only mothers
who have experienced such worries and troubles can judge them prop-
erly.’ Then she asked readers to imagine what they would do if their son
turned out to be one of the ‘unfortunate ones.’ She concluded, ‘It would
be a great relief to me if our law would be finally changed, for I presently
have the constant fear that my son—who is everything in the world to
me—also could be driven to take his own life.’119
Italiaander realized that this letter provided an interesting oppor-
tunity. In some ways it resembled late-nineteenth-century arguments
against Paragraph 175 insofar as it emphasized the suicides and black-
mail that resulted from the law. However, having these arguments come
from the mouth of a mother resonated with both the sentimental treat-
ment of children and the value placed on strong family bonds that were
fast emerging as dominant cultural themes of the Adenauer era. Both
of these attitudes were used by politicians, religious leaders, and youth
welfare advocates to paint gay men as a threat to the German family and
the nation’s youth. Italiaander realized that they might also be used to
nurture compassion for homosexual sons and their parents.
Like the author of the letter, the central figure of Italiaander’s The Right
to Oneself is a mother who has already lost one son to a Paragraph 175-
related suicide and now suspects that her second son, Eric, is attracted
to men too. When she asks him why he does not spend more time with
girls, he replies, ‘Oh, Mother, you should know me better than that.
I don’t really care for those young things. They bore me. Their inter-
ests aren’t the same as mine!’ The father, who knows nothing about the
background of the first son’s death and therefore does not ascertain the
motive behind his wife’s questions, tells her to ‘give the boy some free-
dom.’ The wife, however, takes Erich’s answer as a confirmation of her
fears and decides to inform her husband about her suspicions. The father
at first rejects them based on his high estimation of his son’s character:
‘My Louise, thank God I can satisfy your worries completely. There is no
reason to worry about this boy. Erich takes after me entirely. He is an

industrious, reliable, clean boy through and through, who will certainly
take the straight path. No, no, you don’t need to worry at all!’120 But
after hearing that his own sister Käthe, who is a lesbian, agreed with his
wife’s assessment, he loses his confidence.
Erich returns home unwittingly to an irate father and a mother in
tears. ‘Tell me! Tell me the truth! Tell me the whole truth or I may
lose control of myself! It can’t be true! Tell me that it isn’t true!’ the
father bleats out, grabbing his son by the collar. The mother reminds her
husband what he said just minutes ago about freedom: ‘Either personal
freedom exists, or it doesn’t. You, however, have two sets of standards,
as does everyone today. In our country such people are still subjected to
medieval laws that have long been abolished in other states.’121 Never-
theless, the father is not dissuaded. Surmising what has happened, Erich
announces that he will go to stay with his friend Eberhard, whose par-
ents accept their relationship. He leaves with one final comment: ‘Father
obviously thinks only of Sodom and Gomorrah when he hears about
friendships between men. Our stars, though, are David and Jonathan,
Patrocles and Achilles.’ Despite her martyred countenance, the mother
declares that she is only ‘a mother who has ripened with her chil-
dren. A mother who desires to fight for her children, against inhumane
laws.’122
As the mother’s demands for freedom indicate, Itaaliander’s play
makes other arguments beyond simply pleading for sympathy for homo-
sexuals and their families. The title of the play itself refers to Kurt
Hiller’s legal dissertation from 1908 by the same name, in which Hiller
argued that individuals had the right to do what they wanted to with
their bodies, even if that meant committing homosexual acts or even
suicide.123 As we shall see in Chapter 5, such an argument would res-
onate with the sexual liberalism increasingly articulated in legal circles
during the early 1950s. The context in which the play was performed
in 1952 reinforced this argument. Directed by Ida Ehre, it was one
in a series of five plays developed in the Dramatic Seminar, a group
founded by Günther Weisenborn to cultivate new German directors and
playwrights.124 The five works addressed cases in which the constitu-
tion, freedom of conscience, or human rights in general were abridged,
employing themes that included racism, unequal justice for different
classes, prejudice against conscientious objectors, and finally the laws
and attitudes against homosexuals.
The performance received mixed reviews in Hamburg’s press. The
Hamburger Morgenpost commended Italiaander for having the ‘courage
to deal with Paragraph 175 dramatically’ and for challenging the audi-
ence to think.125 Dr Jürgen Petersen from the Hamburger Abendblatt
similarly praised the piece as a ‘call to action, a defense, a mani-
festo’ that, despite some ‘unevenness in the dialog,’ was not without
promise, especially in the character of the mother.126 Other reviews
were more critical, though. The Hamburger Echo felt that none of the
plays in the series thoroughly presented their characters and prob-
lems. In the case of The Right to Oneself, the abilities of the expe-
rienced director Ehre fell victim to difficulty of the ‘delicate theme’
and the weaknesses of the actors.127 Die Neue Zeitung, published by
the American occupation authorities in Munich, seemed to identify
all political activism as an attack against the state. It denounced the
five plays as ‘political cabaret’ that did not demonstrate ‘practical
social criticism, but emotional anti-Bonn propaganda.’ This group of
‘dilettantes’ had conspired together not to motivate true discussion
of legal or natural rights, but simply to attack the German sense of
rights (Rechtsgefühl). The Right to Oneself in particular was an ‘edu-
cational skit for school children in the tenth grade [Untersekunda]’
that used the ‘cry of a tormented mother’ to bypass reason.128 From
the other end of the political spectrum, the communist Hamburger
Volkszeitung questioned whether a ‘sickness can be made the subject
of a one-act drama.’ Furthermore, it questioned the play’s assumption
that homosexuality was inherited, promoting the standard Leninist-
Stalinist belief that it was a sickness of capitalist society. Pleas for
tolerance, therefore, were misplaced. ‘If one wants to combat this phe-
nomenon,’ the review concluded, ‘then he must erect true and honest
social conditions.’129
Despite such criticisms of the play, the actual audience was ‘friendly
and open-minded,’ according to Petersen. Another member of the audi-
ence agreed, mentioning that he was surprised that the applause for this
theme—‘which doubtless concerned a smaller number of people than
the race question, the problems of conscientious objectors, etc.’—was
just as loud as that which greeted the other plays. He guessed that some
members of the audience had trouble relating to the topic or the diffi-
culties that the three characters faced, since they ‘certainly were hearing
about this problem for the first time.’130 Yet other audience members
obviously could identify all too well. During a discussion that followed
the Sunday performance of the five plays, a 36-year-old man stood up
and told the audience that he had been held in one of the Nazi concen-
tration camps because of his homosexuality. Recently, he had lost his
job because his employers had discovered his past sentence. He spoke
about the continual social repression that he faced, during which some-
one yelled, ‘Six authors have some new material!’ During this discussion,
Rolf Italiaander explained that his criticism of Paragraph 175 was only
part of a ‘larger assault on the hypocritical morals of their so-called soci-
ety.’ In fact, he had already felt the bite of this prejudice in the number
of people who had refused to shake his hand after the performance.
Italiaander then opened the floor to an unnamed lawyer in the audi-
ence (most likely Ernst Buchholz) who summarized the current efforts
of different groups and individuals to reform Paragraph 175.131
Criticisms of Paragraph 175 circulating in the homosexual counter-
public of the early 1950s occasionally echoed voices from an earlier
era. In an article printed in the gay magazine Vox, the attorney Franz
Reinhard argued that according to the theories of Magnus Hirschfeld
homosexuals were a kind of ‘Third Sex.’ As the Basic Law guaranteed
that no one should be put at a disadvantage because of their biologi-
cal sex (Geschlecht), any law that restricted homosexual behavior was in
fact a form of sexual discrimination.132 Hirschfeld was also remembered
by the Berlin activist Werner Becker. Like Hirschfeld, Becker believed
that science and medicine held out the best hope of eradicating prej-
udice and transforming the legal situation for homosexuals. He was
optimistic about the genetic research of Theo Lang, which seemed to
confirm Hirschfeld’s belief that homosexuality was an inborn character-
istic. Continued research in this direction, he predicted in an essay for
Der Kreis, would gradually undermine the belief that homosexuality was
rooted primarily in seduction.133 His faith in science led Becker in 1950
to become one of Hans Giese’s ‘most aggressive propagandists’ and an
early supporter of Giese’s efforts to build a new Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee.134
However, scientific-based arguments for legal reform were not uni-
versally embraced by homophile activists or others participating in the
1950s gay counterpublic. Becker acknowledged that the experience of
Nazism had led many homosexuals to give up their belief in the bene-
fits of scientific research. ‘Even among active combatants for the equal
rights of homosexuals,’ he wrote in an article for Der Kreis, ‘there are in
fact a few of the opinion that medical research and even in general scien-
tific investigations regarding the origin and nature of homosexuality are
completely useless, and even dangerous.’ Although a believer in science
himself, Becker was forced to admit that ‘medical-scientific arguments
cannot solve the problem alone. In addition, what is required is a legal-
philosophic argument that the homosexual disposition of a circle of
people does not harm others not involved.’
Becker may have overstated the amount of skepticism about science

in the movement, as suggested by the growing influence of Giese and
the attention attracted by the ICSE congresses, with their many sci-
entific talks. Nevertheless, it is rather surprising how little we hear of
Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘Third Sex’ arguments in the postwar era, espe-
cially given their prominence back in the 1920s. But perhaps it should
not be unexpected; Hirschfeld had died in exile in 1935, and by the
early 1950s memory of his work was already beginning to fade. Despite
some efforts by select activists and the gay magazines to keep his mem-
ory alive, science had changed a great deal in the past two decades.
As one of Hirschfeld’s biographers, Manfred Herzer, has written, ‘the
old sexology was completely dominated by biology and especially
by Darwinism. Sociology and historical perspectives were neglected
with extreme consequences, or social processes were given a biological
interpretation.’135
Furthermore, Hirschfeld’s notion of the effeminate male Uranian
was badly out of sync with the stereotypes of male homosexuality
that had evolved since the 1930s. Just as important, his central claim
that homosexuality was always an inborn condition was clearly out of
favor by the mid-1950s. Most scientists had turned to psychologically
or sociologically based arguments, and even those who believed that
homosexuality could be an inborn trait in the case of ‘true homosex-
uals’ also accepted that a majority were ‘pseudohomosexuals’ whose
orientation had been acquired through some combination of social
environment and concrete experience.
In place of the scientific and medical arguments so prominent dur-
ing the 1920s, homophile activists turned to other arguments—some
familiar, but others quite new. Like Italiaander and Lasterstein, these
activists emphasized the injustice of a law that drove men to suicide
and created the conditions for further crime at the hands of blackmail-
ers or murderous roughnecks. Furthermore, similar to other homophiles
in the United States and Western Europe, they hoped that by showing
society that homosexuals were upright, proper citizens, the government
might be convinced to decriminalize homosexuality, at least among
consenting adults. Homosexuals did not deserve to have their sexu-
ality grouped with ‘kleptomania, masochism, and sadism,’ or for that
matter with sensational murders or other kinds of criminality, as was
the wont of sensationalist newspapers.136 But this meant that homo-
sexuals needed to do their part to distance themselves from Tunten,
disreputable hustlers, or child predators so commonly associated with
same-sex desire.
Most importantly, homophile activists focused initially on legal and

constitutional reasons to discard Paragraph 175. As Julian Jackson has
recently pointed out, the international homophile movement of the
early 1950s ‘deployed a discourse of citizenship’ that drew upon the
language of democratic freedoms widely disseminated during the strug-
gle against fascism, and upon the language of human rights anchored
in such important documents as the 1948 United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.137 In West Germany, such discourse led
homophile activists to emphasize the way that Paragraph 175 con-
flicted with the constitution’s guarantees of the ‘free development of
personality’ and the equality of men and women before the law.138
The most basic constitutional argument, one that did not disappear
from the rhetoric of homophile activists even after it was rejected by
the Federal High Court, was that Paragraph 175 represented a remnant
of Nazi thinking. Some activists would try to generalize the law into
an overall condemnation of West German society in ways that would
foreshadow the rhetoric of the 1960s New Left and counterculture.139
In an early statement printed in March 1952, Bremen’s IFLO asserted
that the continued existence of Paragraph 175 was proof that authori-
tarian thinking lived on beyond the supposed ‘zero hour’ of 1945. This
continuity required that the present German state accept some respon-
sibility for the crimes committed by its Nazi predecessors: ‘we solemnly
accuse this state in the name of millions of dead individuals who were
driven from life in the course of an era of law which punishes the sen-
suous love between man and man—in the name of destroyed families
and uncounted numbers of broken hearts—and above all in the name
of those who are holy to us.’ In this way, they used the memory of the
Nazi persecution to demand better treatment for homosexuals under the
law.140
Around the same time, Johannes Dörrast from Die Freunde made a
similar argument when he suggested that little had changed for homo-
sexuals after 1945. ‘In Adolf Hitler’s Reich, reason was stomped on and
power politics, racial insanity, and a murderous lust drove people to
persecute us.’ In ‘Adenauer’s Reich,’ the reasons for this persecution may
have changed, but the result was much the same. Now, Dörrast wrote,
homosexuals were harassed because of thoughtlessness, unreasonable-
ness, and religious intolerance. He then called on gay men to take a
stand: ‘We let ourselves be caught and abused once! Will we do the same
a second time?’141
A rather novel strategy used by some activists was to describe
homosexuals as a minority deserving protection from legal and social
discrimination. This was a notion first developed by the American writer

Edward Sagarin, who published his landmark book The Homosexual
America in 1951 under the pseudonym Daniel Webster Cory. In this
book, Sagarin drew a parallel between homosexuals and the many other
minorities that existed, and were persecuted, within American society
at the time. Homosexuals, he wrote, are a minority both ‘numerically’
and because of their ‘caste-like status’: ‘Our minority status is similar,
in a variety of respects, to that of national, religious and other ethnic
groups in the denial of civil liberties; in the legal, extra-legal and quasi-
legal discrimination; in the assignment of an inferior social position; in
the exclusion from the mainstream of life and culture.’142 Though pub-
lished in English, the book was widely discussed in Der Kreis and other
homosexual magazines.143 As one reviewer noted, ‘Cory sees the prob-
lem of homosexual men as a minority problem and connects it with
the history of other kinds of minority persecution—whether that of
blacks in America, of “colored people” in South Africa, of Jews in Hitler’s
Germany, or of the constantly repeated attempts to suppress religious
minorities.’144
This language almost immediately took hold among some homophile
activists of West Germany, as it invoked memories of ‘recent history’
while at the same time echoing post-World War II human rights dis-
course. The Holocaust, of course, served as a glaring example of the
atrocities that can result when barriers to minority persecution are
removed. Protecting minorities, therefore, was seen as a crucial aspect
of the reintroduction of democracy into West Germany. As Johannes
Dörrast put it, ‘We live in a state which proudly calls itself “demo-
cratic” . . . Democracy, however, does not mean dictatorship of the
majority. At its deepest level, democracy means tolerance . . . Protecting
minorities from the law and the terror of the masses should be the fore-
most task of every democratic leadership.’145 Minorities could play a
crucial role in supporting democracy because they were not part of the
majority that exhibited such a ‘devotion to authority.’ The IFLO wrote,
‘Only a small minority therefore will take a positive interest in the state.
We belong to this minority.’146
Arguments against Paragraph 175 that were circulating in the coun-
terpublic of the early 1950s failed to make much of an impact on the
wider West German public. Comparisons of homosexuals to Jewish vic-
tims of the Holocaust were likely to strike a raw nerve in an era in which
the Holocaust was referenced vaguely at best. Moreover, homosexuals’
association with criminality in the minds of most West Germans kept
homosexuals firmly segregated from such ‘real’ victims of the Holocaust
as the Jews. Associations with criminality also made it difficult for many
West Germans to feel much sympathy for the incidents of blackmail
and suicide among the gay population. Appeals to science proved rather
weak in an era in which science often seemed to undergird prejudices
about homosexuals being ‘sick’ and to support a law that would halt
this ‘contagion.’ Any suggestion that homosexuals could be upright,
respectable citizens found little resonance within the wider culture,
where the anxieties about youth, masculinity, and German families
seemed to demand state intervention. The constitutional arguments
pursued by many opponents of the law were repeatedly rejected by the
courts. And last, the relative isolation of the homosexual counterpublic,
where many of these arguments were made the most forcefully, meant
that they had little chance of being heard by a wider audience.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The hopes nourished by the expansion of homosexual publishing and

the re-emergence of a homosexual movement were dashed in 1955,
as the magazines faced mounting legal obstacles and the homophile
organizations faced unforeseen events. As the story of Die Freunde
shows, homosexual magazines had to withstand constant legal harass-
ment. At first, prosecutors relied on West Germany’s pornography laws
(Paragraphs 184 and 184a) in their efforts to shut down homosexual
publishers. However, the difficulty in securing a conviction in the case
of Die Freunde illustrated the problems that legal authorities in the
early 1950s frequently encountered in controlling the circulation of
printed material that lay somewhere ‘on the boundary between good
and bad.’147 It was not simply the homosexual publications: there was a
growing number of magazines aimed at a heterosexual audience, such
as Liebe and Ehe (Love and Marriage) and several nudist periodicals.148
Publishers of such risqué material could be held accountable only if
it was deemed pornographic as defined by Paragraph 184. Judges dis-
agreed, though, on what counted as pornographic, with the result that
there was a great deal of regional difference in how the law was applied.
Paragraph 184a did not forbid the production of ‘shameless’ material,
only its sale to underage children. This meant that it mainly applied to
newspaper and magazine dealers, who proved difficult to convict: they
often successfully defended themselves by claiming that they did not
realize the extent of the definition, or that they were unfamiliar with
the specific content of the material. As one group of lawmakers wrote,
‘Considering the large number of magazines and newspapers, magazine
dealers cannot be asked to check their content in all cases.’149 What

child-protection advocates, moral-purity crusaders, and legal authori-
ties increasingly demanded was a renewal of the Weimar-era ‘trash and
smut’ law. Such legislation, they argued, would create a nationwide sys-
tem that could overcome the regional differences in legal enforcement
and create an easily accessible list of material that should not be sold to
minors.
A new ‘trash and smut’ law was bound to be controversial, especially
given the recent history of rampant official censorship. First proposed by
Christian Democratic representatives to the Bundestag in October 1949,
the Bill against the Distribution of Printed Material Dangerous to Youth
was submitted for committee debate in the course of the summer of
1950. In the minds of many supporters, it was a natural correlate to the
bill aimed at protecting youth in public, which was moving through the
West German parliament and would eventually become law in late 1951
(as will be discussed in the next chapter). However, the ‘trash and smut’
bill encountered more opposition. As the committees discussed this new
youth protection law, the press launched its offensive. In an article
entitled ‘Black Lists Already?’ Wolfgang Jäger from Northwest German
Broadcasting (NWDR) Radio praised the efforts to protect youth from
public dangers but warned against the even greater danger of reintro-
ducing censorship. ‘Simply the fact that the lawmakers’ understanding
of ‘immoral’ is not defined,’ he wrote, ‘is enough to be skeptical about
this bill. In fact, Paragraph 184 of the penal code gives sufficient power
to control the distribution of such material.’150 The editors of the liberal
weekly Die Zeit agreed that the law was ‘well suited to endangering the
freedom of speech.’151 There were no guarantees that the vague defini-
tions established by the law would not be used for political purposes.
Even when the language of the bill explicitly forbade the envisioned
Federal Board of Review from basing its decision on ‘political, social,
religious, or philosophical content,’ there was ‘no way to ensure that
a committee will not base its decision on other grounds besides those
foreseen in the law.’152
Despite challenges from the media as well as opposition from the
Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Social Democratic Party, and the West
German Communist Party, the Law against the Distribution of Written
Material Endangering Youth was finally passed by parliament into law
on July 9, 1953. It established a Federal Board of Review (Bundesprüfstelle)
consisting of representatives from every West German state, one from
the Federal Ministry of Interior, and eight other members who repre-
sented specific cultural areas (for example, art, literature, publishing,
and the churches). This board decided which books, magazines, pam-
phlets, pictures, or any other written or printed material were dangerous
to youth, either because they were ‘immoral’ or they ‘glorified crime,
war, or racial hatred.’ It then published a list of these works, which it
sent to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the governments of every
West German state, and other concerned agencies, organizations, and
individuals, including the publisher and the author of the piece (when
it was possible to determine this). Works on the list were not supposed
to be sold or made available to children under the age of 18; further-
more, they could not be laid out or hung up either inside or outside a
shop or kiosk. All advertisements for this material, whether posters or
mail-outs, were forbidden.
The 1953 law had serious consequences for homosexual publishing.
The editors of Die Zeit had warned that, even if the law seemed innocu-
ous as it ‘leads not to forbidding publications but only to restrictions
in business,’ ultimately its restrictions could ‘come quite close to—or
even become the same as—a prohibition if they are in place over a long
period of time.’153 Even before the law had passed, circulation numbers
for homosexual magazines were low. Simply possessing gay magazines
was perilous, after all. ‘If you were a homosexual,’ remembered the
homophile activist Johannes Werres, ‘you kept your homosexual mag-
azines locked up if possible. If you were caught possessing them, that
could be used against you in a court of law as proof that you were “so.”
In Frankfurt, I rented a safe deposit box at a bank in which I kept all such
documents.’154 If there was a risk for consumers interested in purchasing
gay magazines, there was an even greater risk facing the publishers. All
the gay presses had to repeatedly defend themselves against pornogra-
phy charges. Although more is currently known about the cases against
Charles Grieger and Johannes Dörrast than about other publishers, it
has been established that Putziger’s press was also involved in legal pro-
ceedings, as was Gerhard Prescha’s. Prescha was eventually convicted
of pornography charges in 1957 and sentenced by Hamburg’s district
court to a prison term of four months and two weeks (although it was
commuted to four years of parole).155
In such an environment, staying in business was always a problem
for gay publishers. The 1953 Law against the Distribution of Written
Material Endangering Youth ultimately tipped the scales against them.
Dealing with the Federal Review board could be a hassle, as one arti-
cle in Der Ring explained: ‘An appointment before the Federal Review
Board for Material Endangering Youth had to be expected. The appoint-
ment finally came in the middle of April. Several weeks went by, though,
before the judgment was made and then forwarded to the Publishers.’
One magazine after another was indexed on the Review Board’s list
of ‘dangerous’ material. Once on the list, they disappeared from pub-
lic sight. ‘All the gay magazines that had previously hung outside the
kiosks,’ remarked Werres, ‘had to disappear under the counter. They
could also not be sold openly in bookstores anymore. The German
homopublishers went underground.’156 People who wanted this mate-
rial had to come in and explicitly ask for ‘something spicy’ (etwas
scharfes), as it was usually called. The dealer then pulled out a box
under the counter for the customer to browse through.157 Not surpris-
ingly, sales dropped precipitously. In most cases, subscriptions were not
enough to keep the publishers afloat.
The specific details about the demise of Christian Hansen Schmidt
Publishers is unknown, though it is clear that their many titles—
Humanitas, Hellas, Freond, and Das kleine Blatt—had ceased publication
by early 1955. Gerhard Prescha Publishers found themselves caught in
repeated court battles and conflict with the Federal Review Board over
their magazine Der Ring. In 1957, the company temporarily moved to
Amsterdam, now working under the title Der neuen Ring (The New Ring).
The new location did not solve any of the conflicts with the Federal
Review Board, and by August 1958 the company had moved back to
Hamburg, shortly before the final issue of their magazine was released.
By the beginning of 1959, the only gay publisher left in Germany was
Rolf Putziger’s company. It had relocated to West Berlin in late 1956.
The decision to leave Hamburg was a clear sign that the city, which at
the beginning of the decade seemed to be witnessing a Renaissance in
homosexual publishing, was seen as a less hospitable location by the
end of the 1950s.
Given the importance of homosexual publishing for the West German
homophile movement, it is no surprise that the disintegration of the
movement followed soon afterwards. It is hard to say how direct a role
the decline of publishing played as there were other events that con-
tributed more directly to the demise of the Society for Human Rights.
Although 1954 had been a year of optimism for the organization, grad-
ually knit together by Erwin Haarmann and Johannes Werres out of
a number of West Germany’s local homosexual clubs, the following
year brought only trouble. Haarmann’s forcefulness, an asset in the
early stages of the organization, soon became a liability. He made few
friends, and by early 1955 some members had begun to refer to him as
a ‘dictator.’158 Furthermore, Haarmann found himself in trouble again
with the law, which landed him once more in jail. At roughly the same
time, it was discovered that Haarmann’s treasurer had embezzled money

from the organization and had fled to Austria.159 The combined blow
caused the Society for Human Rights to dissolve itself by the end of the
year.160
After 1955, ‘a quiet time ensued,’ in the words of Johannes Werres.
By this point, interest in Hannover’s organization had already died out,
and curious men were being referred elsewhere.161 Other local clubs that
had affiliated with Haarmann’s Society for Human Rights reverted to
previous names—the Internationale Freundschaftloge (IFLO) in Bremen,
the Society for the Reform of the Sexual Laws in Berlin, and the Asso-
ciation for a Humane Way of Life in Frankfurt—and quickly retreated
inwards in the second half of the 1950s. At the (ICSE) Congress held
in Brussels in 1958, only representatives from Berlin and Bremen were
present. The Association for a Humane Way of Life had disbanded; by
the end, they did little more than organize dances for their members.
Just a year later, Berlin’s Society for the Reform of the Sexual Laws
followed suit. In a meeting held in October, the organization’s board
decide to dissolve itself, a decision that was finally confirmed at the
yearly meeting of January 1960. Bremen’s IFLO lasted only a little longer.
In 1959, they organized a massive fund-raising campaign to buy up
all the copies of Homosexuality as a Biological-Sociological Problem of the
Time, a book written by the East German sexologist Rudolf Klimmer and
published by Hamburg’s Kriminalistik Press. They failed to reach their
monetary goal. In 1961, the group sent to Theodor Heuss—the leader
of the liberal FDP and also ex-President of West Germany—a copy of
the petition circulated by Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Commit-
tee during the 1920s. Apparently, it was the group’s last action before
disbanding.162
Haarmann did not give up his dream of building a nationwide net-
work of homosexual organizations. Werres, however, looked for a posi-
tion elsewhere. For a short time he worked as editor for the Norddeutsche
Zeitung but soon found a new opportunity in Amsterdam with the
COC, which invited him to work in the organization’s press office.
‘Once again,’ he wrote, ‘I sacrificed the job that put food on my table
(Brötchenberuf ) and my career as a journalist in order to dedicate myself
for “the cause,” and I went to Amsterdam at the beginning of 1957.’163
Activists who stayed in West Germany could have only been disheart-
ened when a decision by the country’s Federal Constitutional Court
(Bundesverfassungsgericht) came on May 10, 1957. The arguments made
by the two appellants—the merchant Oskar K. and the cook Günther R.,
both sent to prison by Hamburg’s district court—were the same issues
raised in earlier court cases. They argued that Paragraph 175 embodied
‘National Socialist racial teaching’ that represented a ‘striking violation
of democratic principles.’ Prohibiting same-sex relations among men,
they furthermore insisted, contradicted the constitutionally guaranteed
right of everyone to develop their personality freely. Last, Paragraph 175
was discriminatory insofar as it criminalized male homosexual behavior
but not lesbianism, thereby infringing upon the equality of men and
women also guaranteed by the West German Basic Law.164 All of these
issues had been handled by various courts, including the Federal High
Court, between 1951 and 1954, and all of them had been firmly rejected.
However, the Federal Constitutional Court had not yet taken up
these questions. Like the United States Supreme Court, after which
it was modeled, it had the final say in all issues of constitutionality.
Furthermore, the legal context had changed somewhat since the early
1950s. The 31st of March 1953 was a constitutionally mandated dead-
line for revisions to laws that violated the constitution’s requirement
that the sexes be treated equally. Lawmakers failed to meet this dead-
line due to intractable differences of opinion about how to reform the
patriarchal Family Law that dated back to 1900. The courts were con-
sequently compelled to step in and decide on a case-by-case basis what
was constitutional and what was not.165 It was within this atmosphere
of legal uncertainty that the Federal Constitutional Court decided to
hear the cases of Oskar K. and Günther R. in January 1956. The poten-
tial legal prejudice shown by Paragraph 175 against homosexual men
had already been dealt with by the Federal High Court in 1951. This
court based its decision on the ‘natural’ difference between men and
women, but it had not defined exactly what these differences were, or
why they required different legal treatment. And so, in order to estab-
lish a more precise legal definition regarding sexual differentiation, the
Federal Constitutional Court decided to rule on Paragraph 175.166
Many experts were asked to give testimony: the sexologist and activist
Hans Giese, as well as the sociologist Helmut Schelsky, psychiatrist
Ernst Kretschmer, criminologist Roland Grassberger, and the director of
Cologne’s criminal detective bureau Oskar Wenzky. After considering
this diverse testimony, the judges rejected the arguments of Oskar K.
and Günther R. in some of the same terms of the previous decision of
1951. This time, though, the judges addressed the arguments against
Paragraph 175 in a more extensive fashion than any previous court.
Based on the testimony of its expert witnesses, the court concluded
that male homosexuals represented a greater danger to society than
female homosexuals.167 The supposedly weaker sexual drive of women
made it easier for lesbians to live a life of abstinence than homosex-

ual men, who tended to fall prey to their ‘unshackled sexual needs.’
According to the experts, women were also in less danger of having their
sexual drives permanently diverted towards a homosexual life by a sin-
gle sexual encounter during adolescence. They benefited from a ‘natural
feeling for sexual order’ which usually allowed them to become fix-
ated at an early age on heterosexuality. Finally, lesbians disturbed public
order less than male homosexuals, as they tended to form permanent
relationships more often than men, who in contrast changed partners
constantly and frequently relied on young male prostitutes. This dif-
ference was also traced to natural distinctions between the two sexes,
namely the ‘greater female sense of shame and the greater reservation of
the woman in sexual matters.’168
The Federal Constitutional Court also addressed the appellants‘ claim
that laws against homosexuality violated the constitutionally protected
right to freely develop the personality. This claim was an attempt to play
off the belief that sexuality was an important element of self-fulfillment
and personal happiness. According to the appellants, Paragraph 175
represented a ‘forcible confinement of the existence of people with
homosexual feelings whose peculiarity in most cases is inborn.’ Since no
person or public interest was hurt by the choice of two grown men to
have homosexual sex with each other, there was no reason to stop them
from pursuing their innermost feelings. The judges disagreed. ‘Homo-
sexual activity,’ they insisted, ‘unequivocally violates moral law.’ This
moral law was recognized by all the major religious organizations in
Germany, and its power had been consistently held up in past legal
justifications as important for protecting ‘the health and purity of our
people’s life.’169 Without passing judgment on whether such arguments
were true, the court suggested that what was important was the fact that
most Germans still felt it was immoral for men to have sex with other
men. In effect, the judges claimed that they had no right to go against
majority opinion.
This ruling seemed to settle for good the issue of whether the Nazi ver-
sion of Paragraph 175 was constitutional in post-1945 Germany. Along
with the disappearance of most of the country’s gay magazines and
the vanishing energy within the homophile movement, the ruling left
activists with little hope for legal change in the near future. Their only
consolation was that gay scenes themselves continued to exhibit vitality,
and, if anything, the number of gay bars and other locations attracting
homosexuals continued to grow through the end of the 1950s and on
into the next decade. In 1965, the police department of West Berlin
complained that their city was being ‘flooded by homosexual young

men,’ and they were not the only city to believe this.170 Officials in
Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, and elsewhere observed what they saw as
a growing problem in the early 1960s. Such anxiety was an indication
of the success that gay men had had in the years since World War II in
re-establishing social networks, reclaiming public spaces for their use,
and finding bars that would serve as the hubs of social activity.
4
Struggle over the Gay Scenes’
Boundaries
The rebuilding of the country’s numerous gay scenes was an achieve-

ment that should not be underestimated. Though some aspects of the
scenes did not entirely vanish during the Nazi era, bars solely devoted
to a homosexual clientele had been forced to close, and a majority of
the social networks that had been slowly and carefully knit together by
the 1920s had fragmented under the police assault. What remained by
1945 was a number of scattered encounters made possible only through
persistent habits, chance meetings, and occasional moments of reckless-
ness. Yet, if the near disappearance of the gay scenes under Nazi pressure
demonstrated their vulnerability, their rapid re-emergence in the late
1940s demonstrated their resilience.
The steady expansion of the gay scenes through the 1950s and 1960s
was fueled by the same social and economic forces that had propelled
their growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the
presence of large cities that laid the groundwork for the social interac-
tions and identities of the scenes; the dynamic economy that even more
than before was geared towards consumerism; the circulation of infor-
mation on homosexuality in the form of gay magazines, medical studies,
academic books, and other media; and the emergence of homosexual
clubs that could bring gay men together and also circulate informa-
tion through newsletters, talks, libraries, and simple word of mouth.
Combined with the restored legal protections of the West German con-
stitution that set limits on policing, these conditions enabled men
seeking same-sex contact to find one another, create social networks,
lay claim to public spaces, and locate bars where they could meet.
Yet this activity was not carried on easily. The illegality of homosex-
ual sex and the public anxieties about risks to youth and public morality
meant that the scenes were shaped in fundamental ways by a struggle
112
Struggle over the Gay Scenes’ Boundaries 113
between participants and the government. Like the other gay scenes
that emerged in the modern cities of Europe, America, and elsewhere,
the German scenes’ boundaries were constantly in flux, being a prod-
uct of the tension between men seeking sex with each other and the
government trying to watch public spaces, regulate morality, and sup-
press homosexual activity. The locations that the gay scene revolved
around were chosen because they either disguised the social interactions
of the scene as more innocuous exchanges or offered secluded spots that
allowed for ‘privacy in public.’1 The police, for their part, constantly
responded to new information and invented new mechanisms for polic-
ing the scene, though in practice they were always hampered by legal
and practical limitations to their own enforcement.
The post-1945 gay scenes differed in significant ways from the scenes
of the Weimar era. They also went through important changes in the
course of the 1950s and 1960s. These transformations can in some cases
be traced to changes in policing, but just as often they were responses
to other factors: the political division of the city of Berlin and the rest
of the country; the geographic distribution of publishing firms; and the
clustering of homosexual organizations. Such factors left their mark on
the patterns of behavior, the networks of information distribution, and
ultimately on the choices that gay men made.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
West Berlin during the 1950s was a city not only in the heart of commu-
nist East Germany, but also at the center of the Cold War. It lingers on in
our imagination as a city full of spies, where the CIA rubbed shoulders
with the KGB, and British MI6 agents tried to outsmart the infamous
East German Stasi.2 It was certainly a city where East and West mixed
relatively fluidly, at least until the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
In the early 1950s it was still easy for Berliners to live in the East but then
go to the West to shop, visit friends and relatives, pick up newspapers
and magazines, go to the movies, or take in the nightlife. Eventually the
Communist authorities tried to tighten their control, but they found it
impossible to stop the circulation of people entirely.
The division of Berlin radically reshaped the city’s topography. What
had been the center of the city—the celebrated boulevard of Unter den
Linden that stretches between the city’s famous Brandenburg Gate and
the site of the old Hohenzollern palace, which back in the 1920s had run
past chic cafés, grand hotels, and the city’s celebrated Opera House—was
retained by the Soviets as part of their sector of the city. So, the focus
of West Berlin naturally shifted westward towards Charlottenburg and

Wilmersdorf, once wealthy suburbs that were now transformed into
a center of Western-style consumerism. Already by the middle of the
decade, Kurfürstendamm boulevard was growing ‘crowded: the cafés
and shops were packed with women in bright red lipstick, high heels
and bad copies of the latest Dior and Chanel fashion from Paris; the
streets were lined with the latest dream cars like VW Beetles, Opels and
Borgwards, while teenagers took up the new craze for hula-hoops and
motorbikes.’3 The city was busy rebuilding. As bombed-out areas were
cleared out, new buildings took their place, built often in the harsh,
concrete-and-glass modernist style that the postwar era became known
for. However, many ruins remained. In fact, Walter Gropius, the great
modernist architect and founder of the Bauhaus movement, remarked
upon returning to Berlin for the first time in 1955 that it was ‘still a
tragically shocking sight, much more behind than the western cities.’4
Perhaps because of this, West Berlin’s gay scene lost the prominence
that it had previously enjoyed. During the Weimar period, the city’s
gay life may have had an international reputation that could attract gay
men from all over the world to its dark, smoky hustler bars and its glam-
orous, joyous masquerade balls. In the postwar period, the gay milieu
in the city developed again only slowly. Some bars and nightclubs did
appear quickly after the end of the war, but for a long time Berlin’s gay
life centered on private parties and circles of friends. The homosexual
magazines and publishers based in 1920s Berlin were long gone, as were
the many networks of homosexual associations that had centered atten-
tion on the city. Because of this, the scene was still ‘lifeless’ [verkümmert]
and ‘really lacking [recht kümmerlich], well into the 1950s,’ remembered
one man who lived for a time in Berlin after the war.
It paled in comparison to Hamburg’s scene, which the same observer
had a chance to visit in 1947. Here ‘there was an entirely different kind
of life going on, so that one felt oneself in a certain way drawn to the
city . . . When I went into the gay bars here, I was astonished by how
much was happening and how genuine and unembarrassed it all was.’5
A similar sentiment was voiced in 1955 by one newcomer: ‘The city
Hamburg is certainly the place in Germany that provides me with the
most fertile ground. With almost two million people it is safe here for
people to pursue their individual proclivities. And on top of that there
is a great night life.’6
After World War II, Hamburg, that ‘Free and Hanseatic’ city of the
North, was the second largest city in West Germany and one of Europe’s
most important ports. The heart of the city is squeezed between two
bodies of water. To the south lies the Elbe River, flowing in a north-
west direction towards the North Sea, the chief artery of the city that
bring ships, sailors, goods, and wealth into the city. To the north sits
the Alster, a roughly triangular lake with long stretches of parkland
running along the western bank and comfortable, middle-class homes
along the eastern bank. The southernmost tip of the lake pierces into
downtown, where the five spires of the city’s chief churches compete
for attention with the banks, commercial buildings, and luxury shops
clustered at the heart of Hamburg. The city has a reputation for being a
center for business and trade, but since the 1950s its tourist industry has
played up another side of the city, the so-called ‘entertainment quarter’
of St. Pauli.7
The proximity of St. Pauli to the harbor had long made it a favorite
location for sailors seeking food, alcohol, and entertainment during
their shore leave, while its original location outside the city walls meant
that ‘everything anti-establishment landed there, from religious and
labor dissidents to prostitutes.’8 The district had an unusually interna-
tional feel: airplane travel was still largely reserved for the wealthy in
the 1960s, meaning that people from around the world still often came
to Europe on the passenger ships based in Hamburg, frequently end-
ing up in St. Pauli at least temporarily. The main thoroughfare through
the district, lined with bars, nightclubs, film theaters, and cheap hotels,
is the infamous Reeperbahn—commonly known as die sündige Meile, or
the ‘sinful mile.’ One of the cross streets, Davidstrasse, running from the
Reeperbahn towards the harbor, was one of Europe’s most well known
areas of regulated prostitution. Near the end of the Reeperbahn one can
find Grosse Freiheit, a small side street crowded with bars, brothels, and
strip-clubs on either side, decorated with ‘painted, acrobatic nudes’ and
by the end of the 1950s a growing number of neon lights.9 It is here that
the Beatles would eventually arrive in 1960, playing at first in front of
prostitutes and their johns at the Indra Club. By this time, the area was
clearly prospering, attracting visitors from all over Germany and even
Europe as a whole.10
Amidst the dark streets and crowded nightclubs offering pleasures
aimed specifically at a male, heterosexual audience were not a few
locations of some interest for homosexuals. Moreover, the gay bars of
St. Pauli did not come close to exhausting the richness of Hamburg’s
gay scene. Near the center of Hamburg, just north of the main train sta-
tion, is St. Georg. Visitors to the city coming in by rail could quickly find
cheap hotels, bars, entertainment, and places to eat in this central neigh-
borhood. There were several gay clubs in the area. Homosexual men also
found it easy to pick up hustlers loitering around the main train station
and then take them to a hotel room, or perhaps to one of the many
public bathrooms in the area. St. Georg was an area known for its illegal
prostitution, both male and female, and it was infested with other kinds
of criminals as well—pimps, drug dealers, pickpockets. Although today it
is the center of the city’s vibrant gay scene and is quickly going through
a process of gentrification, its reputation in the 1950s and 1960s as a
seedy area of the town might have made many homosexual men pre-
fer the Grossneumarkt, a large, scenic square on the western side of the
town known then as today for its restaurants and cafés. This was the
heart of the city’s gay scene in the pre-1969 era. On the blocks around
the Grossneumarkt one could find numerous dance clubs, transvestite
cabarets, and smaller bars catering to gay men.
Why exactly Hamburg’s gay scene developed to an unprecedented
extent in the 1950s is a little hard to say. Undoubtedly, the emer-
gence of a homosexual publishing industry in the city during the early
1950s helped attract national attention. Just as the appearance of the
Mattachine Society with its Mattachine Review drew national attention
to the gay life of San Francisco, the many gay magazines published
in Hamburg helped this city’s reputation rise within the gay world.11
As we have seen, Hamburg also briefly became the focal point for
Erwin Haarmann’s efforts to establish the Society of Human Rights as
a national network of homosexual associations.
Some gay men at the time, though, believed that the character of the
city was just as important as the magazines and associations. Albrecht
Becker believed quite simply that ‘Hamburg after 1945 was one of the
most tolerant German cities.’12 Many citizens of Hamburg might suggest
that this tolerance was in keeping with the city’s tradition of liberal-
ism. After all, from the late nineteenth century, the city had been a
stronghold of Social Democracy and had given the great socialist August
Bebel a seat in Parliament beginning in 1883. Furthermore, the center
of the city is the harbor, which lends its people a weltoffen tempera-
ment, which means a live-and-let-live attitude and an open-mindedness
towards the world and how people should act. The symbol of this tol-
erance is the red-light district of St. Pauli, which was still frequented by
sailors ‘starved for experiences that the sea cannot offer’ and searching
for quick sex and easy companionship.13
Whether Hamburg’s reputation for tolerance has always been well
deserved is open to debate.14 However, when it comes to the police
treatment of homosexuals in Hamburg during the 1950s, there is evi-
dence that at least here the reputation was earned. The director of the
city’s criminal detective bureau (Kriminalpolizei) during the early part

of the decade was relatively open in his opposition to Paragraph 175.
The bureau’s homosexual squad was led by men who showed some tact
and sensitivity when it came to investigating homosexual cases.15 The
city’s judges also had a reputation for tolerance among gay men, at least
in comparison with judges from other areas of the country. Accord-
ing to the opinion of the president of the city’s police department in
the mid-1960s, homosexuals came to Hamburg because of the ‘general
prevailing opinion among this circle of people,’ who apparently closely
watched the court decisions concerning homosexuals and transvestites,
that ‘decisions and judgments of the Hamburg courts are milder’ than
other areas. ‘In contrast to the west and southern areas of the Federal
Republic,’ he continued, ‘where values and morality are considerably
influenced by religious ideas, Hamburg enjoys the reputation of being
especially tolerant.’16 Conviction and sentencing statistics with regard
to Paragraph 175 and 175a are not currently available for Hamburg,
and so it is not possible to compare the city’s court system with that
of other cities. What limited evidence is available, though—the ‘Three
Mark Decision’ of 1951, for example, as well as the court decisions of the
early 1950s allowing gay magazines to continue publishing—suggests
that the reputation may have been founded in reality.
One good indication of the tolerance of city officials in the early
1950s is the fact that Hamburg’s gay bars were routinely granted licenses
enabling people to dance on the premises. In West Berlin, gay bar own-
ers found that it was very hard to get such permission. Furthermore, it
was risky: applying for a dance permit would often spark heightened
numbers of visits by the police and city inspectors that might lead to
the bar being closed down on some technicality. In Cologne, dancing
was never licensed and, consequently, was much less frequent than in
either West Berlin or Hamburg, even when there was a doorman stand-
ing watch for the police.17 Hamburg’s bars, in contrast, seem to have had
little problem getting dance licenses for most of the 1950s. While the
licenses were intended to sanction heterosexual pairs dancing together,
the city police had no reason to act against men dancing together since
there were no city regulations that prohibited people from dancing with
members of the same sex.18
Hamburg’s reputed tolerance was only one reason that men inter-
ested in same-sex contact came in droves to this port city. Many people
came simply with the hope of finding a job. The chief of the homosex-
ual squad during the early 1960s noted the tendency, especially among
young people, to see Hamburg’s harbor as full of opportunities, believing
‘that there was always a ship to America in the port.’19 Kuhn agreed:
‘Again and again we see the yearning for adventure, the excitement of
the cosmopolitan and harbor city Hamburg, and the hope of finding
work and making it in the world (for example, by taking a ship off into
the distance) that, with other environmental influences, drive youths to
wander to the city.’20
Other visitors to the city sought opportunities of a different sort. Just
as heterosexuals came to St. Pauli in search of sexual adventure, so did
gay men come to cruise the Reeperbahn and to visit the many bars and
other meeting places offered by the city. As one police report noted,
‘It should be mentioned that Hamburg has become a kind of catchall
(Sammelbecken) for homosexuals. From near and wide inverts come to
visit the bars and clubs of Hamburg.’21 Sexual opportunities were abun-
dant, thanks in no small part to the men who failed to find a job in
the city and so took up male prostitution as a means of livelihood.
Even for those with a job, lack of female company might drive young,
heterosexual men to occasional homosexual contact. As in other port
cities, the sailors who spent months on the gender-segregated atmo-
sphere of the ship were often just as open to the sexual advances of
homosexuals as they were to female prostitutes or other women. Allied
soldiers, too, lived in a nearly exclusive male environment, and they
sometimes sought out sexual contact with other men. All of these
factors contributed, in the words of the criminologist Gerhard Kuhn,
towards making Hamburg ‘the center (Hochburg) of male homosexuality
in Germany after the Second World War.’22 It would remain so for over
a decade.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Hamburg had the most impressive gay scene in 1950s West Germany;
however, many other smaller scenes—Hannover, Cologne, Munich,
Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, just to name a few—also developed local scenes
that could be extremely significant for homosexuals living there or in
the region nearby, giving them an opportunity to seek friendship, love,
and sexual adventure. Even when they did not have enough of a pop-
ulation to support a gay bar, smaller cities and even some larger towns
often had specific locations that acquired a reputation as being a gay
meeting place.
The scenes were constantly monitored by local police departments,
which by the early 1950s had pulled out of the administrative chaos
of the postwar era and had generally re-established homosexual squads,
often as a section within a larger vice squad that also handled female
prostitution, pimping, exhibitionism, and other sexual crimes. Vice
detectives and sometimes uniformed police officers regularly patrolled
the gay scenes, often in conjunction with surveying other areas that
might attract a ‘criminal element’ or juvenile delinquents. Gay scenes
were often intermingled with local red-light districts and with other
locations offering nighttime entertainment. Patrolling such areas was
considered a form of ‘preventive crime fighting,’ which, the head of
Cologne’s police department noted, was even more important than
prosecuting crimes already committed: ‘The phrase used by doctors,
“One ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is just as appli-
cable when it comes to the sickness of the national body [Volkskörper],
crime—and so also for the activity of the police.’23 Such Nazi-associated
language was increasingly unusual in public statements by the mid-
1950s, and yet the attitude that homosexuality represented a serious
threat to public order and the moral environment persisted.
As part of these patrols, the police generally focused on male prosti-
tutes, who were relatively easy to identify and could sometimes even
be caught in the act. They were often young, which gave an easy
justification for pulling them out of bars or taking them ‘off the
streets.’ Furthermore, these hustlers (Strichjungen) often participated in
a larger social network of boys and young men that the police saw
as rife with other kinds of criminal activity, like theft, blackmail, per-
sonal assault, and even murder. Once arrested, hustlers—who rarely felt
any sense of obligation towards their clients—could often be induced
to give information about their johns that could be used to arrest
others.24
Male prostitution was also targeted simply because it was one of the
most visible aspects of the gay scenes, and as such it often brought
complaints from the public. Aggressive male prostitutes—as well as
brazen transvestites—could be arrested for creating a ‘public nuisance’
(öffentliche Ärgernis) under Paragraph 183a. Generally the punishment
for this crime was only a fine, but it still provided the justification
for a police arrest that would immediately remove the offending per-
son from public. In extreme cases and for repeat offenders, the courts
could potentially sentence a convict to a year in prison. Law enforce-
ment officials focused much attention on other visible manifestations
of homosexuality, such as the magazines that came onto the market in
the early 1950s. As we saw in the last chapter, Paragraphs 184 and 184a
(the pornography laws) combined with the 1953 Law against the Distri-
bution of Printed Material Endangering Youth proved to be effective at
removing gay magazines from public view and otherwise limiting their
circulation in the country.
These laws, along with Paragraphs 175 and 175a, provided a clear
framework for restricting and even suppressing some of the most
complained-about activities of gay men. Still, there was some concern
that the laws did not provide law enforcement with the tools they
needed to police the less obvious manifestations of the scenes, espe-
cially the gay bars that were rapidly emerging in the cities of postwar
West Germany. These concerns were most commonly raised in connec-
tion with the moral condition of Germany’s youth. Gay bars and other
significant sites of the various gay scenes were grouped together with
dance clubs, popular music venues, game halls, and other locations that
posed a potential moral danger to young people. The police, youth pro-
tection advocates argued, needed to have the legal power to keep young
Germans away from such locations and to punish the adults who lured
them in.
A new federal Law for the Protection of Youth in Public was drafted
in 1949 and passed by Parliament on December 4, 1951. It prohibited
unsupervised children under the age of 16 from smoking, gambling,
entering bars or game halls, participating in public dances, or watching
movies not officially recognized as ‘geared towards a youthful audi-
ence.’ Adolescents between 16 and 18 years old were subject to a ten
o’clock curfew, and though allowed into bars, they could not drink hard
liquor. The law also targeted adults. Owners of businesses or organiz-
ers of events who endangered youth could be fined or even sentenced
to a year in prison. Other individuals who exposed children to a threat
could receive a fine of 150 marks or a prison sentence of up to six weeks.
For sites of the homosexual scene, the most important element of the
law was the section that made it illegal for children or adolescents to
enter locations where ‘there is a threat of moral danger or neglect.’ Any
minor caught in such a location was to be removed immediately from
the premises, returned to a parent or guardian, and reported to the local
youth welfare bureau.25 The law enabled police departments to work
closely with other regional government offices to draw up lists of sites
that were declared ‘dangerous to youth.’26 Not surprisingly, many of the
locations that were central to the gay scene—gay bars, public toilets, and
areas of certain parks—ended up on these lists. Since all these areas were
public and certainly none of them were illegal, the 1951 Youth Pro-
tection Law provided a justification for policing these areas regularly.
It also gave the police a powerful weapon in their fight against male
prostitution.
The search for underage youth in gay bars also very often served as
an excuse for police raids. Raids were very unpopular among partici-
pants within the gay scene, as they easily brought to mind memories
of the recent past. Even police officials were sometimes forced to admit
that raids ‘reminded one of the Nazi times.’27 Because of this, some city
police departments were reluctant to employ such methods unless they
were searching for murderers or other felons. West Berlin’s police force,
though, was not so hesitant. Large-scale raids, generally involving three
or more bars within the span of several weeks, were reported by readers
of several gay magazines in 1954, 1957, and again in 1960.28
A contributor to Der Kreis left one of the most detailed accounts.
A Thursday evening in an unnamed bar (one that apparently special-
ized in holding amateur boxing matches), the evening activities were
broken up by the appearance of the police. The officer in charge of the
operation wished everyone a good evening in a loud voice and wildly
gave some orders. A transvestite who worked in the place managed to
escape, but others present were watched carefully by the police. Most of
the men sat quietly and waited for their turn to have their ID checked
by the officers. Meanwhile, the policeman in charge explained to the
guests that they had ‘nothing to fear’ since the police measures were
aimed in no way against the ‘reputable guests of this house’ but only
at a ‘certain element.’ Clearly the officers were mostly interested in
removing teenagers from the establishment, but there were a few others
who were also taken away to police headquarters for more questioning.
After being photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated, most were
released about two hours later, leaving them free to return to the bar to
tell the story of their experiences. Presumably, all of their names—even
the names of those in the bar who had escaped arrest—ended up on the
city’s infamous ‘pink lists.’29
Raids were a useful tool because gathering information was not always
easy for the detectives of the homosexual squads. As men became more
thoroughly involved with the gay scene and through it were caught up
with the multitude of relationships that lay at its foundations, loyalty
to friends and ‘like-minded people’ would generally keep them quiet.
The police sometime referred to the scene as a ‘closed society.’ One West
Berlin newspaper noted that policemen were often confronted with a
‘strong pronounced “feeling of community” ’ which, along with the fear
of saying something that might expose them to legal proceedings, made
homosexuals extremely reserved in dealing with the police.30 Even when
the police were trying to find a sexual murderer or a hustler who was rob-
bing or blackmailing homosexuals, they often found that homosexuals
obeyed the general rule to say nothing at all.31 Gay men knew that even
if what they said was never used against them in court, information
about them would be entered into the city’s criminal files and eventu-
ally they might face dire social problems if their sexual activities became
widely known.
Vice detectives charged with watching the country’s gay scenes faced
other challenges as well. Many complained that their squads were
undermanned given the size of the cities and the amount of paper-
work that they had to complete. Keeping up with a scene that was
nebulous and constantly changing was also a problem. Very often, the
police would have to rely on citizen reports and even mere luck to find
new gay bars as they opened up. Last, there was the problem that their
faces soon became known throughout the scene. As the criminologist
Kuhn complained, ‘The constant observation of individual bars by the
officers of the homosexual search teams leads to no observable improve-
ment of the situation, especially since the officers are well known in
the respective circles and their appearance only causes everyone to act
properly.’32 The familiarity of the vice detectives also made it hard some-
times to monitor public bathrooms. As one detective joked, ‘We would
only appear and then everything was calm.’33
These difficulties were encountered by all police departments. They
were real institutional weaknesses, ones that the police were very aware
of, in part because they stood out against the enormous powers of
detaining individuals and gathering information that law enforcement
had possessed during the Nazi era. However, from the perspective of gay
men, the West German police were still a force to be reckoned with.
Whether in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of Hamburg or the more
strictly monitored environment of West Berlin or Cologne, the opera-
tions of the police served to limit the sites of the city in which gay men
could safely meet and develop relationships.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Well into the 1950s, the police regularly monitored the rubble and
ruins left by the wartime bombing raids for homosexual activity.
Of Hamburg’s police cases examined by Gerhard Kuhn—a criminology
student from the University of Hamburg who worked closely with the
police in the early 1950s—15 percent of the men had sex in ruined
buildings (Trümmeranlagen).34 Beyond providing temporary shelter, the
broken remnants of walls, cellars, and hallways created dark areas in
which all sorts of illicit activities could occur, including black market
deals and secret embraces. As one man from Cologne remembered,

‘There were people dawdling [geklüngelt] in every piece of ruined prop-
erty that still had the slightest corner left, or that was covered.’35 Such
buildings were still a common sight in many cities in the mid-1950s.
In Cologne, the ruins of the old opera house as well as the remnants
of the old hospital (Bürgerspital) were commonly used by men for sex.36
In West Berlin, the ruins around the Zoo train station offered a con-
venient site for male prostitutes to take their clients. One 17-year-old
runaway, who was taken into custody by the police while hanging
around the station, admitted to practicing male prostitution along with
other black market activities. He brought most of the men he met to
ruins near the station to engage in mutual masturbation, oral sex, and
even anal intercourse.37
Until they were gradually closed in the 1950s, mass bunkers and other
shelters also provided spaces in which men had sex. These shelters were
maintained by the authorities in the postwar period to provide tem-
porary housing for the homeless or for the German refugees flooding
in from Eastern Europe. Peter Schult was one of the youths moving
from city to city at the time. He remembered, ‘There were also shelters
where we could spend the night: in Hannover in the old bunker near
the main train station, in Kassel in a Red Cross barracks, in Hamburg
at one of the Inner Mission homes. Here there was total confusion—
men and women, boys and girls, often with one another. No one took
offense at this. No one bothered themselves with others.’38 This was
not entirely true, since various representatives of the state who passed
through the bunkers were clearly troubled by the situation. In the under-
ground bunker of Hamburg’s central train station, social workers noted
that there were about 150 youths of both sexes sleeping there at night.
‘Besides black market transactions,’ one worker remarked, ‘some dis-
gusting [widerlich] sexual activity has appeared down there. I found it
necessary once to break up these goings-on. Without police protection,
however, I could not expect to have any real success here.’39
The ruins and bunkers illustrate that many sites where men might
sometimes meet sexual partners or have gay sex were not easily defin-
able. Chance encounters on the street, in shops, or in entirely normal
bars or restaurants might lead to quick sexual engagements, friendships,
and even long-lasting relationships. Kuhn noted that homosexuals
sometimes met at kiosks or food stands on the streets. An attorney
giving a talk to the youth welfare department noted the dangerous ten-
dencies of game halls (Spielhallen) to attract ‘criminal and homosexual
elements.’ These halls could be especially treacherous, he continued,
since boys might resort to prostitution or worse to earn money for the
machines.40 His report clearly exaggerates the morally corrupting influ-
ences of the game halls, but some criminal reports cited by Kuhn do
suggest that gay men went here to pick up male prostitutes. In short,
we can agree with Dieter S.’s summation of his experience: ‘Everywhere
there was something happening: in every park, in the city, in the harbor
area, on the streets, simply everywhere.’41
The use of ruins and postwar bunkers as locations to find sexual part-
ners highlights the way that the conditions of postwar Germany provide
a constant backdrop to the growth of the gay scene after 1945 and
well into the 1950s. In particular, the housing shortage remained an
issue. Although efforts were made to build new housing after 1945, in
1950 it was estimated that there were still only 20 living quarters for
every 100 people.42 In Hamburg, nearly 13 percent of all dwelling places
were still classified by city authorities as ‘emergency housing,’ which
could include destroyed buildings, makeshift constructions out of wood,
rubble, or other available material, and even old army barracks.
The housing shortage affected everyone, of course, but for gay men
it created the special problem of finding privacy in a society hostile to
their pursuit of love. Until the last years of the 1950s, very few men were
able to obtain a ‘quiet room to themselves’ (eine sturmfreie Bude). Those
who did were highly valued in the gay scene as friends and lovers. Even
in the 1960s, after the housing situation had improved dramatically,
many young men’s financial situations forced them to live with a parent
during young adulthood. Others rented a room from a family with space
to spare. In a living situation where a person was forced to walk through
a landlord’s living area to reach his room, and where ears were always
nearby to hear any suspicious sound, most gay men rightfully felt it too
dangerous to bring a male friend back to their room. Even in a situation
where a host family might tolerantly allow a man to bring a girlfriend
back to his room, daring to take a male lover was too much of a risk.
The small amount of privacy offered by many gay men’s rooms forced
them to take advantage of the public spaces that the large cities had
to offer. One study of criminal cases of homosexuality in 1953 suggests
that nearly three-quarters of men who were arrested met their sexual
partners in public places.43 Many would have done so anyway, of course,
since lingering around public spaces was one of the easiest and safest
ways to meet men. Newcomers to West German cities often chose public
spaces to search for new acquaintances or signs of action. Furthermore,
here there was the chance of meeting men who otherwise would not
have participated in homosexual circles: married men with homosexual
desires searching for a sexual outlet, self-identified heterosexual men

who would occasionally have sex with men depending on their mood or
opportunities, and finally straight men who sold sex for money or other
favors. Nor should we forget the thrill that some people experienced by
having sex in public places where there was always the risk of getting
caught.
The risk was real, as every man who participated in this activity
was well aware. If they propositioned the wrong person, they could be
reported to a police officer, or even physically attacked. Even the most
careful man could be identified as homosexual and become a target for
a violent assault. Gay men, after all, were not the only disempowered
group who utilized public spaces to meet and socialize. Working-class
boys also gathered on the streets, and gangs of such boys often harassed
or even assaulted men and women who were seen as outsiders in the
working-class community. Such activity helped boys acquire status, self-
confidence, and a sense of belonging to a group. In the case of attacks
on homosexuals, violence allowed boys to assert their masculinity and,
in a symbolic fashion, to defend their community against the dangers
associated with homosexuality.44
Much of the time, these gangs were searching for someone who would
be easy to rob. One afternoon, Dieter S. was walking through a park
when a young man approached him and asked for ten marks. The ado-
lescent made no direct threat, but apparently his aggressive attitude,
combined with Dieter’s feelings of guilt, were enough to make him com-
ply: ‘He didn’t say anything about me being gay, but I felt that somehow
he must know.’45 Dieter was lucky that the young man did not resort to
violence. In the worst cases, neighborhood boys were less interested in
acquiring money than in picking a fight with an easy target. Men who
visited gay bars often worried about being watched by working-class
toughs, who might take the opportunity to ambush them.
Though announcing one’s sexual interest in public areas was danger-
ous, certain tactics did allow gay men to meet while at the same time
remaining relatively invisible to the rest of society. The most basic one
was to learn certain codes and signs that were known to other men in
the scene. Homosexual men used these signals to communicate their
sexual interests and, in turn, to identify men who might be interested.
Some men utilized women’s clothing, make-up, and hairstyles, as well as
effeminate ways of walking, gesturing, or talking, to identify themselves
as gay. The hustler Heinz noted that he would place his thumbs in his
belt and ‘do like so. When you walk through the Hauptbahnhof, you
have to cross your legs slightly, so that your butt wags a little. Then
they all come right away.’46 Signs of womanliness defined the tradi-
tional stereotype of the gay male, the Tunte. These affectations were the
technique most readily available to men who wished to announce their
desire for men to the rest of society. These codes were intelligible to
straight men, however, which made them more vulnerable to police
observation and harassment from young toughs. Consequently, men
within the gay scene learned other signals that were less conspicuous
and often had double meanings. The double meanings allowed men to
communicate with each other while going undetected by those around
them; they also permitted men to make cautious advances towards an
unfamiliar male to find out if he was receptive.47
The most basic signal involved eye contact. Dieter S. emphasized the
use of the eyes in meeting with men in the bathrooms. Most men
learned to control their gaze carefully in public bathrooms—making lit-
tle eye contact and never allowing the eyes to wander towards another’s
genital area—in order to desexualize this space. This social norm made
it very easy to signal sexual intentions to other men by simply staring.
Yet even in less sensitive public spaces, such as the street or train station
hallways, men learned to watch other eyes, to see whom they followed
or where they lingered. This method of communication was also rela-
tively safe, since it was hard to arrest somebody for ‘looking at them
funny.’ Eye contact was ambiguous, so it often initiated a more complex
ritual that could involve walking, stopping and waiting, passing each
other, and a simple request or exchange of pleasantries.
This improvised ritual that involved utilizing elements of the given
space as an excuse to stop and start conversation was an important part
of gay scenes throughout the Western world and was certainly not new
to this period.48 Talk would generally begin with a simple remark, for
example, one man asking the other if he had a cigarette, a light, or
the time. Even nonsmokers often carried cigarettes and matches with
them to ease this initial contact.49 Given the importance of cigarettes in
this ritual, it is not surprising that gay magazines were full of stories in
which an exchange of cigarettes created an intimate atmosphere and an
emotional bond between men.
More daring men, especially those with exhibitionist tendencies,
might utilize signals that were more sexually charged. One man enjoyed
taking hustlers to a bar, where he would show them nude pictures of
himself.50 The hustler Heinz would imitate fellatio with his index finger,
sticking it in his mouth ‘and pulling it in and out. Then all the men
come, boy do they jump to attention!’51 A common technique used in
public bathrooms was to reveal an erection to the desired sexual partner.
That this was also a signal, and not simply (or at least, not always) an
exhibitionist act, is made clear by the case of Hans N. in Bonn. As a page
in a Bonn hotel, Hans had made contact with homosexuals in 1955,
when he was 17 years old. He worked as a hustler for a while, evidenced
by the letters from an older homosexual found in his possession. In a
park bathroom, he met a man who showed him his erection. ‘Afterwards
the man took him in his car to Petersberg in the mountains, where they
had a delicious meal. After returning, the two masturbated each other,
without the older one having to demand it. Hans had already taken rides
with various men for exactly this reason.’52
Constant alertness for signs that might indicate another man’s attrac-
tion to men could potentially turn any chance meeting into a sexual
opportunity. Most homosexual men, though, were not satisfied wait-
ing for the chance meeting but instead sought out specific locations for
‘cruising’—a term used in English by the 1920s which today has become
a fairly common anglicism in German. A central location for gay cruis-
ing in nearly every city was the central train station (Hauptbahnhof ).
Whether in larger cities like Munich or Düsseldorf, or smaller ones like
Hannover or even Bonn, one could count on finding male prostitutes in
the area willing to sell sexual favors. In West Berlin, a prime area was the
Bahnhof Zoo, which emerged as the city’s major train station after the
division of the city into western and eastern sectors. By 1946 this train
station was already attracting many male prostitutes. One 15-year-old
boy told the police how he arrived at the train station in December of
that year, hoping to earn a little extra money by carrying luggage for
travelers. Around the station, he met several other young men already
making money through prostitution. Eventually, he ‘let himself be spo-
ken to in several cases, and in fact went with the men towards [the
boulevard] Kurfürstendamm in three cases after he was promised com-
pensation,’ which normally amounted to around five or six marks, but
at times as much as 10 to 15 marks.53
The large number of male prostitutes in the area was partially
explained by the number of runaways that were attracted to the
Bahnhof Zoo for lack of other places to go. One 16-year-old boy told
the police in June 1947 that he came to the area around the station
earlier that year after being driven out of his home by conflicts with
his father. He had been introduced to male prostitution after he met
by chance a traveler at the Stettiner Bahnhof and agreed to help him
take his baggage to a local hotel. ‘As I didn’t have any cash on me
[when I ran away from home], the experience of the previous November
came to me, and I realized I could earn a living with this kind of sex
(Unzuchtshandlungen).’54 He soon learned that he could make as much

as one hundred marks for his services. The boy stated that he had had
around 35 partners in the past month, including several English service-
men and one American GI. The American was particularly generous,
giving the boy a pair of pants, two packs of cigarettes, and six candy
bars in exchange for sex.
Central train stations like the Berliner Zoo or the Hamburger
Hauptbahnhof were logical places for male prostitutes to congregate
since they were the first place that men new to the city would come to
if they were looking for some company. There were always people com-
ing and going and otherwise waiting for departures or arrivals, which
made it easy to linger aimlessly for long periods of time without stand-
ing out. In Hamburg, the police and other concerned agents of the state
frequently found boys from all over West Germany in the Wandelhalle
trying to meet other men.55 The kiosks in this hall offered good cover
because there were always men and women stopping to grab a bite to
eat or to read a newspaper. It was also relatively easy to talk with people
here. For male prostitutes, the shopping corridors of major train stations
had the added advantage of providing a nearby bathroom. Kuhn noted
that there was always regular traffic between Hamburg’s Wandelhalle and
its bathroom. If the bathroom was too busy, the male prostitute would
retreat with his potential client to some more secluded spot outside the
train station.56
After the central train stations, the next most popular places to attract
men interested in same-sex contact were, not surprisingly, public bath-
rooms. According to the American sociologist Laud Humphreys, public
bathrooms serve as a locus for homosexual encounters primarily because
of their accessibility, even to men of little means. At the same time,
their walls provide a kind of ‘privacy in public.’ Men who came to bath-
rooms for sex quickly picked up a set of rules—the most important of
which is the maintenance of silence—that protected the identities of
the people involved and kept outsiders from detecting their activities.57
The use of such facilities in this manner was, of course, not new. Pub-
lic bathrooms had emerged as important sites of the gay scene by the
end of the nineteenth century, and many of them continued to be used
by gay men and male prostitutes during the 1930s and 1940s despite
Nazi persecution and the war. They were also key locations in the gay
scenes of other countries, which perhaps contributed to their attrac-
tion: men from all over the world would often begin their search for
sex in such facilities, even when they were traveling or moving into a
new city.
Still, a homosexual man needed to have some sense of which of the

many bathrooms in any given city were good places to seek sexual part-
ners. Dieter S. remembers that his first visits to Hamburg’s bathrooms
in the early 1950s were fruitless. Probably, he admitted, he was going
to the wrong ones.58 Of the more than one hundred public bathrooms
in Hamburg during these decades, Kuhn listed 18 public bathrooms in
1955 that were known as homosexual meeting places, or Klappen as they
were called.59 A few of these, especially one on Warburgstrasse known
in the scene as the ‘Cuban Bridgehead’ (Kuban-Brückenkopf ), acquired
an international reputation for the activities that went on there. The
central factor in the choice of these bathrooms was location. As you
might imagine, in most cases they were near places that attracted lots
of people, such as public squares, markets, or parks. In Munich, the
most popular Klappen were those near the Scheidplatz, conveniently
located next to the Luitpold Park, and the scenic Odeonsplatz, a large
public square spread out in front of the Ferdhernhalle Gallery and
the Theatiner Church.60 In Hamburg, a great number were near the
Hauptbahnhof. Men would wander between the train station, the gay
bars in St. Georg, and four well-trafficked toilets in the vicinity.
In the first years of the postwar period, the public bathrooms often
were extremely dark. Many had had their power cut off during the war
as part of the blackout procedures. In Hamburg until March 1949, the
public bathrooms remained lit only by natural light, which according
to one police report ‘gave an unusually large boost to the homosexuals’
activities’ on these premises during the evening hours.61 But even after
artificial lights were turned back on, most public bathrooms remained
inadequately lit. A medical student who studied the cleanliness of bath-
rooms in Hamburg observed critically that on his visit to the bathroom
on Jungfernstieg (street), there were only eight working lightbulbs for
14 lights, while one of central bathrooms in Hamburg’s St. Pauli dis-
trict had a mere three bulbs for 15 lights. The darkness, he added, was
directly related to the ‘outbreak’ (Ausbreitung) of homosexuality in these
locations.62 The authorities did improve the lighting slowly in the next
two decades, but it was impossible to monitor all the bathrooms all
the time, so police officers still found it difficult to catch men actually
having sex.
Public bathrooms were favorite hangouts for hustlers waiting to pick
up a ‘john’ (Freier). The same medical student observed after nightfall
‘teenagers at nine different locations who were prostituting themselves.
In each case there were four or five young men, who after noticing signs
that police were in the area quickly disappeared.’63 Very often, though,
public bathrooms were often used simply as meeting places from which
men could move to safer locations to engage in sex. Dieter S. said that
he rarely enjoyed sex in a bathroom because he was always afraid that a
policeman might wander in. Instead, he was more likely to meet one or
two others in the bathroom, peek outside to ensure that no policemen
were in the area, and then ‘sneak away to the bushes.’64
This explains why so many Klappen were in the vicinity of a public
park. Men seeking sexual partners have used Hamburg’s parks almost
as long as they have existed. Of the many parks that arose in this city
in the nineteenth century, one of the most popular was the one next
to the Lombard Bridge, with its scenic position along the Alster and
its proximity to the bars of St. Georg and the fashionable shops along
Jungfernstieg. Another area, the thin strip of parkland in south Altona
that runs along the Elbe river, was also a favorite among sailors, male
prostitutes, and men seeking same-sex contact at about this same time;
indeed so much so that the authorities started using young police offi-
cials as decoys to entrap unsuspecting men.65 By the 1950s, other parks
were added to the favorite cruising places of gay men, including Planten
un Blomen, built in the 1930s, and the Rosengarten near the southern
bank of the Elbe river. The latter, in fact, developed in this decade into an
early meeting place for lovers of leather to gather on their motorbikes.66
The Stadtpark did not fully acquire its reputation as a homosexual meet-
ing place until the 1960s, but even during the 1950s some were enticed
by its open air baths (Freibäder) and the small group of nudists who
gathered there.67
Other cities also had parks that attracted large numbers of men seek-
ing sex with other men. In Munich, there is the monumental English
Garden, the first public park on the continent, which dates back to the
turn of the nineteenth century and is one of the largest city parks in
Europe. With its many wandering paths and stream banks full of sun-
bathers, the park also possessed numerous public bathrooms that made
it an ideal spot for gay men to meet and have sex.68 Cologne’s gay popu-
lation visited the Volksgarten, the Stadtwald, and the Beethovenpark;
most popular, though, was the newly constructed Aachener Weihe,
which by the mid-1950s was already being called ‘Venusburg’ by some
men.69 In West Berlin, the Tiergarten continued to attract men just as it
had at the end of the nineteenth century. Heinz Birken remembered his
first visit to this park after the end of the war as both eye-opening and
life-transforming: ‘On the straight and winding paths, past the lawns,
bushes, lake, forest, and running water, a steady stream of men moved
here and there, this way and that, comparable perhaps to that on the
Kurfürstendamm—only men, you understand, old and young and every

age in between. Could they really all be homosexual? So many, so many?
A feeling of happiness overwhelmed me: here is where I belong, here
I feel good. Oh, if only I had come here ten years earlier!’70
Parks were popular cruising locations because they were reasonably
safe. After all, they were locations where men and women could stroll
freely and enjoy nature without attracting much attention. As the histo-
rian George Chauncey notes, this gave a useful alibi to men wandering
in search of others: ‘Few gay men stood out among the other couples,
families, and groups of friends and neighbors who thronged the parks,
socializing, playing sports, and eating their picnics.’71 More importantly,
parks provided bushes, groves, and secluded spots in which men could
hide for a brief moment from prying eyes.
For men looking for some place a little more hidden from the gaze
of others, there were always movie theaters. Like heterosexual cou-
ples, homosexuals who lacked privacy at home sometimes went to the
movies hoping to take advantage of the darkness and intimate setting of
the theater, especially in the balconies or in secluded areas at the back.
In the early 1950s, Dieter S. began visiting an art theater in Hamburg
that regularly showed old films from the 1920s. He would buy two tick-
ets and then offer the second to attractive men that he saw approaching
the theater. ‘I was much too shy, too inexperienced for this,’ he noted,
so his attempts were generally in vain. Once, though, he was surprised
to be offered a ticket by another man. This opportunity might indeed
have led to physical contact had the tickets not been falsely numbered
so that someone sat between them. ‘Boy, the guy was furious,’ Dieter
recalled, ‘since he apparently had the same plans I did.’72 The police,
of course, were aware of the sexual activity in the theaters. Hamburg’s
officers patrolled some of the more notorious theaters semi-regularly,
most notably those in St. Georg. They did this without any enthusi-
asm, though, at least according to a vice detective: ‘We would go with
our flashlights into the upper rows and hope that nothing happened.
Luckily, we didn’t catch anyone often, although occasionally we found
something going on.’73
Gay men also tried their luck in both indoor and outdoor swim-
ming pools (Badeanstalten and Freibäder, respectively). Like heterosexual
men, homosexuals were drawn to these locations by the fun, the relax-
ation, and the prospect of seeing half-clothed or even naked bodies.
Government officials knew that gay men could be found at the pools
sometimes, but also found that they generally did not have to worry
about sexual encounters in the pool as there was very little privacy.
The amount of complaints the Youth Department in Cologne received

about men who took long showers or glanced at other men while they
were showering indicates the kind of ever-present watchful eye that gay
men would have had to contend with in the pools.74 The criminologist
Kuhn wrote, ‘the homosexuals here have to deal with a majority of
normally disposed (normalempfindenden) swimmers, which thwarts their
plans. Their presence in these locations therefore presents only a slight
danger to other bathers.’75
Most gay men, therefore, simply tried to meet others at the pool.
Dieter S. recalled getting to know others at Hamburg’s pools simply ‘by
looking around,’ but that the showers were always too crowded for any-
thing to happen.76 For those interested in sex, their best bet was to meet
one of the hustlers who visited the pools to locate clients. Especially
in the open-air pools during the summer, ‘good-looking and well-built
hustlers romp[ed] about before the eyes of homosexuals.’ The police
were well aware of this activity, but they had difficulty suppressing it
since the prostitutes usually took the men elsewhere for sex.77
Saunas provided more privacy, and for men willing to take some
risks, they occasionally offered opportunities for sex. Few exclusively
gay saunas could be found in any West German city before 1969, but
several baths were well known for attracting homosexuals and male
prostitutes. In Munich, there was a sauna on Dachauer Strasse where
homosexual men were known to meet. Here too there was one of
the few privately owned nude saunas that catered more or less exclu-
sively to homosexual men, at least until it was forced by the police
to close in 1959.78 In Cologne, the Sternen sauna got the nickname
‘Schweinesauna’ (Pigs’ Sauna) in the 1960s ‘because you could act like
a complete pig (Schweinigel) there.’ The rooms were watched over by
one of the employees, but word got around that you could pursue sex-
ual opportunities if you were careful. Especially on days set aside for
men only, the sauna was packed with gay men. Some gay men devel-
oped strategies that involved bunching together to hide the activities
of couples behind them. Others who sought more intimacy would visit
the sauna on less busy days and take their chances in the privacy cabin
(Ruheraum), depending only on the sound of the door opening to signal
when a couple needed to separate quickly.79
In Hamburg, the most notorious sauna was the ‘Roman–Russian’ bath
hall on Lerchenfeld street. Kuhn visited this bath as part of his disserta-
tion research. As he walked in, he became aware that other bathers were
watching him: ‘Sitting on benches and stools around the room, they fol-
lowed your every movement and measured you up from bottom to top.’
He was deeply bothered by the ‘lustful glances typical of homosexuals.’

In the saunas, vision was mostly obscured by steam, but still he thought
he saw two men standing perhaps a little too close to one another.
‘Whether they were actually doing anything immoral one could not tell
for sure. Indeed, this fact alone explained the popularity of these baths
among homosexuals.’ Kuhn observed that seeing men in an excited
state in this bath was not unusual. As he was getting ready to leave, he
saw two men together entering a shower, one noticeably older than the
other. They began to wash together, soaping each other up, ‘which they
enjoyed immensely.’ Kuhn guessed that the younger one was a male
prostitute. ‘In the sauna they even lay together tenderly in each other’s
arms.’80
We should not take this description at face value, since it probably
exaggerates the forwardness of homosexuals in the baths. Dieter S. said
he was always careful when he went into saunas, as one could eas-
ily make a mistake by ‘staring too hard’ or getting an erection among
men who were not receptive. The policemen who accompanied Kuhn,
we should note, did not see anyone worth arresting that day. Perhaps
Kuhn’s paranoia affected his perception of what he saw in the steam.
After all, he himself admits that ‘he felt uncomfortable the entire time
despite the policemen in his company’ and that ‘he only felt safe
after leaving the bath.’ Still, this narrative does give a sense of the
opportunities provided by the bath halls and saunas.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Besides the public places that gay men used as cruising locations, most
cities of any size had at least one establishment where homosexual men
could go to drink with ‘like-minded’ people. Generally, gay bars, pubs,
and nightclubs were nondescript.81 It is unlikely that gay men wandered
across them by accident. Most often, visitors received a tip. Homosexual
men seem to have learned about these gay bars in a number of acciden-
tal or intentional ways. Some would have heard about them from friends
or hustlers. Others, ironically, appear to have had their attention drawn
to the bars by the warnings of family members or neighbors. Straight
colleagues could also be a source of information for transvestite revues,
which were known to attract heterosexuals interested in risqué enter-
tainment. Equally likely, though, was that men would discover them
by reading one of the many gay magazines. In fact, one of the primary
functions of these magazines was to advertise places ‘where one could
have fun.’82
In the large, cosmopolitan city of West Berlin, there were many gay
bars and clubs to choose from. Werner Becker, a medical student and gay
activist living in the city, noted in an article written under a pseudonym
for Der Kreis in 1949 that ‘the first such bars and restaurants began to
open their doors only a short time after the end of the war. Soon fol-
lowed a series of large dancehalls.’83 As was mentioned, Berlin was still
quite an open city even in the early 1950s, and homosexuals found it
easy to move from one establishment to another across the East–West
divide. Between both sections of the city, Becker reported, there were
23 bars for homosexual men (and around 15 for lesbians) that he knew
of personally.84 As he put it, ‘Everything is represented—from the most
primitive courtyard tavern in the city’s East to the most exclusive and
chic bar in the West.’85 Many were also quite busy; however, despite this,
‘only a few remain at the same spot for an extended time; new establish-
ments pop up like mushrooms constantly, while others at the same time
are closing down.’86
A few of these bars could be found at the new heart of West Berlin, the
shopping district of Charlottenburg. On Fasanenstrasse, not far off one
end of the Kurfürstendamm, was the Bart, which advertised itself as the
‘men’s club of West Berlin.’ Just north of this spot was the Opernkeller
on Kantstrasse. Helmut Bendt remembers that in 1949, as an 18-year-old
boy who had only recently recognized his attraction to men as defin-
ing him as different, he received a suggestion from a female friend of
the family that he visit the Opernkeller. Here, she revealed, was a place
where men who loved other men met. ‘This was a sign,’ he noted many
years later, ‘that I had already settled into my role as a woman in a
way that one could apparently no longer overlook.’ Curious, he headed
down to the bar one evening, only to spend hours passing in front of
the door without quite having the courage to walk in, before finally
heading home. Several such efforts ended in failure, but finally Bendt
mustered the nerve to walk through the door. ‘The room was very full;
on a small stage, Cheri Hell sang frivolous chansons. I found a place to
sit and ordered a drink. The atmosphere seemed to me very depraved,
Cheri Hell’s songs racy and cheeky.’ Towards the end of her set, Cheri
Hell walked through the tables and suddenly lifted up her skirt to reveal
herself to be a man. ‘Still rather inexperienced with regards to Berlin’s
nightlife, this all shocked me a little, to say the least.’ However, he con-
tinued to go back and eventually met a man with whom he started a
relationship. It didn’t last long, but it allowed him a deeper introduction
into Berlin’s scene. Bendt described it as a ‘new life,’ which he came to
enjoy thoroughly.87
It was not West Berlin’s Charlottenburg, though, but the neighbor-

hood Schöneberg that emerged as one of the most important focal
points of the gay scene. During the 1920s many of West Berlin’s
best-known clubs had been located in the neighborhood around
Nollendorfplatz square, an area known at the time for its bohemian and
émigré population. Several of these bars quickly reopened again after
the war. For example, on the main thoroughfare of Kleiststrasse was the
Kleist-Casino, named after a well-known bar from the Weimar period,
though it was actually located in a new spot down the road.88 By the
early 1950s, around the corner on Courbierestrasse was located another
bar, the Boheme-Bar (later known as the Silhouette).
Nearby was Haus Thefi on Kurfürstenstrasse, another of the city’s most
popular transvestite bars. It was located in a building that was ‘partially
destroyed, but the bottom floors stood still and had been renovated.’89
Here, the city’s best-known transvestite of the day, Mamita, held her cel-
ebrated gay balls, most likely beginning in 1949.90 Werner Becker noted
that these events were well attended, with as many as 300 men at one of
them. ‘Here a large orchestra played in every one of the three large halls
of the establishment.’91 Bendt attended one of these balls during the
following year, an event which he remembered very fondly many years
later, though perhaps in slightly exaggerated terms: ‘On three floors,
to the music of three large ensembles, one thousand gay men danced
and made merry.’ Those with money or with wardrobes to show off,
Bendt recalled, dressed in everything from formal tailcoats to flowing
robes, accompanied by rhinestones and ostrich feathers and even the
occasional diadem. The young ones, such as Bendt himself, generally
preferred homemade costumes, such as pirate or Cleopatra outfits. Bendt
himself dressed as an Ephebian using simply a bedsheet. He and the
other guests mingled, ate extravagantly, and drank beer, wine, and even
cola. And of course they sought love as well—which Bendt found, in
the form of a young slender man with whom he had a relationship that
lasted over a year.92
Also near Nollendorferplatz one could find a bar that during the
Weimar era had been called the Nationalhof, but now after the war
reopened as Walterchens Ballhaus. The Ballhaus made its mark by
holding the city’s first postwar gay balls in 1946. Not far away, on
Martin Luther Strasse, was the most infamous bar from the 1920s,
the Eldorado, which reopened soon after the war ended and contin-
ued for some time to be a favorite spot. As previously, it was known
for its transvestite revue that drew many well-known personages—both
hetero- and homosexual—into its audience. Peter Schult, who during
the 1960s became a relatively well-known activist and journalist of the

counterculture, made a visit to the club in the early 1950s. On a trip to
the city to participate in a meeting of the Young Democrats, he received
a tip from a professor at the Free University of Berlin that the club repre-
sented a ‘cultural high point’ for any tour of Berlin.93 Upon entering the
Eldorado and finding a table, a ‘lovely “young woman” appeared, sat
down next to us and began to flirt with us. We knew that transvestites
hung around here, but she was so pretty that we still weren’t sure if we
were dealing with a man or a woman.’94
To the east of Schöneberg, near the location where the Wall would
eventually be built in 1961, was Kreuzberg, the Berlin neighborhood
today known for its large Turkish settlement and its countercultural
presence. In the years after World War II, though, Kreuzberg was a run-
down district full of nineteenth-century apartment buildings built for
the city’s rapidly expanding working-class. This edge of the Western
section of the city would become the gay scene’s other major focal
point. At the northwest corner of Lausitzer Platz was a bar that went
by different names: the Künstler Klause, the Artistenklause, and, for a
time, Mamitas. In one of the apartments above the bar Bernd Feuerhelm
was born. He would eventually play the main role in Praunheim’s
landmark film from the early 1970s, It is Not the Homosexual Who is
Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. Feuerhelm remembers as a
child being strongly warned about the bar by his mother.95 It was oper-
ated for a couple of years by Herta Wiedner, at least before the local
authorities became aware that she was permitting men to dance with-
out a license. The transvestite performer Mamita took over the bar for
another few years, but eventually he died—probably from injuries suf-
fered during an attack—and the bar was closed.96 Near the far corner
of Lausitzer Platz was another bar, the Bohème, which Feuerhelm vis-
ited regularly as a teen at the end of the 1950s, shortly before it closed.
The bar had a house band, which made it a good place to dance. It did
not have a doorman or a doorbell—which would become common for
gay bars in the next decade—and was decorated with ‘balloons and
garlands’ and a wallpaper that ‘gave the Bohème a certain Rhenish
cheerfulness.’97
Many people made their rounds between the bars on Lausitzer Platz
and another establishment nearby, Elli’s Place (Bei Elli) on Skalitzer
Strasse. Until it closed in the early 1990s, Elisabeth ‘Elli’ Hartung’s Beer
Bar was one of the best-known in Berlin. Located near the heart of
Kreuzberg, the building had been partially destroyed by the wartime
bombing so that it was in meager condition at first. As Elli described it,
‘Beer was brought in from Schultheiss Brewery on Kreuzbergstrasse

with a handcart. Because the electric lights weren’t working, the guests
brought candles, along with coal, tablecloths, and glasses.’98 Around the
bar quite a mythology developed over the years. According to legend, it
had operated since the 1920s as a gay bar, attracting such famous visitors
as Klaus Mann and Ernst Röhm. The bar had then supposedly continued
operation under the Nazis as the only gay bar in the city, thanks to Elli’s
good relationship with several local Nazis.
No one has been able to verify this legend, and in fact, as the historian
Jens Dobler notes, there is much reason to doubt it. However, the fact
that the legend emerged in the 1950s and 1960s says a great deal about
its atmosphere. As Dobler put it, Elli’s Place was ‘not only a homobar, but
its epitome. Twenty square meters of intense Kreuzburg, colorful, wild,
bubbling with ideas, multilingual, explosive, full of small vices, meager,
fermenting, questionable.’99 Like most gay bars in the 1950s, the bar
was unassuming from the front. The ‘Bier-Bar’ sign along with the beer
advertisements posted out near the door seemed to announce little more
than a neighborhood bar catering to regulars. It must have been quite a
shock for a newcomer to discover how absolutely packed the place was
with people. By 1951, the bar was already attracting quite a crowd from
both West and East Berlin. The inside was strangely decorated, recalled
Lothar ‘Charlotte’ Berfelde, a transvestite from East Germany who reg-
ularly visited the bar in the 1950s until the wall made it impossible to
cross into West Berlin. Behind the bar stood a dark brown, turn-of-the-
century backbar. One side wall was adorned with ‘a picture of Berlin as it
had been—a row of houses, gaslights, city gates . . . Everything hinted at
1900, another era. But on the worn-out chairs, their cushions so faded
that their original colors could no longer be determined, life was focused
on the here and now.’100
The bars of West Berlin opened and closed, but overall the number
continued to grow over the decade, from 7 in 1952 to 13 by 1959.101
Other cities also experienced such growth, though most not as impres-
sive. Cologne, which only had two gay bars in 1951—the Barberina
and Zum steinernen Kännchen—possessed 15 by the middle of the
decade.102 Frankfurt’s number grew from approximately 5 in 1951 to
14 in 1959.103 Even a smaller city like Hannover had one gay bar that
opened up in 1946 (the Schlossklause), followed by the Schwanenburg
in 1951, and then the Wielandseck in 1953. The first two closed, but oth-
ers came to replace them, leaving approximately three open in the city
at any given time.104 And then Munich, a city whose gay scene remained
stunted for many years by the conservative Catholic atmosphere of
Bavaria, still managed to produce two gay bars in the early 1950s (the
Dult-Stuben and Die Spinne).105
None of these scenes, not even West Berlin’s, could compare with
Hamburg’s, at least until the middle years of the 1960s. Observers of
Hamburg’s gay scene were impressed by the variety of establishments
that it had to offer. ‘In Hamburg there is a bar for practically every taste,’
Kuhn noted. ‘Next to the obvious dives, which would probably appear
a little scary to the average visitor, there are also the comfortably bour-
geois establishments and then those that are luxuriously furnished.’106
In 1948 there were four bars with some homosexual activity accord-
ing to police estimates, although some of these probably also had a
straight clientele.107 One of these was the Hummel-Klause, ran by Käthe
Borowsky until it was closed down in late 1948 for illegally producing
its own liquor.108 As with many other commercial enterprises, the num-
ber of homosexual bars expanded rapidly after 1948, so that there were
nine by September 1950 and no less than 17 by 1954.109
Near the Reeperbahn there was the Roxi Bar, one of the earliest gay
bars to appear after the war. Like many early drinking establishments,
the bar occupied what space it could find, namely the basement and
first two stories of a building whose upper floors had been gutted by
the bombings. Opened in the spring of 1949, by April 1950 the bar
ran into trouble, since the original owner could ‘not offer homosexuals
what they expected from him due to business and family difficulties.’110
In the following month the bar was sold to the plump ‘Aunt Annie,’
as she became known. Under her management, it regained its lost
popularity.111 A contributor to one of Hamburg’s gay magazines, Der
Ring, probably had this club in mind when he described the ‘true locale
for our kind’: ‘Usually they consist of two small rooms. The first contains
a long bar on which twelve or more barstools stand, the second conceals
five or six tables. Nothing here strikes one as anything out of the ordi-
nary; instead, the soul of this small bar is always the manager (Inhaber),
who in many cases is a woman.’ ‘Aunt Annie’ was described as dealing
with the regulars with a kind of ‘rough (kratzbürstiger) motherliness.’112
The Roxi Bar was just one of the bars in the area of St. Pauli. Also on
the northern side of the Reeperbahn was Max + Moritz, the Bar Celeno,
and the Spundloch. Most were located, though, on the southern side.
Down Davidstrasse one could find in the early 1950s the David-Klause,
the Hafenschenke, the Hummel-Klause, and the Loreley (at least before
it moved to a new location not far away, on Detlev Bremer Strasse).
Around the corner on Kastenienallee were the Flamingo, the Zwitscher-
Klause, and the Laubfrosch.
The heart of Hamburg’s gay scene was not St. Pauli, but the
Grossneumarkt square in the center of the ‘new city’ (Neustadt), just
north of the city’s famous St. Michaelis church. Here, not long after the
Roxi Bar made its debut in 1949, the Stadtcasino opened, taking its name
from a popular homosexual bar of the Weimar years. It quickly turned
into ‘Hamburg’s leading Freundschaftslokal,’ thanks in part to its mas-
querade balls, which promised ‘atmosphere, humor, and a full bar,’ and
the beloved transvestite singer ‘Fräulein Grete.’113 Further attractions
included the ‘week of festivities’ held in celebration of the Stadtcasino’s
third anniversary, during which guests were treated to a new surprise
every day and, on two days of the week, free drinks of every kind at
the bar.114 One writer for Der Ring described the regular public of such
establishments as the Stadtcasino as consisting of young office work-
ers, store salesmen, and those who ‘want to show off a little in front of
their boyfriends.’ Couples could drink a glass of cola and smoke a few
cigarettes before heading out onto the floor to dance the tango or the
fox trot. In the early hours of the morning they would return home,
satisfied to ‘have had another exciting and entertaining weekend.’115
On the nearby Neustädterstrasse, the owners of the old Stadtcasino
from the Weimar years—Hans and Lisa Eiserdorff (known to their cus-
tomers as ‘Aunt Lisa and Uncle Hans’)—decided to open up their new
nightclub, the Bronzekeller. The Bronzekeller advertised itself as the
‘most modern restaurant where art and society meet.’116 It too occasion-
ally held large costume parties and similar festivities, yet it distinguished
itself primarily by serving a better clientele than many other bars. The
Bronzekeller was often frequented by visitors from outside Hamburg,
especially from the small towns of the countryside, who had money to
spend and wanted to experience some of the fun of the big city.
At least one of Hamburg’s gay bars, the Theaterklause, had the distinc-
tion of operating continuously through the Weimar and Nazi periods.
It was located directly behind the state opera building in the heart of the
city. Rumors suggest that the owner Else Asshauer may have co-operated
with the police during the Nazi period, perhaps even denouncing some
of her customers, although that has not been verified by any official
records. At the same time, she seems to have really ‘loved gay men.’
One customer remembered her as an ‘ice-cold, resolute businesswoman’
who could nonetheless be fun and take some special steps for her cus-
tomers: ‘She opened her bar on Christmas Eve. For gay men without
friends or family, that was important.’117 She carefully maintained a
respectable, middle-class atmosphere in her bar. In the 1950s it was
frequented mostly by wealthier, better-educated people who were seen
by many gay men as conceited: ‘You recognized it right away . . . their

noses were stuck way up in the air and they always addressed each other
formally (sagten zu sich selber “Sie”).’
Most of Hamburg’s gay bars catered to a less refined crowd. Tabasco’s
and Schwarzer Kater’s were Schnurrbartdiele, which meant that their
public consisted almost solely of men older than 50. The Atelier
‘Le Monocle’ at 57 ABC Strasse featured a transvestite show, known for
being one of the favorite stops for the Swedish actress Zarah Leander
when she was in the city, despite her lack of appreciation of the men
there who imitated her. Finally, there were a number of hustler bars,
where men who were interested in picking up male prostitutes could go.
Many were in St. Pauli, not surprisingly, most notably the Davidklause
and Loreley on Davidstrasse. There were also some in the neighborhood
of St. Georg, such as the Göttes Stuben on Lange Reihe (street), whose
proximity to the central train station made it attractive for male pros-
titutes and clients alike. The hustler bars often served a mixed crowd.
In the Davidklause, for instance, one could find pimps and female pros-
titutes along with their heterosexual clients, and regulars of the Loreley
would often see sailors come in as well as tourists who had no idea what
kind of place it was. A writer for the gay magazine Der Ring described the
hustler bars as the only ones in the city that reeked of ‘strong and per-
haps morbid foulness.’ The male prostitutes in these bars ‘slump in the
corner like hungry birds, ready to dive on anyone with coins jingling in
their pockets. They are always strong, slothful, able to hold their drink,
and not without a certain charm, but generally they turn around and
take the money made from men in these bars straight to a prostitute.’118
Aside from the disreputable hustler bars, most gay bars and clubs—in
Hamburg and elsewhere—were clean, orderly, and even rather ordinary.
Even on the inside, both existing photographs and memories from the
period suggest that most gay establishments were comfortably middle
class. Despite what popular prejudice and rumor might suggest, there
were ‘no orgies, no more dirty jokes than anywhere else.’119 In fact, pic-
tures of the bar interiors generally show men dressed respectably like
other men of the time: in slacks, coat, and often ties. In his descrip-
tion of the city, Werner Becker went to great lengths to emphasize how
upright people acted in these establishments. ‘Yes, the atmosphere is
usually quite excited,’ he wrote, ‘but in fact never oversteps acceptable
limits.’ Several times fellow medical students who were not homosex-
ual but were interested in the issue had gone with him to one of the
bars. They had found nothing that happened there offensive, and in
fact they were slightly saddened that there was not more going on.
‘They had the idea,’ remarked Becker, ‘which frequently runs around
among outsiders, that the wildest orgies are held in such men’s-only
clubs’. Such expectations were quite unrealistic, given that the patrons
still felt threatened by the arm of the law and, in fact, the establishments
were visited frequently by the police.120
Despite this self-imposed stuffiness, gay men nevertheless were among
friends and ‘like-minded’ people in these bars, so that to a certain extent
they could relax. The knowledge that the people around them would
not condemn them for their desires helped encourage everyone to let
down their guards. At the bar, people chatted, drank, and discussed
problems as in any other club. ‘The vanity of the young men and the
experience of the older ones combined with the inevitable flirtatious-
ness of everyone present to contribute to an almost festive atmosphere.’
Above all, there was a feeling of honesty that pervaded despite the ‘con-
stant prancing [dick aufgetragenen Protzereien] and the life stories that
are always skillfully shaped to evoke either sympathy or envy in their
audience.’121
This loose, at times even camp, atmosphere would immediately strike
the chance heterosexual visitor, leaving him with the impression that
there was something ‘odd’ about this deceptively normal establishment.
Indeed, such a visitor, the criminologist Herbert Grigat explained, would
encounter a bewildering scene. He would see men dancing closely to the
beat of modern music, while couples embraced, kissed, and addressed
each other with endearments in the corner. At the bar a platinum-
blonde barmaid, ‘who does not look at all feminine, takes orders in a
bass tone.’ Similarly, Kuhn noted that the chance visitor would have
the ‘uncomfortable feeling of being a stranger and a cause of trou-
ble.’ He would feel that he had ‘somehow stumbled into a completely
other world. The strange, unnatural behavior of the homosexuals who
act completely free and casual here, the constant watch for passing
“partner-objects,” and not least of all the male couples dancing on the
dance floor: all of this is the world of the homosexual.’122 These two
accounts should be taken with a grain of salt, since both Grigat and
Kuhn were interested in portraying the homosexual as a severe danger
to society, but they do suggest the different types of behavior that might
be encountered in these establishments and practically nowhere else.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
In the gay bars, parks, streets, and other major locations of the gay
scenes, one could find people of very different ages, class backgrounds,
occupations, and national origins. Within the cultural spaces of the local
scenes, though, it was often the dress and behavior of the participants
that defined personal interactions. These styles operated as a symbolic
language through which men constructed a specific gender and sexual
presentation and gave voice to their desires for other men. They can
also be interpreted in the light of Michel de Certeau’s theories as rep-
resenting a tactical deployment of the dominant culture that paralleled
the tactical usage of public spaces represented by the gay scenes as a
whole.123 An analysis of these styles suggests both the powerful forms of
creativity and self-assertion that were at play within the gay scenes, and
yet simultaneously the difficulties that these styles would face in having
their symbolic meanings accepted by the wider German culture.
For outsiders, the most recognizable homosexual style was displayed
by those men who fundamentally rejected masculinity in favor of their
identification with women. Two technically distinct types—effeminate
Tunten and transvestites—embraced this style. Transvestites, according
to one psychologist of the period, were ‘people who are seized by the
urge to dress in clothing of opposite sex, defined by both their bodily
characteristics and the manner in which they were raised, and to be
recognized as a member of this opposite sex.’124 They had a significant
role to play in some of the gay scene’s bars and nightclubs, many being
employed as singers or comics. A few, lucky transvestites—Cheri Hell in
Hamburg, for example, or Mamita in Berlin—managed to turn them-
selves into minor celebrities within the gay scene. Most, though, had
smaller roles to play. In 1951, the Hamburg vice squad remarked that
it was not unusual to find as many as eight transvestite entertainers in
several of the bars during the weekend evenings.125 Others worked as
bartenders. In Hamburg’s Stadtcasino, one bartender regularly ‘got into
drag’ inside the bar before he started work. The Roxi Bar also employed
a transvestite as a barmaid on the weekend, at least until the city’s vice
squad pressured the owner to let him go.126
Tunten, on the other hand, were gay men who acted in effeminate
ways without necessarily dressing completely like women. Sometimes
they might adopt a female name, as in the case of Werner Landers, who
adopted the name ‘Therese’ shortly after his introduction to Hamburg’s
gay scene in 1946.127 Such a rechristening, though, appears to have been
less common in the mid-century than it was earlier.128 More typical
was the employment of articles of women’s clothing or make-up. In an
era in which most men cut their hair short, two detectives noted that
Tunten ‘kept their hair long, sometimes curled, done-up, and also col-
ored.’ Instead of a tie, they wrapped their neck with a chiffon scarf.
The detectives added, ‘in our experience, we have found that at least
fifty percent of all Tunten wear eye shadow, lipstick, and nail polish.’129
Equally important were gestures and mannerisms. The psychologist
Heinz Winterberg’s description of Werner N., a male prostitute who
moved to Bonn from Breslau with his mother after the war, suggests
the complex bodily motions and attendant props that enabled a per-
formance of womanliness. ‘Werner is a slender, blond young man,’
Winterberg began, ‘who is friendly and prone to making jokes.’ His walk
marked by a ‘flirtatious swing,’ Werner swished about while making ‘eas-
ily exaggerated gestures,’ stopping occasionally to make theatrical poses.
His friends, ‘who belong to the same species, impress one with the same
feminine mannerisms.’ Together, they reinforced each other’s sense of
self and strength. Werner N. and his friends would often take trips to
Cologne, where they would cruise the city’s streets and visit gay bars
‘made-up, perfumed, and wearing women’s clothing.’ One story, which
Winterberg used to illustrate how ‘impetuous’ Werner and his friends
were, might also be read as suggesting the sense of empowerment that
could come through the celebration of one’s sexuality with the help
of effeminacy: ‘Once when they tried to visit Werner, but could only
find his mother, who tried to get rid of them, they cried for who knows
what reason: “We are all gay (schwul)! Everyone can know it, we don’t
care!” ’130
There are important differences between the two social types that a
deeper analysis would have to explore. Focusing simply on the style of
self-presentation, though, suggests that transvestites and Tunten were
not completely distinct categories. On special occasions, such as gay
masquerade balls, Tunten, too, might dress up completely as women.
Transvestites, on the other hand, generally dressed as women only in
certain contexts, for example while working in a bar or, if they were
prostitutes, walking the streets in search of johns. On other occasions,
they might be indistinguishable from other Tunten.
More importantly, both Tunten and transvestites constructed a femi-
nine persona by manipulating and utilizing signs of femininity—that is,
by swinging their hips, speaking in a high tone, and wearing make-up,
dresses, and other articles of clothing that women traditionally wear in
German society. These men saw their feminine personas and their desire
for men as deeply connected, in fact, as aspects of a feminine personal-
ity. In this way, they accepted an understanding of homosexuality that
can be traced to around the turn of the eighteenth century, namely that
sexual desire for one’s own sex was merely one aspect of a more general
gender inversion.131
Although effeminacy was not always appreciated by all participants in

the gay scenes, it actually played a very important role. Many outsiders
remarked on the festive, almost otherworldly atmosphere that reigned
in the gay bars. Effeminacy was key in engendering such an atmosphere:
by releasing men from the rigid norms that usually governed their
speech, gestures, and other forms of bodily movement, it also unleashed
energy and emotion that helped to heighten the mood. Even men who
acted according to bourgeois norms for most of their daily life would
frequently adopt a certain level of effeminacy upon entering a gay bar.
As Marjorie Garber has argued, by playing with gender roles and struc-
tures of male-centered power, transvestitism undoubtedly produced its
own unique pleasures that were reward enough in themselves.132 For
Tunten and transvestites alike, there was a joy in having their deep-
est sense of self, their most ingrained subjective position, affirmed and
celebrated by the people around them. Effeminate dress and manner-
isms, which in heterosexual society would have created only awkward
moments and closed down possibilities for communication and inti-
macy, allowed men in the gay scene to play the role of celebrity and
socialite, mingling freely with those around them, sharing stories, meet-
ing new people, and establishing new social contacts and possibilities
for intimacy with the people around them.
Besides Tunten and transvestites, there was a second group of men in
the West German gay scene who resisted the long-standing association
between effeminacy and homosexuality. These respectable homosex-
uals, as I will call them, were not new to the 1950s. Even during
the nineteenth century, when a large majority of the people (both
homo- and heterosexual) had come to accept the image of the Tunte
as the dominant stereotype of the homosexual, there were some gay
men who managed to distance themselves from effeminacy. Generally
drawn to the notion of ‘Greek love’ that they found in ancient litera-
ture, they eventually found spokesmen among the ‘masculinist’ wing of
the early-twentieth-century homosexual movement. Some writers after
1945 very obviously carried on this intellectual tradition. In fact in the
gay magazines of the early 1950s one can find attacks on the effem-
inate stereotype that echoed the dispute about Hirschfeld’s theories
of homosexuality that raged in the Weimar-era movement. Wolfgang
Fischer protested in Die Insel that people still identified homosexuals
with ‘hoards of feeble and unmanly men that can only have a dele-
terious effect on male society.’133 F. F. Wesley asserted that it was ‘every
homosexual’s duty . . . to honorably and respectably hate all obsequious-
ness [Muckertum] and effeminacy to death, for it is [these characteristics]
that make different sexual dispositions so laughable. After all, it is a

small step from laughable to contemptible, and from contemptible to
persecuted.’134 Another man, writing for Der Kreis, argued that ‘the
strictest war is to be declared against fairy behavior, for it is this above all
that brings us opposition and—there is nothing more irritating!—makes
us ridiculous.’135
If expressions of aversion towards effeminacy could be found fairly
often in the homosexual magazines of the 1950s, the focus on erotic
relationships between men of different ages, another tradition of the
1920s ‘masculinist’ writers, virtually disappeared. This may be credited
to the declining importance of classically based education by the mid-
twentieth century in Germany as elsewhere. It also made little sense to
promote or even discuss notions of ‘Greek love’ in the era of family poli-
tics. The heightened public fears that homosexuals represented a danger
to youths made it very dangerous by the 1950s to advocate relationships
with adolescent boys. Just as essential was the increasing importance for
working-class youths to maintain a strictly heterosexual identity, which
would have removed at least some of the available young men from the
pool of potential sexual partners.
Privately, such traditions may have persisted, as suggested by the
number of erotic pictures of adolescent boys and even stories of relation-
ships between older and younger men that could be found in the gay
magazines. Certainly there were still men who pursued sex with primar-
ily adolescents and young men. Publically, though, no gay men could be
found who would go so far as to advocate such relationships. Moreover,
magazines frequently published essays and letters that clearly frowned
on the practice, even suggesting that such relationships only hurt the
gay community at large by justifying society’s prejudice against them.
One anonymous scientist wrote in one of Hamburg’s gay magazines,
‘Homosexuals also do not defend those men who exploit young people.
They believe that [if paragraph 175 were to be amended to make sex
between adult males legal] maintaining twenty-one as an age of consent
is worthwhile and desirable.’136
In the place of ‘Greek love,’ postwar gay magazines increasingly
included stories that emphasized the equality and similarity of the
men drawn together into a relationship. As Matt Houlbrook has noted,
this emphasis on the emotional attachment between two committed
men mirrored the ‘companionship marriage’ that gained ascendency
among heterosexual, married couples in the early twentieth century.137
At least one author writing in Der Weg argued that true love, in fact, was
only possible between men. ‘Man and woman,’ he wrote, ‘are always
two different elements that either attract or repel each other.’ When a
woman ‘steps into the world of man,’ the former always acts as a force
of restraint which harnesses the latter. Friendship between men, on the
other hand, ‘is something of a higher sort.’ It is a ‘binding together of
the same element, a strengthening of one through the other’ and ‘a fire
that purifies the best qualities and dispositions.’138
This vision of love was but part of a larger habitus. In the 1950s
and early 1960s, respectable homosexuals generally cut their hair short,
dressed in the rather plain and conservative attire that followed mas-
culine fashion, behaved in a restrained, upright manner, and were
circumspect about their sexual life. Most men who chose this style
probably did so out of a desire not to draw unnecessary attention to
themselves. Others would have felt foolish ‘swishing’ around the gay
bars, talking in a womanly voice. Their middle-class habitus led them
to feel distaste for any behavior that might undermine their masculine
and class status. A case in point is Dieter S. (who we will see again when
we turn to the early leathermen). In the late 1950s, Dieter visited a few
of the gay bars in Hamburg, but he rejected them because they were
full of Tunten. Later, in the 1980s, he came through psychotherapy to
understand his distaste for effeminate homosexuals as being based in a
hatred of himself and a rejection of his own homosexuality. In this ear-
lier period, however, he found Tunten ‘repulsive,’ preferring the look of
workers, soldiers, or the ‘normal guy,’ as he called them.139
Acting effeminately may not have felt ‘right’ to some gay men, but
it is clear that the more masculine style of the respectable homosexu-
als came with many problems of its own. Although for some, living a
life of respectability seemed natural and correct, it must have been dif-
ficult knowing that in society at large it would have been interpreted as
indicating heterosexual, not homosexual, desire. The effort to maintain
respectability as defined by the prevailing sexual conservatism might
have involved circumspection about one’s sexual life, but the distinction
between circumspection and hiding a secret is never secure, and gener-
ally based more on perspective than anything. It is not surprising then
that many who lived according to the respectable style came to feel that
they were hiding their homosexuality from the rest of the world. In such
a case, men might have felt more burdened by respectability than any-
thing. Their masculine self-presentation would increasingly feel forced,
unnatural, and uncomfortable, no doubt leading to emotional prob-
lems. As one criminologist noted, ‘If the dissimulator does not have
a well-integrated personality, he experiences a great deal of inner ten-
sion as he maintains the rather difficult position that he himself has
chosen.’140 In these cases, in which gay men saw themselves as living a

double life, the men looked forward to the moments when they could
enter the gay bar and act more ‘naturally.’ Certainly this would have
involved behavior that broke heterosexual norms, such as dancing with
men or otherwise coming into physical contact with men in ways that
would have seemed ‘odd’ to heterosexual society. It might also entail
adopting small gestures from a tuntenhaft style.
Problems of maintaining a masculine self-presentation came not only
from encounters with the world outside the gay scene, but also from
within the gay scene itself. Tunten were known to generalize their own
equation of homosexuality with effeminacy to include all gay men.
In an interview done in 1994, one man argued that there was no dis-
tinction between homosexuals and Tunten, and that men who tried to
‘exhibit their manliness’ were only fooling themselves. Their dress was
itself a kind of ‘drag.’141 Whether this man or any other Tunte would
have made such an argument back in the 1950s or even the early 1960s
is not known, but there is evidence that Tunten liked to poke holes in
the pretensions of masculine-styled gay men. In the northern city of
Kiel, Christian M. met a man named Uwe on his first visit to the only
gay bar in the town, the Bunte Kuh. They went back to Uwe’s apartment
that evening, where the man convinced him to have anal sex. Christian
M. found the experience very painful, but afterwards could not stop
thinking about Uwe. The next evening, he went back to the Bunte Kuh
hoping to find his lover. Instead of finding Uwe, he ran into ‘Maria,’ a
Tunte whom he had met the previous night. ‘Where did you leave your
husband?’ Maria yelled across the bar while waving him over. Christian
walked over, where he was met by the greeting, ‘Hello, my little girl
[meine Kleine].’ This irritated him. ‘Even if she [sic] acts like a woman,
she doesn’t have to lay such effeminacy on me!’ he grumbled to him-
self. After again being addressed as a girl, Christian informed Maria that
he didn’t appreciate it. Maria burst out in laughter, having trouble even
staying on his bench. He then replied, louder than Christian would have
wished, ‘The world is simply set up in this manner: Who sticks it in is
the man, and who gets it is the woman! Do you see? And everyone here
knows that Uwe is always the one who sticks it in. No hole is safe with
him.’ With a look of feigned curiosity on his face, Maria inquired, ‘Or
did things turn out differently with you?’142
Maria in this story appeared to relish the opportunity to point out
the perceived gap between Christian’s appearance and who he ‘really’
was. Later, in the 1970s, some gay activists would aggressively denounce
more masculine homosexuals. To them, respectable homosexuals were
no different than the black ‘Uncle Toms’ who submitted to the norms
of their oppressors while waiting futilely for the majority to grant them
equality. In some cases, this condemnation rings true, since there were
certainly many closeted males who carefully guarded their sexual lives.
Yet not all respectable homosexuals fit this description. We should not
ignore the many masculine homosexuals who had elaborate networks
of gay friends, read gay magazines and novels, and on occasion joined
groups that discussed the problems that they faced. Many of these men
were comfortable with their sexuality and, in a few cases, worked quite
diligently to end the legal proscription against sexual contact between
men through scientific work and education.143
In the context of the 1950s homophile movement, a significant seg-
ment of respectable homosexuals attached political meanings to their
masculine style. First articulated by writers associated with Freidrich
Radzuweit’s League of Human Rights in the 1920s, this political strat-
egy emphasized that masculine, respectable behavior was one of the
best ways to convince the rest of society to accept homosexuality and
decriminalize homosexual behavior. By the early 1950s, Der Kreis had
become one of the most consistent promoters of this ‘code of con-
duct.’ 144 Other prominent activists also played a role. As we have seen,
Hans Giese argued in The Homosexual Man in the World that gay men
needed to seek out stable, long-lasting relationships that would approx-
imate heterosexual marriages. Such pairings, he believed, would allow
gay men to live out healthier and more ethical lives.145 Another promi-
nent sexologist of the era, Dr. Rudolf Klimmer, insisted that effeminate
homosexuals (who, he believed, were born with their disposition) had
‘a duty to conduct [themselves] in public as inconspicuously as possible,
not to indulge [themselves], and all the more not to exaggerate [their]
feminine behavior to the outside.’146
The homophile style may have implicitly challenged what remained
of the association between effeminacy and homosexuality, but an even
more striking confrontation was made by the third group in West
Germany’s gay scene, the leathermen. The style now indelibly associated
with the graphic images of the Norwegian artist Tom of Finland did not
appear all at once in the post-World War II period.147 Instead, it emerged
tentatively in Germany at first, often being hinted at more than any-
thing. This style was certainly of American origin, but it spread to West
Germany long before the arrival of American movies such as The Wild
One in 1955. Indeed, there already existed tiny groups of leathermen
in Amsterdam, Berlin, Cologne, and a few other cities by 1951. We can
assume they picked up the style from American GIs, since disillusioned
veterans were among the first Americans to found motorcycle gangs in

California during the late 1940s.148 In the late 1940s and early 1950s,
few could afford a full leather outfit; men with a yearning for the style
had to be satisfied with small articles of clothing like boots or, at most,
a jacket.
The desire for leather was rooted in the eroticization of the working
class. For many bourgeois homosexuals, working-class men sometimes
appeared ‘more physical, less civilized, less effeminate.’ This vision of
the rough and rowdy worker often caused bourgeois gay men to search
for a ‘real man’ among the working class.149 In the same way, gay men
turned to markers of working-class masculinity when they wished to
construct an overtly masculine homosexual identity for themselves.
One of the most prominent of these markers was clothing made of
leather. ‘At that time,’ one author notes, ‘leather was certainly not classy.
No, it was the dress of workers, waged employees, and the lower classes.
The only exception was the brightly polished soldier’s boots.’150 By the
end of the 1950s, leather brought to mind images of the working-class
hoodlums that were receiving such press coverage. The cultural mean-
ings of leather are complex, and were especially complicated in a period
in which leather still conjured up images of Nazi functionaries and
SS troops. The Nazis as well as many other authoritarian regimes in
the 1920s and 1930s had drawn on leather’s associations with power,
domination, and military masculinity. For some, leather acted as a
fetish, standing in for naked flesh.151 For others, all of these meanings
became mixed into a potent brew, as illustrated by the ‘torture chamber’
found in Nuremberg that included leather boots, old German army uni-
forms, straps, and whips used, according to one journalist, by numerous
leathermen in ritualistic S&M orgies.152
Since leather jackets were relatively uncommon, the early leatherman
style could include other elements: American-style cowboy boots, tra-
ditional German Lederhosen, and by the end of the 1950s, jeans and
denim jackets. The style was not shaped exclusively by gay leather-
men, but instead seems to have evolved within a rather indistinct
social milieu of its own, which included (potentially straight) motor-
cycle enthusiasts, working-class hoodlums, and practitioners of sado-
masochism in addition to gay men attracted to the style.153 Because
of this, it was some time before the leatherman style became associ-
ated with homosexuality. This is true even in the gay scene itself, as
Dieter S.’s experiences show. After an initial period in which he sought
lovers among intellectual circles, Dieter slowly discovered that he found
workers more attractive. Around 1959, he started to imitate their dress
and, in this way, acquired some of the new styles of clothing com-
ing from America. He remembered himself as one of the first to start
wearing jeans and a leather jacket in Hamburg. This could cause some
problems in a world in which leather was associated with working-class
hoodlums, even in the gay scene itself. When Dieter visited Berlin, the
doormen at the front of the gay bars often would not let him in because
he looked too young. ‘In Berlin,’ he explains, ‘if you wore jeans and a
leather jacket, you were seen as a hustler.’ If he was allowed in, he then
had the problem of meeting men who were disappointed to find out he
was an ‘old man’ of twenty-five.154
Dieter S.’s story suggests the difficulties that accompany developing a
novel style. If a style is supposed to convey information about its wearer,
there will be many who misunderstand it as it first emerges into public
view. And yet, Dieter was obviously not alone in being drawn to the sig-
nifying possibilities of the leatherman style. If he had ventured over to
Elli’s Place, he would have found other leathermen rubbing elbows with
‘made-up transvestites, butch lesbians, [and] hoards of male prostitutes
who came from the East to make a quick five marks.’155 In Cologne,
there are hints that men in leather or on motorcycles could be seen
regularly in the vicinity of several gay cruising spots along the har-
bor and around specific public restrooms.156 By the end of the 1950s,
Hamburg’s Rosengarten Park near the city’s harbor district was serv-
ing as a cruising spot for leathermen.157 Furthermore, men in leather
made a few appearances in gay magazines during the second half of the
decade.158
What did some men see in leather and other elements of the style
that they found so attractive? By looking at images found in the gay
magazines of the time, reading the stories written about gay leather-
men, and listening to leathermen themselves talk about the style, one
discovers a powerful mixture of meanings and energies that could be
called to mind through the style. Like Dieter S., many men were in
search of a style that contained a sexual message, and yet offered a
firm rebuke to the feminine style of the Tunten. Yet these men also
were in search of something more exciting than the respectable dress
of the homophiles, which was designed to blend into everyday life and
to exhibit the homophiles’ self-possessed, rational, and temperate per-
sonalities. Some men who associated respectable masculine dress with
their daily conformity to heterosexual norms may have been fascinated
by this costume that promised them an alternate way of living during
their leisure hours. This style made them stand out instead of blending
in. In place of the rational, controlled presence of the homophile, the
leatherman style elicited an emotional response from both the individ-

uals who adopted it and from onlookers. It is not surprising then that
many men turned to the leather jackets and motorcycles that exuded
a sense of wild freedom, somehow vaguely evocative of the American
frontier, and more importantly conjured up images of working-class
masculinity that so many gay men found exciting.159
The number of men who adopted this style was still small, but
growing—especially in the first half of the 1960s. During this period, the
fluid leather-biker milieu of the 1950s crystallized into distinct groups.
Working-class hoodlums went through a little-understood metamor-
phosis into ‘rockers,’ who closely resembled motorcycle gangs like the
United States’s Hell’s Angels.160 Gay leathermen, for their part, devel-
oped their own separate associations. Close circles of friends cemented
themselves in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, and elsewhere, meeting regu-
larly in local gay bars and throwing their own parties. In 1965, the Argos
opened in Amsterdam. As one of the first bars in Europe to exclusively
serve gay leathermen, it quickly acquired a reputation in the various gay
scenes across the continent. Soon, gay leathermen from across Europe
were converging on Amsterdam, providing them with a common set
of experiences that allowed a full-blown ‘leather culture’ to develop in
West Germany after 1967, the year that Hamburg’s Loreley began to
cater to leathermen and that the Motor Sport Club of Cologne held its
initial meetings.161
The fourth major style in the gay scene was that of the working-class
boys and young men who operated as hustlers (Strichjungen, or simply
Stricher). The story of one such male prostitute, Heinz G., is told by
criminologist Reinhard Redhardt. After World War II was over, Heinz
G. began an apprenticeship as a machine fitter. He lost his thumb a year
later and had to quit. Next, he started work as a baker’s assistant, but
the heat bothered him, as did his boss. In the meantime, his relation-
ship with his stepmother had grown worse. He decided to leave home in
search of adventure, visiting cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Munich, and
eventually Hamburg. In Hamburg he came into ‘bad company,’ as Heinz
himself put it. He began to work as a hustler and ultimately spent more
than a year in juvenile detention due to the abduction and blackmailing
of a homosexual man.162
Hustlers such as Heinz G. attracted a lot of attention in the first half of
the 1950s because they combined and concentrated many concerns that
were central to public debates in the early Federal Republic: crime, pros-
titution, homosexuality, youth, and the dangers of the public sphere.163
Anyone researching male prostitution in this period will be pleased to
discover a number of published studies on the subject written at the

time. From these sources, we find out some very basic information about
male prostitutes. Heinz G. turns out to be exemplary of male prostitutes
in several ways: his working-class origin, his difficult family situation,
his lack of economic opportunities, and his involvement with other
criminal activities. In the gay scenes of West German cities, there were
a number of such men whose ages ranged generally between 16 and 23,
according to one study, with the peak ages being between 18 and 20.164
Like Heinz G., they were generally part of a larger population of young,
working-class men found in most major cities who moved from one
urban area to another in search of economic activity and excitement.
Sources such as Redhardt’s study also allow us to glean informa-
tion about the style associated with street hustlers. Not surprisingly,
their behavior and dress were largely the same as that of most young
working-class men at the time, though hustlers might wear especially
tight trousers or put on certain costumes (like sailor uniforms) to attract
the attention of clients.165 A few began to dress in the American-style
clothing of the hoodlum by the end of the 1950s.
Within the gay scene, some men were attracted to these hustlers as
representing the ‘real men’ that they desired. Others, though—especially
those who wanted to maintain their respectability—might have been
repulsed by hustlers as representing ‘the street’ and the dirty, promis-
cuous sex of bathroom stalls.166 Hustlers could also invoke fear in the
gay scene, as everyone had heard stories of blackmail, beatings, and
even murder involving street prostitutes. Effeminate men in particular
had to worry about attacks from violent, working-class youths who were
often indistinguishable from the hustlers (and quite possibly the same
individuals).
Interpreting the significance that hustlers assigned to their own styles
and activities within the scene presents historians with a major problem.
The studies of hustlers from the 1950s contain a wealth of information
about them, but also some obvious biases and blind spots. Reading them
today, we can quickly see that most of the researchers trusted very little
of what the hustlers actually said. There was some good reason for this,
since the subjects were generally in police custody; however, the result
for historians is that we have little of the actual language that subjects
used. Mostly we have to rely on paraphrased conversations and the anal-
ysis of the author, which gives us little help if we want to explore the
worldview of hustlers themselves.
Because of this problem, I will rely on some interviews done by
students at the University of Hamburg in 1969–70. Admittedly, there
are some real difficulties here, since a lot happened between 1965
and 1969—the rise of the student movement, the growing influence
of the counterculture, and the broader sexual revolution—that could
have led to changed attitudes regarding homosexuality among hustlers
and the rest of the working-class population. Because these inter-
views provide some very rare hints about how hustlers viewed their
own activity within the gay scene, however, I will take the risk of
proposing that they can be applied to the decade of the 1960s as
a whole.
What these interviews suggest is that, at least by the end of the 1960s,
there were two competing understandings of homosexuality available
to working-class men. Hustlers themselves, who rarely described them-
selves as homosexual despite their frequent sexual contact with men,
tended to subscribe to the older conception of homosexuality, which
saw it as an aspect of gender inversion. One interview subject stated
that homosexuals were ‘unmanly and look like women,’ while several
other hustlers described them as weak.167 As we have seen, this notion
of gender inversion has been the prevalent view of homosexuality
from at least the end of the nineteenth century if not earlier. As a
response to this stereotype, hustlers maintained their own masculin-
ity and heterosexuality above all by dressing in what they considered a
masculine fashion; that is, according to the norms that governed other
working-class youths.
A separate sociological study published in the early 1970s suggests
that the stereotype of the Tunte was certainly not dead among the work-
ing class at this point.168 Nevertheless, the attitudes of other working-
class boys towards the hustlers interviewed reveal an alternate, more
modern understanding of homosexuality that did not depend on gen-
der inversion. One young prostitute said, ‘If the others knew that he
walked the street, then he would be called mentally unsound, abnor-
mal, gay, perverted . . . If the others knew it, then the fag, the homo, that
is, the hustler, is through, it is all over for him. He will never get a friend
again. If the others here knew what I had done, I would never have
another buddy.’169 In the eyes of most working-class youths, apparently,
hustlers were homosexual (and therefore unmanly) by their very will-
ingness to have sex with men. They did not have to look abnormal to
be sick or unmanly in other deeper ways. When exactly this understand-
ing took root in the working class is not yet precisely known; however,
there is every reason to think that given the proliferating image of the
(not-specifically feminine) corrupting homosexual, it had at least started
to take root in working-class minds by the early 1960s.
Hustlers, then, focused on one definition of homosexuality avail-

able to them, while the general working-class public alternated between
definitions depending on the context. This difference between how
hustlers saw homosexuality and how other working-class youths saw it
made hustlers understandably insecure about their masculinity. Hustlers
reacted in various ways to this tension. Some alternated between having
sex with their clients and beating them up and robbing them, which
was something that they could brag about to their friends.170 Nearly all
attempted to keep their activities secret, usually by withdrawing from
friendships with other young men in their milieu.171 Spending lots of
time among homosexuals in the gay scene had an added advantage,
since here they could more easily maintain their sense of manhood. And
then, hustlers could also create elaborate excuses for their activities. One
adolescent named George felt that there had to be hustlers to protect
respectable society: ‘Hamburg is a port city, so lots of strangers come
here—sailors and so on—and they want some satisfaction . . . I mean,
there have to be hustlers, or listen, the respectable boys and decent
girls wouldn’t be left alone.’172 Such excuses, however, did not protect
hustlers from having occasional bouts of shame: ‘I’ll be honest, some-
times I have the sense that I am doing something really base. Then, well,
then I feel like some cheater, or some scoundrel [Abstauber], some crim-
inal.’ In many cases, feelings of guilt impinged on hustlers in the figure
of people close to them: ‘No, [I don’t think what I am doing is immoral,]
but my parents can’t find it out. If my grandmother ever found out, she
would die of a heart attack.’173
Each of these four styles was caught in complicated relationships of
power, both with the dominant culture and with each other. On the
one hand, imitation was involved in all the styles, suggesting the power
differential that existed between the scene and the wider culture of
West Germany. Indeed, as an American, it is hard to read the descrip-
tions of these basic styles and not occasionally be reminded of African
Americans who, prior to the 1960s, imitated white styles in an effort
to earn status both from white society and within their specific commu-
nity. Certainly homophiles acted largely like other bourgeois men, while
leathermen and hustlers borrowed stylistic elements from working-class
culture.
And yet, this was not a mere mimicry of the dominant culture;
indeed, each of these styles can be seen as ‘tactical’ appropriations of
the dominant culture.174 All the gay men in the gay scene redeployed
some symbols of the wider German culture in ways that assigned them
new meanings, thus providing a fundamental challenge to the power
of the dominant culture. Homophiles, for example, adopted the style

of bourgeois masculine behavior, and yet also provided a challenge to
the assumption that this style implied heterosexual desire to be car-
ried out within a nuclear family context. Hustlers, for their part, also
lived according to the style of masculinity that prevailed in their milieu,
namely the society of young, working-class men that one tended to find
around the central train station and in St. Pauli; however, they, too, were
forced to make tactical moves vis-à-vis the dominant understandings of
sexuality and masculinity while selling sexual favors in the gay scene.
The nascent style of the leathermen offered a more significant chal-
lenge to masculine norms. Drawing upon symbols of straight, working-
class masculinity and upon the more openly sexual fashions associated
with American popular culture, it represented a novel way for men to
express their sexual desire for other men, one that would finally find
a powerful expression (and, we should note, standardization) in the
late 1960s with the pictures of Tom of Finland. The style of Tunten and
transvestites also represented a significant rejection of the norms of mas-
culinity by reveling in feminine attire and behavior. Though vilified by
some homophiles and ridiculed by the dominant culture, the men who
adopted this style could within the limits of the gay scene create glam-
orous, expansive personas that could overcome the emotional obstacles
set up by West German society to prevent intimacy between men. The
fame and status that a few transvestites attained within the limited con-
fines of the gay scene suggest that this social arena did not simply award
authority to those who best imitated heterosexual fashions; the dynamic
was more complicated than that.
Yet that these various tactics always remained ‘weapons of the weak’
becomes clear at different levels.175 Homophiles may have privately
challenged the assumptions behind the ‘German father,’ but their pub-
lic repetition of the bourgeois masculine norms only reinforced those
norms. Homophile men may have insisted that homosexuality did not
necessarily rob a man of his respectability, but the fact that most of
them closeted their desires for men reveals that they realized much of
society believed otherwise. Furthermore, they had difficulty addressing
the real weakness of the style. If they accepted the private nature of sex-
uality associated with bourgeois masculinity, their very privacy could
be seen as ‘proof’ of the hidden problem of corrupting homosexuals.
Homophiles themselves recognized this weakness at some level. A num-
ber of them vocally rejected relationships with adolescents in a way that
suggested their insecurity, while those who continued to pursue such
relationships did so quietly, even in the gay scene itself.176
All the other styles faced limits as well. Most hustlers insisted that they
were heterosexual, even if they were having sex with men; but they also
understood that they had to keep their activities secret from their fami-
lies and friends if they wanted to still be treated with respect. Tunten and
transvestites, in some ways, actually helped to reinforce the dominant
culture’s assumption about the ‘natural’ distinction between men and
women by ‘imitating’ feminine behavior. Furthermore, their extremely
visible behavior marked them clearly as outsiders, which could have
extreme consequences for them socially and legally. Finally, the style
of the leathermen was so novel and its implications so radical for the
1950s that its meaning was often indecipherable to the culture at large.
Even if jeans and leather jackets would become commonplace a couple
of decades later, at this time, both were generally associated with hood-
lums and juvenile delinquents. Men who wore these items would have
had to deal with social stigma for this reason alone.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The growing size and confidence of the West Germany gay scenes was
observed by many at the end of the 1950s. One official from Cologne’s
Youth Welfare office remarked, ‘All and all, the behavior of homosexuals
must be described as “aggressive.” ’ In Hamburg too, government offices
in the late 1950s and early 1960s began to receive more complaints
about men loitering around public bathrooms, complaints that grad-
ually led public officials to re-evaluate the limits of their tolerance.177
Less is known about public or government responses to the gay scenes
in West Berlin or other smaller cities, but what is certain is that, in
1959, the Federal Bureau of Criminal Investigation felt it necessary to
call a major conference on sexual crimes. The seminar received a sub-
stantial amount of publicity in the police world, with summaries of the
talks being published in the police journal Kriminalistik and full-length
versions published slightly later in book form.178
As this conference suggests, homosexuality was not the only pub-
lic manifestation of sexuality that government officials thought had
gotten out of control. In both Cologne and Hamburg, city officials ini-
tiated ‘sanitation measures’ (Sanierungsmassnahmen) in the early 1960s
to return an atmosphere of respectability to poor districts that had
emerged as centers of female prostitutes. Worried about the bad pub-
licity that the city was getting internationally, and anxious about the
impression that crime-ridden areas such as St. Georg and St. Pauli would
make on the visitors that were expected to come to the city in 1963
as part of the International Garden Exposition, Hamburg’s government

authorized large-scale raids and escalated the undercover police work
in St. Pauli and St. Georg. New zoning regulations were drawn up to
drive prostitution out of inner-city areas, especially St. Georg, and into
the zones of regulated prostitution in St. Pauli.179 Similar measures were
taken by the city of Cologne in 1963, as the government tried to encour-
age traffic and promote business in the central areas of the older portion
of the city, exactly the area where prostitution had thrived after the
war.180
At the same time, officials in both cities targeted gay bars and other
areas of the gay scene. In Cologne, the Youth Welfare Office, the City
Regulations Office, and the police department mobilized to monitor
bars, public bathrooms, and parks known to be frequented by homosex-
ual men. They sought to add to the files kept by the police and to extend
the official list of homosexual bars to include recently opened establish-
ments as well as clubs operating in the suburbs of the city, which the
police previously had ignored.181 Information acquired from these var-
ious sources or from the League of People’s Guardians, who had their
own people watching the scene, was then employed by the City Regula-
tions Office to revoke the liquor licenses of gay bars or to aid the police
in curbing homosexual activity in the bathrooms.182
Hamburg’s city government also intensified its efforts. During routine
checks of the 34 gay bars known to the Hamburg police department at
the time, the detectives of the homosexual squad were able to establish
that ‘the men in these establishments were dancing with one another
in an unsavory manner.’ Reading this report, the local city licensing
authorities notified one local gay bar, the Boheme, that dancing would
no longer be permitted at this location. The manager of the Boheme
took the case to the local administrative court, but in October 1961 the
court ruled in favor of the city office: ‘Dancing among men, as is cele-
brated in the homo-bars, violates good customs (Sitte).’183 The Tanzverbot
(‘ban on dancing’) was soon extended to other gay bars. Many of them
lost a lot of customers in the early 1960s as the inability to dance took
away energy from their atmosphere. Werner ‘Therese’ Landers’s own
bar, the Stadtcasino, which had been the most popular of the clubs
during the 1950s, had to close its doors at the beginning of 1962. He
would eventually open up a new bar, but the disappearance of such a
prominent establishment was a sad moment in the history of the city’s
scene.
In the state effort against local gay bars and other areas of the gay
scene, local youth authorities often played a critical role. The passage
of the two youth protection laws—the 1951 Law for the Protection of
Youth in Public and the 1953 Law against the Distribution of Printed
Material Endangering Youth—had created the basis for the growing
cooperation between youth agencies, the police, and several other local
departments. By the end of the 1950s, most city governments had
enacted regulations assigning particular tasks to specific government
departments.184 Cooperation generally required many steps: new gov-
ernmental bodies had to be established, generally in the form of com-
mittees involving representatives of numerous government branches;
meetings had to take place in which information was shared and an
understanding could be worked out with regard to the participation
and responsibilities of various members; and, finally, decisions had to
be made about the most effective strategies and methods to enforce the
two laws.
Very often, interdepartmental cooperation yielded new institutions.
In Cologne, the city council established a Committee for Youth Wel-
fare that then divided into numerous subcommittees, including one
that specifically handled youth protection issues.185 Other West German
cities established specialized juvenile police forces to take over youth
protection work and criminal cases involving juveniles. Hamburg, for
example, established youth protection squads in 1958, composed nor-
mally of a youth welfare worker, a detective from the vice squad, an
officer of the Women’s Police Force or another patrol unit, and very
often workers from the Social Welfare Office or liquor license agents.
Such juvenile police forces often spent a great deal of their time watch-
ing areas of the local gay scene for signs of male prostitution or for
underage young men who might be caught in the gay bars. Hamburg’s
youth protection squads walked the streets of St. Pauli and St. Georg reg-
ularly, checking in on the many gay bars that could be found in these
neighborhoods.186
The interdepartmental youth protection squads of the early 1960s
were not Hamburg’s only new way to crack down on the city’s homo-
sexual scene. The city’s police department was busy developing new
methods of police enforcement, some of which were watched closely
by other West German police departments by the middle of the 1960s.
‘Based on numerous complaints, most notably from organizations
involved with child welfare issues,’ wrote Sergeant Detective Hans-Carl
Gressman in an article for the police journal Kriminalistik, ‘the respon-
sible government agencies began in 1961 to carry out a more intense
fight against this [dangerous homosexual activity.]’ The first measure
the police developed was the loitering report (Anhaltemeldung). Patrol
officers who found a man lingering conspicuously near or inside public

toilets would check his identification and then write up a report stat-
ing where exactly they saw him and how long they observed him there.
This report was then sent to the vice squad, where it was evaluated and
added to the rest of the homosexual files. The vice squad would send
a copy of the report to the local police station in the area where the
man had been seen, as well as the district administrative office, and,
if the man was a foreigner, to the office that kept tabs on non-citizens
(Ausländerabteilung).187 In the case that the man was ever indicted for
breaking Paragraph 175, the state prosecutor could use these reports
as evidence against him. If the matter was doubtful, one policeman
explained, the judge might easily decide that ‘no one stands around
such places so often’ and convict him on this evidence.188 In one case,
the courts concluded based on these reports that ‘the accused obviously
belongs to those stubborn homosexuals who hang about toilets, block-
ade public bathrooms, and make it difficult or even impossible for others
to take care of their needs.’189 The loitering reports in themselves did
not carry any punishment. The police found, though, that they could
use them to drive homosexuals from some public areas, since most did
not wish to have anything filed against them with the vice squad.190
Altogether, the police filled out between 500 and 700 loitering reports
every year.
In 1963, the police department began to use the Hausverbot. If a man
were found standing around needlessly in the bathrooms, police officers
filled out a form stating his name, which bathroom he was caught in,
and when.191 The police gave one copy of the form to the man whom
they caught in the bathroom. They also sent a copy to the vice squad
and the district office that was in charge of maintaining the bathroom.
If the man was caught visiting that same bathroom in the next three
years, the police could charge him with trespassing, thereby bypassing
the need to actually catch the man having sex. Around 300 Hausverbote
were issued in 1966, with 80 leading to charges of trespassing, in which
the courts handed down both fines and prison sentences. Of course,
this did not count the men who were caught having sex in the bath-
rooms and were therefore charged with breaking Paragraphs 175 or
175a. In 1966, the police dealt with 88 of these cases in which a total
of 182 men were involved.192 The Hausverbot was controversial because
men who simply stood around too long in one place might have a report
made about them. The Hausverbote were challenged legally on sev-
eral occasions, but were upheld consistently by the local administrative
court as necessary to defend the ‘public order’ and children against the
‘extreme danger’ represented by homosexuals.193 Hamburg’s police, for

their part, argued that the officers watching the bathrooms had ‘a wealth
of experience’ in observing these areas and only intervened when ‘every-
thing about the behavior of the observed person reveals they are using
the bathrooms for purposes other than what they were intended.’194
An even more drastic measure came in 1964, when the city’s gov-
ernment decided to install two-way mirrors (Einwegspiegel) with which
uniformed police officers could observe the activities inside.195 A detec-
tive sergeant of Hamburg’s police department noted that officers much
preferred the two-way mirrors to being sent into the bathrooms as plain-
clothesmen since it allowed them to avoid accusations of entrapment
or other kinds of improprieties.196 Who first came up with the idea of
installing the mirrors is not known, though it may be established later as
more documents from the district offices (Bezirksämter) and Department
of Internal Affairs are released. It quite possibly was an American idea,
since the German police journal Kriminalistik printed an article in 1963
on two-way mirrors being used by the police department in Mansfield,
Ohio.197 Unlike their American counterparts, the West German police
did not set up cameras behind the mirror. Instead, officers were sta-
tioned in small rooms. ‘When we saw a criminal act, a homosexual act,
in the bathroom,’ recalled Gerhard P., who was 20 years old when he
was first assigned to the toilets on Gerhard-Hauptmann-Platz in 1966,
‘we came out of the side room, arrested the man, and brought him to the
police station.’ ‘The situation was completely unspectacular in the sense
of what was required from us,’ he explained. ‘The people were caught
red-handed with two witnesses to the event. At the station we described
the facts of the case, a statement was taken down, signed—everything
went according to procedure.’198
In contrast to the detectives of the homosexual squad, most of the
uniformed patrol officers (Schutzpolizei) stationed behind one of the mir-
rors had no sympathy for the men they were arresting. ‘I knew nothing
really about homosexuality,’ Gerhard P. said. ‘I also can’t remember it
being a serious topic of conversation among my colleagues.’ Although
he went about his job without thinking too much about it, one instance
did stick in his mind. After catching a man in his sixties, they took
him down to the police station, where he was completely ‘dejected and
began to cry up a storm (Rotz und Wasser geheult).’ It turned out he
was married and from out of town. At some level, Gerhard realized that
his arrest could destroy ‘his family, his life there in his hometown.’ He
thought to himself, ‘My God, the poor guy, this will be a real bad prob-
lem for him now.’ Still, the two officers watched the whole scene rather
stoically. ‘That was our job, arresting criminals in the act. We were young
at the time. We had just begun our careers. We wanted to prove some-
thing, and we were praised for making arrests.’ If they felt a pang of
guilt, they also told themselves, ‘Well, he didn’t have to go in there, he
didn’t have to do those things.’ Yet they felt themselves deprived of the
sense of accomplishment they might have had while arresting a thief or
another sort of criminal. ‘Inside we knew that the arrested man didn’t
really have the chance that other criminals did.’199
Hamburg’s aggressive police measures brought them much attention
from other cities trying to curb homosexual activity. Unfortunately,
what is not yet known is whether other cities imitated Hamburg, and
to what extent. It is also hard to say what influence these measures had
on arrest and conviction rates, especially as the government was focused
more on eliminating trysting spaces as opposed to actually increasing
arrests and convictions. For what it is worth, judicial statistics do suggest
a nationwide intensification of policing efforts at the end of the 1950s
and the early 1960s. According to the numbers put together by historian
Rainer Hoffschildt, conviction levels reached a post-World War II high
in 1960 and then declined in the following decade, falling off especially
rapidly after 1966.200
What we can certainly say is that the impact on Hamburg’s gay scene
was limited at best. Although a few bars did close shortly after the ban on
dancing was put in place, by the mid-1960s many of the city’s clubs had
found ways of working around this restriction. Many establishments
went to employing doormen and doorbells to alert insiders when the
vice detectives or other policemen arrived—a technique already being
employed regularly in many West Berlin bars and elsewhere by this
time. The police were aware that men were still dancing in the clubs, but
found it difficult to do anything about this activity if everyone stopped
before they entered.201
Other owners came up with more creative solutions. In 1963, the
owner of the now-closed Stadtcasino, Werner Landers, opened up the
Neu-Stadt-Casino in Hamburg with his mother at a location directly
across the street from his old bar. His new establishment quickly began
to attract a crowd. An English-language guide to the city’s tourist sites
described this bar as ‘the best-known Hamburg rendezvous for young,
and also more mature gentlemen, who are scarcely—or not at all—
disturbed at finding no female company to dance or flirt with.’202 After
receiving a 1800-mark fine (‘the highest penalty available to them’) for
allowing men to dance together despite the new regulations, Landers
and his mother took a new tack. Starting in 1964, they invited customers
to come with them once a month on Sunday afternoon to Hannover,

where men were still allowed to dance together. On the way, the two or
three buses of men would stop occasionally and picnic in parking lots.
The food was provided for free, since Landers and his mother saw the
trip mostly as promotion. The passengers only had to pay ten marks
for the round-trip bus ticket, which was a good price for that distance.
When they arrived in Hannover, the clubs—full of people from nearby
cities—often provided coffee and cake, also for free. When it was time
to leave, the buses were often only half full because many decided to
stay in Hannover for the night and then return by train or car the next
day.203
The original Stadtcasino, on the other hand, soon reopened under a
different name as a transvestite cabaret, operated by the celebrated Cheri
Hell. Returning from a stay in West Berlin, he gave the bar a glamorous
new look and renamed it La Pointe (or, as it was sometimes called, Cheri
Hell’s Pointe). With the help of some talented performers—Ramonita
Vargas, Ricky Renee, Pierre Curvan, and Eddy Johner, for example—he
hoped to make the cabaret a site that could compete with the success-
ful cabarets of St. Pauli—the Bar Celona, the Intermezzo, and the Neu
Roxi-Bar. However, as one visitor remembers, the club did not really
fit in with the clean, middle-class setting of Hamburg’s Grossneumarkt.
It went bankrupt after only a few years.204
The location did not stay empty for long, though. In March 1965, a
new club appeared called the Alte Stadtcasino (to differentiate it from
Landers’s club right across the street). One regular visitor, Helmut A.,
recalled his first encounter with the bar in the mid-1960s as a 16-year-
old boy. ‘With my heart pounding, I came into the main room where
I was nearly blinded by the mirrors hanging on the walls. For me, it was
like an enchanted world. At last I was surrounded by other gay men.’205
The owner took the risk of allowing dancing in one of the back rooms.
The music played here was an international mix of the hits of the mid-
1960s: songs by the English pop star Alma Cogan, the Belgian crooner
Adamo, the German ‘Schlager’ star Udo Jürgens, American pop singers
such as Sandy Posey and Patti Page, and even the Beatles. Allowing men
to dance was not the only risk that the owner took. Teenagers were by
law not supposed to be in the bar, and if they were caught the owner
could face a heavy fine. However, the owner knew that he could ‘make
good money’ from them, and so he took the chance. When the ‘cops
were on the way, that is when a police raid threatened, all the minors
disappeared through the emergency exit in the stairway,’ Helmut A.
recalled.206
And so, in the long run, there is little evidence that the crackdown dis-
suaded gay men from entering the gay scene, or limited the number of
bars that catered to them. By September 1964, there were roughly 30 in
Hamburg, an increase from the 24 that had existed in 1959.207 The effect
of the greater policing of public bathrooms also was not quite what the
city government expected. The police reported some decline in the sex-
ual activity taking place in the bathrooms in the center of town, but they
were frustrated by the men who simply used the bathrooms as places to
meet, saving the sex for secluded spots in nearby parks. At the same
time, though, police districts in the outlying areas began to see more
activity in their bathrooms, where two-way mirrors were never installed.
With homosexual activity apparently being driven into the suburbs, sev-
eral Hamburg officials suggested in 1965 that Wandsbek (a suburb to
the east) take the same measures to combat homosexuality as the cen-
tral districts of Hamburg. By 1966, Wandsbek officials were considering
seriously such measures, especially to curb the activity that had esca-
lated dramatically at the Hasselbrook train stop and in the underground
tunnel of the Wandsbek Markt subway stop. In a meeting with several
police officers, Wandsbek officials considered erecting two-way mirrors
in several bathrooms, but decided that these would be much harder to
install in Wandsbek than in the center of town as the layout of the
bathrooms was considerably different. Instead, police chose to rely on
loitering reports and the Hausverbot, which alone had had considerable
impact in the center of Hamburg. They also hung signs in the bathrooms
warning about the consequences of having sex in these public areas.208
The evidence suggests that the police crackdown of the early 1960s
did not drastically curtail the growth of Hamburg’s gay scene. However,
it is possible that the crackdown permanently damaged the reputation
that the scene had in the minds of gay men. Whatever tolerance the
city may have once shown to homosexuals was clearly a thing of the
past, with police officers hiding behind two-way mirrors and handing
out Hausverbote. The crackdown, compounded by the failure of the city’s
homosexual organizations to attain any momentum and the disappear-
ance of the gay magazines from Hamburg after 1957, dampened the
city’s allure for Germany’s gay men, but West Berlin’s gay scene rapidly
filled the void. One observer remarked in 1965, ‘Berlin for example is
the only city in which men may dance with each other in public. And
in no other German city are there so many gay meeting places as in
Berlin.’209 One reader reported to Der Weg that there were roughly 20
gay bars that operated in Berlin in 1964, and by July 1967 police esti-
mates suggest that this number had nearly doubled to 38.210 The city’s
police were still notorious for carrying out periodic raids; nevertheless,
the gay bars thrived, as did other bars and nighttime entertainment
aimed at a heterosexual clientele after the city did away with manda-
tory closing hours in 1962. The Moby Dick was a sign of the gay scene’s
growing confidence: located on Grolmannstrasse in the fashionable area
of Charlottenburg, when it opened in 1963, it was ‘the first with an
outdoor terrace and an interior that was visible from the street.’211
The relocation of Rolf Putziger, the only homosexual publisher left in
the country by the end of the 1950s, to West Berlin in 1957 helped to
refocus national attention on the city. Putziger’s magazine, Der Weg, was
much less impressive than any of the magazines that had been around in
the early 1950s. In October 1960, it ceased having pictures on its cover,
which made it much safer to send through the mail. The content also
became noticeably blander in the second half of the 1960s. Reflecting
these changes, its circulation dropped significantly. According to gay
activist Johannes Werres, Die Insel had printed 16,000 copies in 1950; by
1969, Der Weg put out no more than 500 copies per issue.212 Still, next
to Der Kreis, which still came into the country from Switzerland, Der
Weg was the only German-language journal available to gay men in the
1960s. This publication, therefore, continued to offer images and essays
that revealed a homosexual point of view. The building in which Der
Weg was produced also became an important site within West Berlin’s
gay scene. Next to the editor’s office was a small bookshop that ‘served
as a meeting spot and information exchange.’ From this location, the
editor acted as a supplier of reading material for several contacts in the
eastern half of the city.213
As West Berlin’s scene was rapidly re-establishing the city as one of
the metropoles of the European gay landscape, other less prominent
cities were also witnessing some growth in their gay scenes. Hannover’s
scene remained relatively small, despite the traffic coming for a time
from Hamburg. By the second half of the 1960s, there were three main
clubs: the Burgklause, a small bar with a comfortable ‘bourgeois’ feel that
was run by ‘the two Heldas,’ as they were known to regulars; the Come
Back, which increasingly attracted leathermen from the region; and
most famously, the Amsterdam, which is today the oldest gay bar still in
operation (though known now as the Barkarole).214 Munich’s scene went
through more impressive growth, eventually including eight bars by the
end of the 1960s despite the massive police crackdown that came earlier
in the decade.215 Most remarkable was Cologne’s scene, which also sur-
vived the police crackdown of the early 1960s to become the focal point
for gay life in the Rhineland. Here, the number of bars reached 30 in
1963 and 35 by 1969. Several of the mainstays—the Sombrero-Club, the

Caroussel, Hollandia, Tunika, and the Stephan-Schänke—survive today,
just with different owners and under different names.216
By the end of the 1960s, the gay scenes in Hamburg, West
Berlin, Munich, Cologne, and several other cities across the country
had re-created much of West Germany’s ‘gay world,’ to use George
Chauncey’s term. Homosexuals by the 1920s had gone a long way in
developing a distinctive culture, a network of relationships, and a series
of social institutions that brought gay men together, and much of this
world had been recreated by gay men in the two and a half decades after
World War II. The failure of the homophile movement to build any last-
ing institutions suggests the very real limits of this world’s vitality in
comparison with the 1920s or with what would come in the 1970s. The
scenes had not yet generated the cohesiveness and confidence that we
would expect of a full-fledged ‘community.’ Nevertheless, within these
scenes gay men could ‘conceive of themselves as linked to the others
in their common [homosexuality] and their membership in a single gay
world.’217
5
Reforming Paragraph 175
The Adenauer era officially came to an end on October 16, 1963 when
Adenauer was pressured to resign. His reputation had been tarnished
during the last years of his office by his weak reaction to the building
of the Berlin Wall, the infamous Spiegel Affair that raised the issue of
state censorship once again, and growing diplomatic problems created
by his unwillingness to officially recognize East Germany. The Christian
Democratic Union (CDU)-led coalition stayed in power, but now under
the leadership of Ludwig Erhard, the new Chancellor of West Germany.
Erhard would steer his party successfully through the election year of
1965, winning just short of 50 percent of the votes, but across the coun-
try there was mounting evidence that the social and political situation
was rapidly changing.1
Actually, signs that the conservative political consensus, sexual con-
servatism, and family politics that had held sway over the country
during the height of the Cold War were beginning to break down
could already be seen by the end of the 1950s. The organization of
students and Leftist intellectuals into the organization Fight against
Nuclear Death (Kampf dem Atemtod) in 1958 eventually served as the
kernel of the student movement that by the mid-1960s was aggres-
sively demanding university reform, demonstrating against the Vietnam
War, and staging massive protests against authoritarianism and capital-
ism. The publication of several prominent novels (including Günther
Grass’s Tin Drum) in 1959 reopened the issue of the Nazi past for
a new generation of West Germans. A sense of outrage about Nazi
crimes raised suspicions among young West Germans that their demo-
cratic government masked fascist tendencies still lurking within German
society. Generational conflict also mounted as American and British
rock music found fans in the country, at first among working-class
166
Reforming Paragraph 175 167
youth but by the mid-1960s among a large slice of middle-class stu-

dents as well.
The growing popularity of these new styles of popular music was
itself a major sign of the advancing consumerism of the decade; this
consumerism was a driving force behind the Sexual Revolution, or
the Sexwelle (Sex Wave) as it is commonly called in German. Height-
ened levels of consumerism provided motives to challenge social norms
regarding both the expression of sexual desire and the discussion or
depiction of sexual topics in public. There were certainly signs before
the 1960s of discontent with the sexual conservatism that pervaded the
public life of the Adenauer era, but the rigidness of public norms did
not break until 1962. In this year, a major censorship court case opened
the door for the publication of sexually explicit material as long as it
was artistic or educational. A number of popular magazines soon began
to run articles on love, nudism, topless sunbathing, and sex education.2
Youth counterculture, the student movement, and Leftist critique also
made a considerable contribution to the Sexwelle. Besides opposing
American involvement in Vietnam and calling attention to the harm-
ful consequences of capitalism, racism, and imperialism, the student
movement promoted breaking sexual taboos and dissolving ‘bourgeois’
familial arrangements. The willingness to challenge traditional social
norms about sexuality was not limited to the New Left, though. Many
young people exhibited a relaxed attitude towards birth control and
public nudity on beaches, while an equally significant number began
to have sex during their mid-teenage years.3
The transformation of both public and private sexual norms during
the 1960s certainly must be placed within the context of a much longer
struggle over sexuality dating back to the late nineteenth century, if not
earlier.4 However, such a long-term perspective should not minimize the
life-transforming impact of the changes of the 1960s. This impact is
especially evident with the legal reform of Paragraph 175 in 1969, which
would radically change the conditions under which homosexuals could
live and love.
The reform of Paragraph 175 is still a topic that has not received much
scholarly attention. This event is interesting in part because it happened
without any political pressure ‘from below,’ or least in the sense in
which this concept is commonly understood. By the early 1960s, the
efforts of homosexual men to organize a national movement for legal
reform employing the model from the Weimar era had clearly failed.
The debate around legal reform that emerged after 1962 revived some
interest in political activity among homosexual men, but in the end
little came out of these efforts. Eventually, a new, energetic homosexual

movement did appear in West Germany, but only in 1971, nearly two
years after the reform of Paragraph 175. How, then, was reform achieved
if there was no well-organized group of committed gay activists pushing
for legal change?
When the reform of the law is discussed at all, it is generally por-
trayed as the inevitable result of a decade of Sexual Revolution and
Leftist politics.5 While it is impossible to deny that the cultural and
political transformations of West Germany in the 1960s were critical
for the reform of Paragraph 175, both answers are too easy in the
end. There has been too much analysis of the complicated relationship
between gay rights and Leftism to assume that it would inevitably lead
to sexual emancipation.6 Furthermore, recent examinations of sexual
transformation in the 1960s and 1970s have tended to emphasize that
the transformation was composed of many different, interlocking strug-
gles over sexuality, each with a complicated dynamic of its own. Some
of these conflicts had more radical potential than others, many of them
worked at cross-purposes, and not all of them achieved any long-term
change at all.7 We can ask, then, what political alliances were made
in order to enact a reform of Paragraph 175? Answering this question
should contribute to the history of sexual transformation in Germany
that is in the process of being written today.
The debate around the reform of Paragraph 175 was a discussion that
began in West Germany well before the traditional onset of the Sexwelle
in 1962 and that became in the course of the decade a key debate
for determining how the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s
would play out. Although homophile activists did make some impor-
tant contributions to this debate, it was largely promoted by a num-
ber of progressive attorneys, doctors, scientists, Christian theologians,
politicians, and other public figures who saw the decriminalization of
homosexuality as a key aspect of a much more comprehensive trans-
formation in West Germany’s system of criminal law. These individuals
were united behind what might be called the ‘progressive project,’ a
political vision of the world tied to the effort of Western liberalism
to redefine itself in the face of challenges of the New Left and the
Conservatism that had held sway across the postwar Western world.
While rejecting the radical criticism of democracy and capitalism
articulated by the New Left and the counterculture, progressivism
believed the world could be made a better place through a greater com-
mitment to social justice, freedom, and individual self-development.
A common assumption that progressives held dear was that science and
general education could promote these ideals. Progressives made impor-

tant contributions in several professional fields. In the field of education,
they fought for a more democratic, open school system that incorpo-
rated innovative pedagogy and a revised curriculum. In the field of
law, they promoted a new attitude towards enforcement that avoided a
sense of revenge or retribution; prison conditions were to be made more
humane, and the time spent in prison was to be aimed at retraining cit-
izens for a productive life. Progressives also were generally sympathetic
towards broader social and political changes that would promote their
ideals, such as the American Civil Rights movement, the Free Speech
movement, and some aspects of the sexual changes taking place in the
1960s.
I have developed this notion of progressivism in part based on his-
torian Arthur Marwick’s notion of ‘measured judgment’ that he argues
was just as crucial to the transformation of the 1960s as the radicalism of
the New Left and the counterculture. In the introduction to his book The
Sixties, he argues that this ‘measured judgment’ could be found among
‘men and women [in authority] of traditional enlightened and ratio-
nal outlook who responded flexibly and tolerantly to counter-cultural
demands.’8 In a later chapter, Marwick connects measured judgment
with British and American ‘Progressives,’ a term which he uses in a
limited sense for those educated professionals working on education
and legal reform. I will use the term ‘progressive’ rather than ‘liberal’
for three reasons. First, I want to distinguish between a more general
progressive perspective and a key component of this perspective, the
currents of sexual liberalism. Sexual liberalism will refer specifically to
a concept of the proper role of government in controlling sexuality.
Second, the term ‘progressive’ avoids the difficulty of deciding what
‘political liberalism’ meant at the end of the 1960s, when both the Free
Democratic Party (FDP) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) occupied
this rather indistinct area of the political terrain. Lastly, ‘progressive’
also opens up the possibility that there were members of the politically
conservative CDU that held a ‘sexually progressive’ perspective on the
prospect of legal reform.
When it came to the issue of homosexuality, science underpinned
a crucial series of discourses that bound together different ‘progres-
sive’ constituencies. Various groups of progressive-minded individuals
from different areas of expertise and, sometimes, from very different
political camps united behind an enlightened, modern attitude based
on science. Scientific discourse became for a time a foundation for
building a progressive political alliance, both in the sense of bringing
the different groups together, but also in the sense of linking vari-
ous themes central to the ‘progressive project’: the search for truth,
modernity, social justice, and individual freedom. A faith in science
would also bring together progressive groups working in distinctly dif-
ferent national contexts, enabling international political contacts and
a cross-pollination of ideas that would be important for the decrimi-
nalization of homosexuality that eventually occurred in many different
countries at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Faith in the enlightening power of science may have been a critical

aspect of the early-twentieth-century homosexual movement, but in the
1950s there was serious reason to doubt whether scientific arguments
could make much of an impact. As became clear during the 1957 Fed-
eral Constitutional Court case that tested and ultimately reconfirmed
Paragraph 175, much scientific opinion in the 1950s actually tended
to support criminalizing homosexuality. Sociologist Helmut Schelsky,
psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, and criminologist Roland Grassberger all
gave evidence defending the law.
Scientific opinion after World War II certainly was overwhelmingly in
favor of criminalization; however, there were a few isolated scientists at
the end of the 1950s who tried to raise questions about Paragraph 175.
Noteworthy here is Rudolf Klimmer, an East German sexologist who
led the Department for Marriage and Sexual Counseling at the Freital
Polyclinic in Dresden. In his own country, he became a defender of
gay interests and the most important spokesman for the decriminal-
ization of homosexuality.9 His voice was also heard in Western Europe,
first through pieces written for gay magazines in the early 1950s and
later from his 1958 book Homosexuality as a Biological-Sociological Prob-
lem of the Time, published in Hamburg after its release was refused in
his own country. In it, Klimmer argued that ‘The question of whether
homosexuality harms or is otherwise dangerous to society must be
denied. The homosexual is no more asocial or predisposed towards crim-
inal behavior than the heterosexual is.’10 This book would be widely
cited as a well-respected, standard work on the subject in the course of
the next decade.
More important for West Germany was Hans Giese. After his failure at
recreating the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, he threw his energy
into building up his professional contacts, finishing his research, and
establishing an institutional basis for sexual science in West Germany.
He continued to organize his Seminars for Sexual Science every other

year. Although forced to abandon The Journal for Sexual Research for
financial reasons, he continued to publish the monograph series
‘Contributions towards Sexual Research’ (Beiträge zur Sexualforschung),
which eventually included many important works on homosexuality,
transvestites, prostitution, childhood sexuality, and other sexual topics.
He failed to attain a permanent position at the University of Frankfurt
as he had hoped, but eventually his connection with Hans Bürger-
Prinz allowed him to find a temporary lectureship at the University
of Hamburg in 1958. Despite some resistance, the University Clinic in
Eppendorf eventually agreed to find room for Giese’s Institute for Sexual
Science.
By the time Giese moved to Hamburg, there were indications that his
research and connections were earning him an increasing reputation, at
least within certain circles. As we have seen, he was one of a handful of
scientists and legal experts invited to present testimony to the Federal
Constitutional Court in 1957 while they were considering the consti-
tutionality of Paragraph 175. Around the same time, he was also asked
by Veit Harlan to collaborate with him during the filming of Different
from You and Me (1957). Both experiences were no doubt bittersweet for
him, for although they confirmed his growing professional reputation,
both also backfired badly. His statements were interpreted by the Federal
Constitutional Court as evidence of the ‘natural’ differences between
male homosexuals and lesbians that helped the judges to ultimately
uphold the law.11 And whatever enlightening effect he might have had
on Harlan’s portrayal of homosexuality was negated by the film indus-
try’s Voluntary Self-Control Board, which forced Harlan to produce a
film that was unequivocal in its condemnation of homosexuality.12
In the long run, Giese’s growing prominence put him in a position
to take advantage of the Sexwelle of the early 1960s. Overcoming his
initial preference for maintaining sexuality as a topic for discussion
among scientific experts, Giese increasingly gave interviews to news-
papers and illustrated magazines. The growing public interest in sexual
matters encouraged him to branch out into other lines of research and
other areas of reform besides homosexuality. He became involved with
the fight against the censorship of serious literature and art that depicted
sexual acts. In connection with this writing, he was asked to testify in
court cases involving works by Jean Genet, Henry Miller, John Cleland,
and Harold Robbins.13 He also decided to supply the growing demand
for descriptive and quantitative studies on actual sexual behavior. Begin-
ning in February 1965, he and his colleague Günter Schmidt at the
Institute for Sexual Research compiled an extensive survey of the sexual

habits and attitudes of university students in West Germany. This work
earned Giese and his institute the largest amount of public attention
he ever received, due in part to attacks made by the Springer Press’s
tabloid Bild-Zeitung that suggested their survey was a depraved invasion
of privacy.
By 1969, Hans Giese’s name was familiar to an audience much broader
than the circle of legal and medical experts that had known him in
1960. Professionally, his promotion to full professor at the University of
Hamburg in 1965 served as a confirmation of his success. At the same
time, though, he never lost sight of the goal that he had set for himself
back in the late 1940s. He served as an editor for a number of collec-
tions dealing with the laws against male homosexuality. Above all, his
Homosexuality or the Politics of Paragraph 175 made an important contri-
bution to the debate, with essays by Kurt Freund, Walter Bräutigam, and
the young sociologist Gunter Schmidt. He ended the collection with an
essay of his own, alluding as many before him to the crimes of the Nazi
past: ‘The uncritically accepted existence of a legal protection from a
limited behavior that does not especially endanger our society can no
longer be met with any understanding in our time, especially from a
country that has our past.’14
The third scientific figure to take a leading role in the effort to repeal
Paragraph 175 was Willhart Schlegel. In an era in which most scien-
tific opinion had turned to social and psychological explanations for
homosexuality, Schlegel was left as the most outspoken champion of
the inheritability of sexual orientation in the 1950s and 1960s. Schlegel’s
training came from the biological school of psychiatry; however, he fol-
lowed a different line of research than the geneticists who had come
to prominence under the Nazi government. Schlegel, in fact, came out
of the tradition developed by Cesare Lombroso and Ernst Kretschmer,
which theorized a close connection between character and physical
constitution. During the mid-1930s, he began to work out a theory
that connected sexuality with physical build. Although his research was
interrupted by the years that he spent working as a field doctor dur-
ing World War II, he resumed his work afterwards, first at the University
Clinic in Hamburg and then privately in his home after September 1952.
Schlegel theorized that individuals could be classified according to
dual-character spectrums that mixed with each other to produce dif-
ferent physical and personality types. One spectrum ran between an
athletic type with a well-developed physical build and an asthenic type
who was slighter and weaker. The other spectrum included physical
and personality characteristics that are often associated with gender; it
ranged from the andromorphous type who was logical, aggressive, and
assertive to the gynecomorphous type who was more emotional, affec-
tionate, and sociable.15 These two character spectrums, Schlegel argued,
strongly correlated with strength of sexual drive, the nature of the
attraction, and preferences for specific sexual practices. Andromorphous
sexuality, for example, was ‘characterized by a need to lead’ and by
‘a will to dominate, to the control of a partner that lies under and
yields to the power of his body and spirit.’ Gynecomorphs desired to
‘be allowed to give their entire love and self to the partner that they so
admire.’16
According to Schlegel, sexuality did not correlate strongly with one’s
gender. Sexuality was genetically determined, but not in the way that
many genetic researchers seemed to suggest. Instead, Schlegel argued
that most people were born somewhere within a broad bisexual range.
This was not the fluid bisexuality suggested by Freudian or phenomeno-
logical psychoanalysis, however. Sexual constitution was tightly bound
up with physiognomy. It could not be affected by personal experiences,
medical treatment, or the social environment. The implication for Para-
graph 175 was obvious, he thought. Schlegel wrote, ‘Can one hold
people up for contempt, socially discriminate against them, and legally
persecute them because of sexual drives and behavior that are beyond
their power to control?’17 Homosexuals posed a threat to no one, not
even young people, since no one would ever pursue sexual contact with
someone to which they were not attracted to according to a genetic
predisposition.
Given his argument, one might assume that Schlegel drew inspira-
tion from Magnus Hirschfeld and the other writers associated with the
Weimar-era Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. In fact, he was more
influenced by the ‘masculinist’ tradition associated with Adolf Brand,
and especially by the ideas of Benedict Friedländer and Hans Blüher.
Like these earlier thinkers, Schlegel argued that sexuality was deeply
connected with the ‘ethical self-realization and development of the
personality.’18 In many cases, homosexuality was perfectly natural for
men, and indeed crucial for the richness of human life. Sexual contact,
after all, not only creates biological offspring, but contributes to the pro-
cess of social construction.19 Later on in his life, Schlegel went so far as
to describe ‘the penis and the backside of the man’ as ‘social organs’
that are as every bit as important for the production of society as the
male and female sexual organs together were for the reproduction of the
human race.20 Like Hans Blüher, Schlegel’s view of sexuality as building
strong social bonds took its place within a decisively right-wing view of
the world.21 Schlegel claimed that men would become no better than
the lower animals, with no real culture, society, or sense of responsibil-

ity for others, if it were not for sexual contact between men. Western
society, therefore, needed to overcome its taboo against homosexuality
if it did not want to suffer the fate of the Roman world: ‘The taboo that
obstructs homosexual behavior is responsible for the absence of a sense
of social responsibility in capitalism and Marxism, in modern industrial
society as well as a free economy.’22
It was not widely known that Schlegel had been a passionate sup-
porter of the Nazi party until the onset of the homosexual persecution
that had ‘deeply shocked and bitterly disappointed’ him.23 His right-
wing worldview did not prevent him from becoming a popular speaker
at homophile meetings and at sexual science conferences in Germany
and the Netherlands. With the support of activist Johannes Werres—
who worked for a time as Schlegel’s personal assistant—Schlegel’s repu-
tation in West Germany grew, though he never became as influential
as Hans Giese did.24 A not insignificant group of gay men preferred
Schlegel with his straightforward language to the ‘pale and somewhat
vague’ Giese, who wrote difficult prose peppered with scientific and
phenomenological jargon.25 Moreover, men with a preference for ado-
lescent boys were attracted by Schlegel’s willingness to argue against
Paragraph 175a. Laws preventing sex between men and boys was point-
less, according to Schlegel, since all forms of sexuality were genetically
determined.26 Moreover, it made no sense to insulate young men during
the ‘time of their strongest sexual needs’ from the personality develop-
ment that sexuality contributes to. Laws aimed at protecting youth only
hurt them by making them ‘sexually and socially isolated.’27
Schlegel, Giese, and Klimmer were unusual figures in the 1950s scien-
tific establishment for their willingness to criticize the criminalization
of homosexuality. Because of the pathologization of homosexuality that
was so important to mid-twentieth-century prejudices, science was more
often used to emphasize the ‘perversity’ of homosexuals and the dan-
gers that they posed to children. However, the memory of Magnus
Hirschfeld was a reminder to many gay men that science could have
other implications for the law. Indeed, very different conclusions were
being drawn by many theologians and other religious figures who had
become acquainted with scientific writing on homosexuality.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
At the end of the 1950s, science contributed to a fundamental transfor-

mation in the ways that liberal Christian writers and spokesmen talked
about homosexuality and, consequently, in their attitude towards its

criminalization. Citing the arguments of Kinsey, Klimmer, Giese, Boss,
and Schelsky—as well as earlier figures such as Hans Blüher and Sigmund
Freud—they noted that modern science treated homosexuality as either
a hereditary ‘fact of nature’ or a psychological condition acquired in
childhood or adolescence. In either case, such notions about the origins
of homosexuality, they argued, removed it from the sphere of morality,
or at the very least made it a more complicated ethical issue than if it
were simply a sinful choice.
In West Germany, this willingness of Christian thinkers to seriously
confront scientific theories of homosexuality can be placed in two
contexts. Internationally, it can be understood as connected with a
significant movement, gradually gaining ground in the course of the
twentieth century, to reconcile Christianity with science and conse-
quently protect its relevance for the modern world. Nationally, it could
be linked to a current of thought that had developed within German
Christian circles during the Nazi period. This current strove to revise
Christianity’s traditional hostile attitude towards sexuality. In Germany,
Protestant writer Theodor Haug and Catholic official Theodor Bliewies
wanted to counter Nazi criticism, which attempted to make ‘Christianity
look backward and foolish’ for the party’s own ideological end.28 Even
after World War II ended, some voices within the church continued the
self-criticism. After the trauma of the war and postwar years, Catholics
and Protestants alike expressed concern that taking a negative attitude
towards all forms of sexuality might drive people further away from the
church.29
As Dagmar Herzog has shown, such progressive Christian arguments
were soon overwhelmed in West Germany by a more conservative dis-
course that linked sexuality in general and sexual excess in particular
with the crimes of Nazism. As we have seen, this negative attitude
towards sexuality became a key foundation of the era of family poli-
tics that dominated West German culture and political debate from the
early 1950s until the early 1960s. In other countries, though, progres-
sive voices were not so easily silenced. Such currents of thought led
to the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council beginning a study
in 1952 of ‘the legal, theological and moral principles of inversion.’30
Two years later, this church committee, made up of clergymen, doc-
tors, and lawyers, published their report. Maintaining the sinfulness of
homosexual acts (though not of the ‘inverted’ predisposition itself), the
report nevertheless argued that legal and humanitarian considerations
demanded the decriminalization of homosexual acts. After all, ‘In no
other department of life does the State hold itself competent to interfere
with the private actions of consenting adults.’31
A key member of this committee, British theologian Derrick S. Bailey,
took an even more radical step by suggesting that not all homosexual
acts might be sinful. His 1955 work Homosexuality and the Western Tradi-
tion, based on careful analysis of the language used by biblical and other
ancient texts, is best known for its argument that the biblical story of
Sodom and Gomorrah was not originally intended as a condemnation
of homosexuality but was only interpreted in that direction by several
Jewish and early Christian writers. While admitting that other passages
in the Old and New Testaments did condemn homosexual activities, he
insisted that they had to be understood in the context of the time, when
homosexuality was widely practiced within a Hellenic way of life that
early Christianity went to great pains to distance itself from. Bailey’s
final argument, though, was that the condemnations of the Christian
tradition did not apply to ‘true inverts,’ whom he defined as men who
were ‘unalterably’ determined to feel an ‘emotional and physico-sexual
propensity towards others of the same sex.’32 Christian tradition knew
nothing about ‘genuine inversion,’ and so could offer no moral guid-
ance. Only ‘perversion,’ which Bailey defined as a heterosexual engaging
in homosexual practices, fell under the moral authority of the Christian
texts.33
Currents of sexual liberalism within British institutions of Christianity,
combined with the controversial trial of Lord Montagu and Peter
Wildeblood in 1954, worked in favor of those who desired legal reform
in Britain. Against his own judgment, the British Home Secretary at
the time, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, was prevailed upon to appoint a
departmental committee to reconsider the position of the law towards
both prostitution and homosexuality. Chaired by Sir John Wolfenden,
Vice Chancellor of the University of Reading, the committee began its
work in September 1954 by gathering information from a number of
sources.34 Early on, it requested the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of
Westminster to submit a ‘reasoned account of Catholic moral teach-
ing upon the subject [of homosexual offences and prostitution] with
appropriate conclusions which might be drawn from such principles in
so far as they affect the criminal law.’35 The seven-member committee
appointed by Cardinal Griffin to take on this task came back in 1956
with a report that also called for the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Agreeing that ‘the end of civil law was to maintain and safeguard
the common good,’ the committee concluded that ‘acts committed in
private by consenting adults do not themselves militate against the
common good of citizens and are therefore not justly subject to the
criminal law.’ This argument made even more sense given that any effort
to enforce a law against homosexuality itself could easily work against
the common good by depending on ‘a system of police espionage or the
activities of the informer.’36
Taking into account such statements as well as other evidence that
public opinion in Britain was, in the words of Jeffrey Weeks, not
‘monolithically hostile to reform as the popular press imagined,’ the
Wolfenden Committee released its own report in 1957, recommend-
ing that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private
should no longer be a criminal offence.’ In a compelling argument
for sexual liberalism, the committee reasoned that the function of
criminal law was to protect the weak and to preserve public order
and decency. It was not, the committee insisted, to impose moral
behavior.37
The Griffin and Wolfenden reports, while not immediately leading
to legal reform in Britain, did help initiate a broader debate over the
relationship between religion, morality, and the law with regard to sex-
uality, both within Britain and in other areas of Europe and the United
States. Within the German-speaking world, the first calls for more toler-
ance to come from a Christian perspective were issued by Swiss marriage
counselor Theodor Bovet, whose 1959 work A Meaningful Way of Being
Different included an edited account of an anonymous pastor’s spiritual
work with homosexual men.38 In his introduction, Bovet explained that
homosexuality (or homophilia, as he preferred to call it) did not refer to
sexual activity exclusively, but instead meant ‘much more a total differ-
ence in an individual’s way of being [Anders-Sein der ganzen Person] that
among other things accounts for an erotic-spiritual relationship with
the same sex.’ Here Bovet exhibited the willingness of liberal-progressive
Christianity to become engaged with modern science, citing psycholog-
ical arguments that homosexuality could be either inborn or acquired
during early childhood. In either case, Bovet argued, homosexuality was
not a matter of personal choice and therefore cannot be consigned easily
to ‘sin.’39
The underlying argument of Bovet’s work was that a true
Christian ethic required a more humane and complicated response
to homosexuality than absolute rejection. This argument was made
more explicitly by Hendrik van Oyen, a Dutch theologian whose essay
‘Pastoral Comments on Homophilia’ was published in the German-
language Journal of Protestant Ethics in 1964. Like Bovet, Oyen began
with the assumption that Christianity needed to be open to learning
from modern sciences, whether that be criminology (he cited Dutch

criminologist Gerrit Theodoor Kempe) or psychiatry. Drawing the con-
clusion that homosexuality must be treated simply as a ‘fact of creation’
that it is not our job either ‘to condemn or to smear,’ Oyen argued that it
was a Christian’s duty to treat homosexuals as brothers requiring—like
all humans—moral guidance.40 ‘If Jesus Christ,’ Oyen wrote, ‘were to
encounter such people (and we don’t know that he did), he would have
looked into their hearts and loved them.’ Jesus would not have simply
consigned homosexuals to the devil’s lot, but would have seen them as
‘simply men.’ And like all men, homosexuals had a moral calling that
they sought to fulfill: ‘The homophile man also wants to give love, seeks
justice, lives with a deep respect of his fellow man, and wishes only to
live a truly responsible life.’41
By the time Oyen’s article appeared in 1964, a debate had been
underway for several years in The Journal of Protestant Ethics and else-
where over the relationship between homosexuality, Christian ethics,
and the law. Like Bovet and Oyen, Adolf Köberle from the Univer-
sity of Tübingen pleaded for ‘understanding and sympathy instead of
contempt and punishment’ in the church’s dealings with homosexu-
als. In his essay ‘The Meaning and Evaluation of Homosexuality in
Contemporary Discussion,’ Köberle reviewed the current treatment of
homosexuality within both the scientific community and Christianity.
He concluded by calling for the Christian community to ‘have the
strength to take such people under their protection and to give them
its support.’42 Such a move, he implied, would not only fulfill the
ethical calling of Christians, but would help promote the church’s gen-
eral engagement with contemporary issues: ‘Christian theology and the
Christian church should learn from the extremely lively discussion of
the present and should contribute more understanding and assistance
for the entire area in question.’ Such an engagement could lead the
church to re-evaluate other issues concerning sexuality. Perhaps, he
speculated, the church’s ‘puritanical concern’ regarding the awakening
sexuality of young men and women in adolescence had inadvertently
driven some men away from women, thereby contributing towards ‘an
inclination to inversion.’43 This passage reveals some lingering anxi-
ety about homosexuality, especially its ability to ‘infect’ young people.
Köberle also still classified homosexuality as a sin, even if he insisted
that it was no worse than the failings that make all humans sinners.
This attitude set him apart from Bovet and Oyen, who insisted on the
ethically neutral condition of homosexuality. In the end, though, the
position that he advocated was much the same: Christ’s central message
was one of love and mercy, and homosexuals could receive these gifts
just like anyone else.44
While Bovet, Oyen, and Köberle represented one particular line of
reasoning—an ethical argument rooted in both modern science and a
liberal Christian focus on love as the essence of the religion—the Pro-
fessor of Judaism at the University of Erlangen, Hans-Joachim Schoeps,
carried on the historical-textual criticism initiated by Derrick Bailey
in Britain. In his essay ‘Homosexuality and the Bible,’ he argued that
the biblical passages of Leviticus that prohibited sodomy were con-
nected with other passages dealing not so much with ethics per se,
but ritual purity. Placed in the context of other regulations concern-
ing purity—including rules governing food preparation and interactions
with menstruating women—the sodomy prohibition looks like a relic
from a long-dead past. In historical context, it can be understood to
have arisen out of the need of Judaism to clearly differentiate itself from
other religions present in ancient Israel. Since same-sex sexuality was an
element of the sacred temple rites practiced by the ancient Canaanites,
Moabites, and Assyrians, it was violently rejected by the Israelites as
‘an atrocity.’ While the sodomy prohibition had a cultural role at the
time, believing that it had religious validity today, Schoeps argued, was
as absurd as ‘preparing an anti-capitalist sermon theme based on the
biblical story of the construction of the golden calf.’45
Of course, these various arguments did not go unanswered. In the
Protestant journal Reformatio, based in Switzerland, Walther Eichrodt,
an Old Testament expert at the University of Basel, took issue with
the displacement of biblical authority by the moral claims of sociol-
ogy, psychiatry, and biology. Clearly frightened by the tendency of some
Christian ethicists to join ‘heathen thinkers’ in an attack on ‘long recog-
nized norms,’ Eichrodt reasserted the ethical priority of biblical scripture
over any knowledge that science could provide.46 Klaus Bockmühl took
issue with Bovet’s use of science to draw ethical conclusions. Bockmühl
accurately noted that scientific opinion was by no means in agreement
over the origins of homosexuality and, consequently, the possibility
of homosexuals being ‘healed.’47 Bovet falsely concluded, Bockmühl
insisted, that homosexuality should be tolerated by Christians because
nothing could be done to heal homosexuals. Beyond the simple prob-
lem that a number of ‘qualified psychiatrists’ believed that this could
be accomplished, Bockmühl suggested that Bovet thought of healing in
a bare naturalistic sense, instead of a Christian conception of healing
that would go beyond a ‘natural transformation.’48 Bockmühl con-
cluded that the Christian community needed to guard itself against a
relativization of morality that was not justified in the slightest by the

biblical texts.49
The Catholic Church in West Germany especially remained adamant
about the sinful nature of homosexuality. Catholic priests and theolo-
gians did not ignore the debate happening among Protestants, and there
are some signs that these debates had the effect of creating open-minded
tendencies among some local clergy, especially in the Netherlands
but also more quietly in West Germany.50 The official position of the
Catholic hierarchy, however, remained that any sexual act not intended
for procreation within the context of a Christian marriage was a sin in
the eyes of God. This would remain the case even after the promulga-
tion of Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
in 1965, which broadened the purpose of sexuality to include ‘unitive’
ends but that still placed it firmly within the marital union.51 In fact,
it would not be until the mid-1970s that any serious theological debate
about homosexuality would start among Catholics.
As earlier, the Catholic Church’s viewpoint was championed by the
League of People’s Guardians. They devoted the December 1967 issue
of their magazine Concepte, publishing beginning in 1965, to the issue
of homosexuality and the need for Paragraph 175. Although they had
moderated their language since the days of Richard Gatzweiler, the
League remained unyielding in its opinion on the subject: ‘All and all,
morality therefore has a good reason to hold fast to the core of biblical
attitudes and to condemn homosexual behavior.’52
However, not all theologians who approached religion from a con-
servative point of view in the 1960s remained wedded to the legal
persecution of homosexuality. Helmut Thielicke, a preacher and the-
ologian who combined in interesting ways a world view grounded in
the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and a healthy pragmatism towards the
‘ethical dilemmas of the modern world,’ made a powerful argument
that homosexuality, despite being sinful in nature, needed to be freed
from legal punishment.53 In several essays, and more influentially as
part of a sizeable work called The Ethics of Sex, Thielicke proposed that
homosexuality could indeed be described as a ‘perversion,’ but only in
the sense that it represents a manifestation of the disordered world left
in the wake of the Fall of Man. As he writes, ‘The predisposition itself,
the homosexual potentiality as such, dare not be any more strongly
depreciated than the status of existence which we all share as men in
the disordered creation that exists since the Fall.’54 In this sense, we all
share in the ‘perversion’ of God’s original plan. However, a predisposi-
tion towards sin does not mean that we are powerless before sin. This
brought Thielicke to the difficult problem of whether homosexual con-

tact itself can be sanctioned, assuming that the homosexual cannot be
healed by medicine or psychiatric treatment. Thielicke concluded, obvi-
ously against his instincts, that homosexual activity must be ‘accepted,’
though not necessarily welcomed, assuming that the homosexual ‘is
willing to structure the man–man relationship in an ethically respon-
sible way.’55 And yet, having granted this possibility, the author goes on
to outline the real obstacles that stand in the path of such an ethical
relationship, including the lack of the institutional framework of mar-
riage and the secrecy in which homosexuals often felt that they had to
conduct their sexual lives.56
All of these considerations made homosexuality an extremely compli-
cated ethical problem for Thielicke. But, for Thielicke, that was precisely
the point. As he framed it concisely in an essay for The Journal of Protes-
tant Ethics, ‘homosexuality . . . must primarily be understood as an ethical
question. Consequently, it is not the business of the criminal courts.’57
Citing the authority of the Wolfenden report, Thielicke agreed that
making homosexuality illegal created more ethical and legal problems
(especially blackmail) than it solved. Thus, Thielicke suggested that West
Germany join what he perceived as the emerging consensus that ethical
issues be separated from legal issues, leaving only problems that clearly
had a detrimental impact on society under the purview of criminal law.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
With this declaration, Thielicke reiterated the argument of sexual lib-

eralism that had already made some headway in legal circles at the
beginning of the 1950s, spearheaded by Heinrich Ackermann at several
professional conferences. This debate had been initiated in 1951 at the
39th Conference of German Jurists (39. Deutscher Juristentag) held that
year in Stuttgart. Here, Heinrich Ackermann read a paper in which he
recommended a thorough revision of the legal treatment of sexuality in
West Germany. Ackermann was an attorney from Hamburg who since
1947 had been a member of the Committee for Penal Law of the German
Legal Bars (Strafrechtsausschuss der Deutschen Rechtsanwaltskammern), a
national committee organized by the regional bars to consider issues of
criminal law. In the early 1950s, Ackermann emerged as an advocate for
a more modern treatment of sexuality by the law. Besides legalizing the
sale of contraceptives and abortion, Ackermann argued, West German
lawmakers should recognize that Paragraph 175 had not succeeded in
turning homosexuals away from their sexual practices, but had only
exposed them to blackmail and physical assault. Ackermann subscribed

to the hereditary theories of homosexuality, calling it a ‘fact of nature’
(Naturgegebenheit), which suggested that no law would ever be success-
ful at completely eliminating homosexuality. Ackermann himself, as we
will see in a later contribution to the debate about Paragraph 175, did
not hesitate about describing homosexuality as immoral and even as a
serious public nuisance. Still, he felt there was no legal justification for
making sex between two consenting adults illegal when it represented
no danger to others. Lawmakers, therefore, should repeal the ‘useless,
unjust’ law, keeping only Paragraph 175a as a means of protecting
youths and dependents.58
In short, Ackermann argued that the government should separate
law and morality. He rejected the view of law that was emerging as
the heart of the Adenauer era’s family politics, namely one that saw
sexuality as a source of disruption and danger that required careful
policing. In its place, he embraced what historian Jeffrey Weeks calls
the liberal approach to controlling sexuality, which in Germany dates
back to eighteenth-century Kantian arguments about the proper role of
law, but which by the mid-twentieth century was also associated with
John Stuart Mill’s liberal critique of law.59 According to sexual liberalism,
‘the duty of law is to regulate public order and to maintain accept-
able (though by implication changing) standards of public decency, not
to patrol personal life.’60 It was a view gaining ground among legal
experts across the West in the early 1950s. In the United States, the
American Law Institute in 1951 renewed its effort to reorganize and
rethink American criminal law, work that would eventually recommend
eliminating the country’s sodomy statutes.61 A year later in Britain, a
group of physicians, doctors, and lawyers were asked to participate in
the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council to study the ‘legal, the-
ological and moral principles of inversion.’62 In 1954 they published
a report recommending that homosexuality be decriminalized in their
country.63
The debate reared up again in February 1953 within the Penal
Law Committee of the West German Legal Bars Association. Again,
Ackermann played a crucial role, making many of the same arguments
he had in 1951. In the course of the discussion, it became clear that
most participants at this meeting saw ‘homosexual intercourse as a vice’
that is an offense ‘against the sense of modesty and morality of most
normal members of the legal community (Rechtsgemeinschaft) and there-
fore morality itself.’ Still, a majority also agreed that in this case it
was not necessarily the role of government to impose morality on two
consenting adults, as long as laws were in place to protect children and

adolescents from the advances of homosexuals.64
This tentative agreement did not stop the discussion. In the following
two years, the Penal Law Committee received a number of papers sug-
gesting how the current laws could be either used or extended to protect
youths. Ackermann suggested expanding Paragraph 183, the law against
disturbing the public, to protect children from being exposed to public
manifestations of homosexuality. His own underlying prejudices were
revealed by his proposal that men dancing together, wearing women’s
clothing, operating homosexual bars, and even scribbling indecent graf-
fiti might be brought into the range of Paragraph 183. ‘Given what we
know about homosexual activity,’ Ackermann remarked, ‘we can predict
that all of these areas would increase greatly in extent if we are left with
only the other laws besides Paragraph 175, which today are only laxly
enforced.’65 In short, legal liberalism needed to be coupled with a much
stricter attitude towards the public expression of sexuality. Along these
lines, the law against pornography (Paragraph 184) could also be rewrit-
ten to explicitly include homosexual magazines or other work designed
to initiate contact between gay men or women. The Penal Law Commit-
tee was convinced by Ackermann’s arguments, and on December 5, 1955
it approved an official recommendation that West German lawmakers
repeal Paragraph 175.66
In Stuttgart, Ackerman’s arguments caused a major uproar among the
delegates to the Conference of German Jurists in 1956. One law pro-
fessor retorted that even if the law had not been able to rid the world
of homosexuality, it did at least keep this ‘very infectious disease’ from
spreading further into society. A lawyer from Munich alluded to the dan-
ger that society would face if this ‘epidemic’ were to spread beyond the
large cities to which it was usually contained. In the end, the conference
members decided to vote on the issue, despite the lack of a quorum.
The unofficial vote resulted in a narrow victory for the forces of sexual
liberalism: 14 in favor of repeal, 11 against.67
Ackermann’s success among lawyers suggests that this profession was
in general more willing than most groups in the early 1950s to rethink
the utility of criminalizing homosexuality. Botho Laserstein has already
been mentioned, and there were many other lawyers who gave time and
energy to the cause. One of Laserstein’s friends was Ernst Buchholtz,
a prosecutor in Hamburg in the early 1950s who was also a friend of
Kurt Hiller’s. He earned a reputation in the gay scene for tolerance: one
story was that he sent an arrested transvestite home without bringing
up criminal charges.68 He became Hamburg’s chief prosecutor in 1958
and during the early 1960 successfully defended the publication of Jean
Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers in German translation in Hamburg’s
district court, a landmark decision that would play a key role in the
decriminalization of pornography.69
Albrecht Dieckhoff, an attorney who defended many men faced with
legal charges under Paragraph 175, was employed by the publishers
Christian Hansen Schmidt and Gerhard Prescha, as well as the owner of
the Stadtcasino. Furthermore, he was at the center of a small, informal
group of friends who gathered once a month in the side rooms of vari-
ous bars and restaurants in Hamburg to discuss legal problems that gay
men faced. One of these friends, Jakob Kron, also remembers discussing
some of the psychiatric writers on homosexuality, including Sigmund
Freud, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich.70 Later, in the
1960s, Dieckhoff played a crucial role in the debate over Paragraph 175
by publicizing the Griffin and Wolfenden committee reports within the
German-speaking world.71
Another Hamburg attorney worth mentioning is Paul Hugo Biederich,
the official legal advisor for Hans Giese’s Institute for Sexual Research,
who was one of the few to write articles for the gay magazines without
a pseudonym.72 More important for the institutions of the gay scene
itself was Franz Reinhard, the legal advisor for Charles Grieger’s pub-
lishing firm and for Hamburg’s Club of Friends. In his role, Reinhard
became involved with a number of significant course cases, includ-
ing the remarkable ‘Three Mark Decision’ of 1951 and the numerous
pornography charges brought against Die Freunde.73
West Berlin, too, had its share of progressive-minded lawyers. Curt
Kleemann, who because of his Nazi party membership had trouble find-
ing a job, operated a private practice in the early 1950s through which
he gave legal advice to Giese’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and
later to West Berlin’s Society for the Reform of Sexual Law. In addition,
Kleemann had artistic interests, having dreamt of performing on stage
in his younger life and even becoming involved in a short-lived the-
ater in 1946–7. These interests drew him into a small circle of friends
surrounding the graphic artist Lieselotte Friedländer, several of whom
eventually joined the Society for the Reform of Sexual Law.74 Another
significant lawyer for this society was Werner Hesse, who had been
arrested several times during the Nazi period and spent time in the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944. Besides representing the
Society for the Reform of the Sexual Law from 1950 until 1958, Hesse
did some work gathering expert opinions in favor of the repeal of
Paragraph 175.75
Such lawyers performed many functions for the gay scene. Besides
providing legal advice to organizations, publishing firms, and gay bars,
they also defended men in cases involving Paragraph 175, including
some cases in which the men were willing to turn their personal bat-
tles against the legal system into an assault on a law that condemned
all gay men. These lawyers occasionally provided collective legal advice
in the form of columns written for homosexual magazines or by giv-
ing talks to homophile groups. Finally, they played a crucial part in the
fight against Paragraph 175 by using their professional qualifications
and expertise to initiate debate within the profession about this law’s
place in a democratic Germany.
By 1957, sexual liberalism had another significant proponent among
legalists: Herbert Jäger, professor of law at the University of Hamburg.
His book Penal Legislation and the Protection of Legal Rights in Sexual Crim-
inal Cases argued that in general sexual morality (die Sittlichkeit) cannot
be an object of the law (Rechtsgut) that should be legally protected.76
With the help of sociological, anthropological, historical, and psycho-
logical evidence that sexual morality is not an objectively definable
thing but a mutable system of values that is socially defined, Jäger rea-
soned that sexual morality is too ill-defined to be legally defensible. This
did not mean that an individual act, especially one such as rape in which
force or violence is involved, did not violate an identifiable Rechtsgut.
In the case of homosexuality between consenting adults, however, Jäger
carefully demonstrated that this type of sexual behavior did not harm
any identifiable interest, either individual or social. Paragraph 175, he
concluded, was an obvious example of the law punishing someone not
for violating the rights of others but simply for committing an act of
‘moral wretchedness.’77
Critics of Paragraph 175 could also be found on the Great Penal Law
Commission (Grosse Strafrechtskommission), a group of experts called
into existence in 1954 by Adenauer’s Minister of Justice Fritz Neumayer.
This commission—composed of professors, lawyer, judges, and repre-
sentatives from Parliament and the Federal Council—had an enormous
task in front of it.78 Given that the legal code in use at the time dated
from 1871 and that many of its laws, it was feared, had been tainted
by the country’s Nazi past, the group undertook to write an entirely
new legal code that would better reflect modern, democratic conditions.
Among the many things considered by the commission was whether
homosexuality should continue to be criminalized. The members of
the groups received translations of the Griffin and Wolfenden Reports
soon after they appeared in Britain in 1956 and 1957 respectively, and
a lively discussion ensued.79 Some members of the Great Penal Law

Commission wished to join the British in calling for the legalization
of homosexuality among adult males. Others were reluctant to give up
the supposed protections provided by Paragraph 175. One university
professor suggested to the commission that homosexual activists had
managed to acquire sympathy for their movement by ‘turning the world
upside down.’ A representative from the Federal Ministry of Justice also
defended the law, arguing that it was unfair to blame Paragraph 175 for
the frequent cases of blackmail involving homosexuals: even if the law
were repealed, the social stigma against homosexuality would remain,
giving blackmailers more than enough leverage to extort money from
their victims.80
The Great Criminal Law Commission ultimately could not come to a
consensus about how to proceed. In 1959, one member of the Ministry
of Justice explained as follows:
There was unanimity in the commission that homosexuality between

an adult and man under 21 as well as the so-called aggravated
sexual offenses between men that are covered in Paragraph 175a
should remain illegal in the future. If, however, homosexual activi-
ties between adult men in a form similar to coitus (beischlafsähnlich)
should be included was controversial. The tally of the vote was so
close, that it is impossible to foresee how the Federal Government
shall ultimately decide.81
At the end of the 1950s, the commission could do no better than to

provide the government with two options: either to legalize homosexual
activity between men who had turned 21, or to reduce the punishment
to a maximum of three years in prison.82
For the final draft of the reform bill, the Ministry of Justice chose
the second option. This choice was consistent with the philosophy of
law that underlay the entire proposed bill. With the painful memory
of Nazi totalitarianism and legally sanctioned crime still very present in
everyone’s minds, the authors of the draft code E-1962 wanted to ensure
that morality and law were tightly bound together to provide both limits
and legitimacy to the law.83 This basic vision of the law—rooted not only
in a reaction to history but also in a response to the common political
association made at the time between successful democracies and moral
family orders—shaped the many revisions (E I-1959, then E II-1959) that
were made in the next few years.84
All the work of the commission, of the Ministry of Justice, and even-
tually of representatives of the regional governments organized into
a special commission (Länderkommission) finally yielded bill E-1962,
which was formally presented by West Germany’s Ministry of Justice
for debate in the Bundestag on March 28, 1962. If it had passed, E-1962
would have carried out a general overhaul of West Germany’s criminal
law code. The new code would have made some limited compromises
with the progressive legal thinking making headway in the country, but
the overall thrust of E-1962 remained very traditional, being focused on
‘retaliation, wrongdoing, and guilt.’ In contrast, modern criminological
thinking focused on rehabilitation and tended to reduce the number of
punishable offenses.85
When it came to the legal treatment of sexuality, the proposed code
in its entirety went very much against the currents of sexual liberalism
moving through professional circles. Instead, E-1962 reflected the sex-
ual conservatism that had been prevalent since the mid-1950s. As one
author points out, the number of paragraphs in the proposed code
defining specific sexual crimes included ‘no less than 31(!) offenses.’86
Among them, several new paragraphs (222 and 224) focused on con-
trolling sexual activities in public spaces and would have criminalized
gay cruising or other efforts to ‘attract’ others (Anlocken) or ‘advertise’
oneself (Werbung). With regard to homosexuality, the justification pre-
sented by the Ministry of Justice was a catalog of all the major arguments
against decriminalization.87 The envisioned Paragraph 216 represented
a return to the pre-1935 version of Paragraph 175, punishing a rather
limited range of homosexual activity that did not include, for example,
mutual masturbation. Paragraph 217 would have kept the aggravated
offenses spelled out in Paragraph 175a but with somewhat reduced
prison sentences.88
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Perhaps not entirely coincidently, given that many legalists were

rethinking the relationship between sexuality and the law, the intro-
duction of reform bill E-1962 came in the same year that Hamburg’s
District Court handed down a landmark censorship case. The book
in question was a German-language edition of The Lady of Flowers,
a novel by French author Jean Genet, who became known in the
1940s for his glorification of the criminal underworld and portrayals of
homosexuality that exhibited ‘unprecedented frankness and demonic
power.’89 Although internationally recognized by the end of the 1950s

as a leading figure within the French intellectual world, most German
publishers refused to touch his works. The one firm that tried in 1955
to publish a translation of one of Genet’s books was pursued by state
prosecutors and eventually forced to destroy all remaining copies.90
Only in 1960 did another firm, Andreas Meyer’s Merlin Press, try
again. Meyer was soon indicted by Hamburg’s prosecutor for distribut-
ing pornographic material, but then the case took a surprising turn.
Hamburg’s chief prosecutor, Ernst Buchholz, who by the early 1960s
was emerging as a leader in the argument for the freedom of art from
censorship, took personal charge of the case. In 1962 Buchholz argued
before the court against his office’s own indictment. As summarized in
his closing statement, ‘Artistic freedom takes priority over protecting
youth.’91 Meyer was acquitted in this landmark case in the fight against
censorship.
With a major work depicting homosexuality already a topic of debate,
the introduction of reform bill E-1962 was timely. It was echoed by
the debate raging in Britain around the Griffin and Wolfenden reports,
which increasingly was reported on by the West German daily press.
E-1962 would play an enormous role in bringing out into the open the
discussions about homosexuality that had been developing in circles of
religious, legal, and scientific experts, making homosexuality a topic of
major public debate in the popular media of the day. This public discus-
sion contributed to the first onrush of the Sexwelle—the flood of images,
public debates, and pop cultural trends that washed over West Germany
in the mid-1960s.
This debate involved a number of different media institutions. Sev-
eral popular magazines published extended articles on the debate. For
example, Quick ran a series of articles that covered the debate beginning
in late 1965. Written by Carl Conrad, the series gave glimpses into the
gay scene: a Schnurrbart-Diele in West Berlin; a bar for younger, trendier
sorts in Frankfurt; and a posh salon arranged by a wealthy middle-aged
man in Hamburg. It concluded with a short, yet thorough, discussion
of homosexuality from various perspectives—psychological, sociologi-
cal, and criminological.92 The next installment, after quickly discussing
the issue of gay pornography, provided some very human portraits of
gay men of all ages and from all walks of life.93 The final article in
the series outlined some of the arguments for and against the reform
of Paragraph 175.94 Despite the use of some prejudiced language such
as ‘abnormal dispositions’ and notwithstanding the author’s insistence
that homosexuals represented a danger for the military, the articles were
pretty even-handed—much more so than nearly any such article one

would have read during the 1950s in a popular magazine.
Mainstream publishers released paperback collections of essays from a
range of perspectives—legal, scientific, medical, religious, and historical.
Fursche Press translated the well-received The Homosexual Fellow Man
from Dutch and released it in 1962, followed by Fritz Baier’s collection
Sexuality and Crime in 1963, A Plea for the Abolition of Paragraph 175 in
1966, Willhart Schlegel’s The Great Taboo in 1967, and in the same year
Hans Giese’s Homosexuality or the Politics of Paragraph 175. Film and tele-
vision also played their part. In fact, in May 1965, the West German
television station WDR broadcast the documentary ‘Paragraph 175:
Considering the Problem of Legal Reform.’ Produced by journalist Peter
von Zahn, the program laid out the major sides of the issue. It pit-
ted reformers such as Hans Giese and the president of the German
Criminological Association, who described some of the worst cases of
homosexual persecution for the audience, against opponents of reform.
For his fair and balanced treatment of this controversial issue, von Zahn
received the Adolf Grimme Gold Award, the most highly prized award
in West German television.95
Discussions of Paragraph 175 raised issues about the very nature and
purpose of law that would have major implications for the fate of the
Sexual Revolution. Homosexuality represented a type of sexuality not
confined to marriage and not sanctioned by the Judeo-Christian ethic.
The way it was ultimately handled in public discourse would have
serious implications for the family politics that had held sway dur-
ing the Adenauer era. Finally, the way the media treated the issue of
homosexuality sexualized the public sphere in ways that would have
seemed remarkable a decade earlier.
These debates were flourishing by the mid-1960s. A number of dif-
ferent yet intertwining themes emerged that can be identified as the
‘progressive’ attitude towards Paragraph 175. Above all, there were calls
for a redefined notion of the law that clearly differentiated it from
morality. Many of the debates that had previously been carried out
in religious, legal, and scientific circles now gained a wider hearing.
Theologians Schoeps, Köberle, and Thielecke all had essays published
(or republished) in paperback collections. Jäger, Giese, Shlegel, and
many others served as editors for popular collections. Lawyer Albrecht
Dieckhoff summarized Britain’s Griffin report, while writer and ethnog-
rapher Rolf Italiaander reviewed the debate in the British government
over the Wolfenden report. Hans Bolewski, director at the Evangeli-
cal Academy in Loccum, reviewed the ongoing Protestant discussions;
he concluded by calling for a criminal code that ‘regulated human

cohabitation’ rather than ‘preach[ed] penitence.’96
A redefinition of the law, progressives suggested, was behind the con-
sensus emerging among ‘modern nations’ that homosexuality should
be decriminalized. In an essay included in The Homosexual Fellow
Man, attorney Herbert Ernst Müller noted that ‘only five European
countries that do not belong to the Eastern Bloc’ criminalize all ver-
sions of male homosexuality (Germany, England, Finland, Ireland, and
Austria), whereas in 15 European nations consensual sex between adult
males was not punishable by the law (Belgium, Denmark, France,
Greece, Greenland, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway,
Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Turkey).97 Criminologist
Armand Mergen from Mainz expanded on this argument several years
later, suggesting that West Germany was being left behind by the rest of
the modern world by not reforming its laws against homosexuality.98
Using classic enlightenment language, progressives identified Para-
graph 175 as a remnant of an intolerant, ignorant past. As Alexander
Lernet-Holenia wrote, ‘Our laws against homosexuals can easily be
explained: we are still stuck deep in the Middle Ages, and indeed not
at its easiest moments, but its darkest.’99 Wolfgang Abendroth, a social-
ist professor of political science at the University of Marburg, described
the law as ‘stemming from the particular form of European feudal soci-
ety that was already anachronistic in the period of liberal capitalist
society.’100 Many described it as a ‘taboo,’ sometimes explicitly blamed
on the darkest impulses of dogmatic Christianity.101
In contrast, the trend towards legal reform in the modern world was
linked to the progress of science working in the world. Fritz Bauer,
the chief public prosecutor from the federal state of Hesse, forcefully
argued that modern times required a new attitude towards sexuality
founded on science, and especially modern psychology and criminol-
ogy. Bauer emerged as a spokesman for reforming a whole range of
sexual laws. In his contribution to the influential paperback Sexuality
and Crime, he suggested that evidence from numerous other modern
countries, including Britain, the United States, Japan, Denmark, and
Greenland, indicated that a modern attitude towards sexuality was
sweeping the world.102 The implication was that West Germany also
needed to reform if it hoped to be part of the modern world. Implicitly,
this argument played off West German anxiety about being included in
the modern Western world—a legacy of course of the country’s Nazi past
and the Holocaust, but also generated by its proximity to the Eastern
bloc.103
Authors increasingly connected ‘modernity,’ reform, and science,

highlighting the transformation that took place in the 1960s in how
‘scientific opinion’ on homosexuality was represented in the public
media. Beginning in the early decade, there was a clear shift in the
scientific world away from the criminalization of homosexuality and
towards legal reform. The biological school was still well represented
among the scientists commonly cited as experts on homosexuality, but
now increasingly by figures such as psychologist Willhart Schlegel or
Hungarian sexologist Kurt Freund, who both advocated the repeal of
Paragraph 175. Helmut Schelsky, the towering figure in German social
psychology during the mid-1950s and a key defender of Paragraph 175,
was cited less often by the mid-1960s; his place was taken by Giese, who
became the chief representative of West German sexology.
Most significantly, by the mid-1960s, Freudian psychoanalysis had
clearly made a comeback in West Germany. Tobias Brocher, president
of the German Society for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Hans
Luxenburger, professor of psychiatry at the University of Munich, were
mentioned in a 1965 article for the popular magazine Quick that cov-
ered the growing debate over Paragraph 175. Referred to as representing
medical science’s opinion on why men become homosexual, they gave
variations of the Freudian answer to this question. Representatives of
the psychoanalytic tradition were included in nearly all the paperback
collections written during this period. Homosexuality or the Politics of
Paragraph 175, edited by Hans Giese, included an essay by Helmut
Thomä—one of Alexander Mitscherlich’s students at Heidelberg and
later professor at the University of Ulm—that sought common ground
between traditional Freudian psychoanalysis and Giese’s phenomeno-
logical approach. Bauer’s Sexuality and Crime included two such pieces,
one from prominent philosopher Theodore Adorno and a second from
Wolfgang Hochheimer, professor of psychotherapy and director of the
Institute for Pedogogical Psychology at the West Berlin College for
Teachers. The growing prominence of psychoanalysis in public media
was significant because representatives of this school were likely to favor
legal reform. Brocher’s contribution to the collection Plea for the Aboli-
tion of Paragraph 175 presented a clear argument that homosexuality was
a deeply rooted psychological ‘neurosis,’ the criminalization of which
had little effect outside of making gay men more miserable.104
Indirectly, the progress that science promised to make at the level
of knowledge was linked in many people’s minds to other kinds of
progress, especially in the realms of freedom and social justice. Most
common was the argument, reminiscent of the case made a century
earlier by J. S. Mill for the liberation of women, that freedom would

yield utilitarian social benefits. Adorno, for example, in his essay for Sex-
uality and Crime highlighted the social costs of Paragraph 175. The law,
he argued, had little impact on homosexual ‘neurosis’ itself, and in fact
might only ‘perpetuate and even strengthen the neurosis.’ Furthermore,
the social and legal pressure against homosexuality could actually be
quite harmful to society by encumbering the productivity of otherwise
‘very talented’ individuals.105 Hamburg Attorney Herbert Ernst Müller
also described Paragraph 175 as a crime against society that cut off the
opportunities of otherwise productive human beings and in other ways
produced ‘tragedy and crime.’106 In this context, a much older argu-
ment that Paragraph 175 only created conditions for the victimization
of homosexuals by blackmailers found a wider audience. Not only was
this argument repeated time and again by critics of the law, it was also
the basis of the plot for the 1961 film Victim, a British film directed by
Basil Dearden released in West Germany under the title Teufelkreis just
as the debate around E-1962 was erupting.
Utilitarian arguments for freedom could easily be coupled with the
more radical assertion that pursuing sexual happiness was in fact nec-
essary for the free development of the personality. The West German
court may have rejected this argument in their 1957 case upholding
Paragraph 175, but from the early 1960s a growing number of voices
could be heard insisting that sexuality was a fundamental right and
sexual pleasure ‘a moral good.’107 Such a claim was taken to its radi-
cal extreme, of course, by young activists associated with the New Left.
Drawing on the theories of the Frankfurt School and the views of rad-
ical Freudians such as Wilhelm Reich, many New Leftists saw sexual
repression as the root of all social evil. Terminating its social and psy-
chic impact through a combination of intellectual critique and altered
social practice would release Germans from their authoritarian politi-
cal tendencies, enable a radical social revolution, and free individuals
to develop in truly healthy and fulfilling directions.108 In the words of
Berlin student and activist Niels Kadritzke, Paragraph 175 was just one
manifestation of the ‘general hostility towards sexuality that lays at the
foundation of our bourgeois system of norms.’109 This re-evaluation of
the importance of sexuality for human life could also be heard in less
radical terms among liberal-minded professionals. Certainly there was
a growing appreciation in many professional circles of the important
role that sexuality played in personality development. The next logical
step would be extending social tolerance and legal freedom to include
most areas of sexual behavior. The Berlin psychoanalyst Hochheimer,
for instance, called on West Germans to give up their scornful attitudes

towards all things sexual and embrace sexuality as an integral element
of human nature that comes in many forms.110
The quest for sexual freedom, in turn, was intimately connected with
the progressive desire for social justice. Here, the Nazi era provided an
important backdrop. As Dagmar Herzog has demonstrated, both West
German liberals and New Left radicals were successful in the early 1960s
at refashioning public memory of the Nazi period so as to promote
their vision of sexual reform and revolution. In contrast to the asso-
ciation between the Nazi era and sexual excess assumed by the family
politics of the 1950s, Nazis were now increasingly portrayed as the
embodiment of sexual repression. Through a Freudian-based logic of
repression fueling intolerance, hatred, and violence, progressives were
able to use the memory of Nazi crimes to justify the need for legal
reform, while New Left radicals could make a powerful case for a thor-
ough social revolution. From both points of view, the survival of social
‘taboos’ and repressive laws against homosexuality verified the suspi-
cions that long-standing German tendencies towards authoritarianism
were not yet dead. Reforming Paragraph 175, then, would be an impor-
tant step in confronting intolerance and therefore protecting West
German democracy. Fritz Bauer made this argument most clearly in a
1966 essay published in the liberal newspaper Die Zeit. In this essay,
Bauer’s belief that science would promote tolerance, open-mindedness,
and democracy becomes clear: ‘The pluralism of our society must not
simply exist: it must be recognized by the fundamental law of the land.
It demands limiting our [legal] norms to the bare “ethical minimum.”
The opinions of our minorities will be thereby protected.’111 Bauer
clearly connected West Germany’s old-fashioned attitudes towards sex-
uality with the crimes of the Nazi past, which he seemed to fear might
be revisited someday if more modern attitudes were not adopted by
the country. As he pleaded to a group in Cologne during a talk, ‘Our
nation . . . must learn to get along with its minorities.’112
The use of the term ‘minority’ by Bauer and many others in the
mid-1960s was significant. As we have seen, it was a conception of
homosexuality first developed by Edward Sagarin and then propagated
by homophiles during the early 1950s. It alluded to a long intellectual
tradition concerned with protecting the rights of minorities within a
democracy. By the early 1960s, many would have associated the term
with the African-American struggle for Civil Rights being played out in
the United States, a cause with which many progressive-minded peo-
ple were sympathetic. More poignant for the Germans would have
been the term’s associations with the fate of the Jewish minority in
the Nazi period. This connection between the persecution of homo-
sexuals and the Jewish Holocaust was driven home quite effectively by
Peter Fleischmann’s film Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria (Jagdszenen
aus Niederbayern, 1969). This film, based on a play that was part of a
wave of theater productions done in 1966 dealing with sexual topics,
portrays the confrontation between a young mechanic, Abram, and the
people of his small hometown in southern Germany.113 Fleischmann,
who was one of the young innovative and critical directors who spear-
headed the ‘New German Cinema’ during the late 1960s, returned
in this film to his favorite theme, the relationship of the outsider to
society.114 He suggested that Germany’s fear of the corrupting homosex-
ual was a reflection of society’s fear and hatred of everyone who does
not fit in. No doubt the most intense scene comes at the end, when
Abram is driven through the woods by a murderous gang of townspeo-
ple into the hands of the police. Through such scenes, the prejudice
against homosexuals was turned in the film into a metaphor for all
kinds of minority persecution, ‘whether it be ideological, racial, politi-
cal, or for other reasons—even where a self-satisfied and petty bourgeois
self-righteousness sets itself up as judge over one’s neighbors.’115
The portrayal of homosexual persecution in ways that resonated with
memories of the Nazi period created an opening for the spread of
knowledge about the fate of homosexuals under the Hitler Reich. Other
factors, too, might have created curiosity about this issue: the compli-
cated context of New Left politics; the appearance of several key novels
in the early 1960s dealing with the Nazi era; and a generational yearning
among the youth of the 1960s to learn more about a past that they felt
had been whitewashed or hidden from them. It would not be until the
1970s that writers and historians would seriously take on this project,
but there was an early effort that came in Willhart Schlegel’s 1967 col-
lection The Great Taboo. Wolfgang Harthauser’s essay ‘The Mass Murder
of Homosexuals in the Third Reich,’ the first real account of the Nazi
treatment of homosexuals to have a chance of reaching a large public,
began by remarking that the fate of other minorities besides the Jewish
population in the Nazi concentration camps was not well known. After
summarizing the one real description of a homosexual’s experiences that
existed at the time—a series of small stories published in one of the
homosexual journals of the early 1950s—Harthauser went on to provide
a short history of the Nazi persecution of homosexuality, from its ideo-
logical background to the centralized assault on gay men by Himmler’s
SS after the Röhm affair.116
Progressive advocacy of freedom, social justice, and minority protec-

tion were in step with the growing urge to confront the Nazi past, but
they were also implicitly understood in the context of Cold War ide-
ological competition. There were some indications of an international
move towards détente by the second half of the 1960s. At the same time,
though, some of the tension between communism and democracy was
being transferred back to the domestic level. The Leftist critique struck a
chord among many young students, fueling the massive demonstrations
at universities and in the streets. ‘Political power,’ writes historian Jeremi
Suri, ‘had lost its social component—its ability to command domes-
tic obedience without force, in short its legitimacy.’117 Progressivism
insisted that the way to restore this political legitimacy was to redefine
the nature of government. The relationship between it and the coun-
try must change. If—as Jennifer Evans has argued—the state in the late
1940s and 1950s had been widely imagined by a range of criminologists,
legalists, sexologists, and politicians as being responsible for policing
‘sexual deviance’ and thereby setting the parameters of the new coun-
try’s ‘social citizenship,’ then progressives now argued that the state
needed to take on a new role.118 The state would now more broadly
define ‘social citizenship’ by embracing minorities and in fact take on
the task of legally protecting them. The nation could be reimagined
as an ‘affirmatively diversified polity,’ one in which homosexual men
stopped functioning as ‘a constitutive Other,’ and instead might become
emblems of progress and freedom in a post-fascist Europe ‘constructed
beyond the exclusionary strictures of the nation-state.’119
By the end of the decade, arguments based on ideas of modernity,
science, freedom, and social justice were routinely cited in conjunction
with one another as compelling justifications for legal reform. At the
47th Conference of German Jurists (47. Deutscher Juristentag) that was
held in Nuremberg in September 1968, participants listened to public
prosecutor Just-Dahlmann, who explicitly placed homosexuals among
other prominent minorities (‘Jews, foreigners, leftist intellectuals’) and
then demanded the end to a law that promoted prejudices against
homosexuals and created ‘interminable suffering’ without protecting
anyone else’s rights. She pointed to the transformation in sexual mores
that was occurring around them, which she noted was not the ‘moral
decay’ that conservatives claimed, but instead a widespread discarding
of hypocrisy. Lawmakers, therefore, could no longer legitimately appeal
to the general ‘sense of shame and morality’ supposedly possessed by all
healthy people, since a consensus clearly no longer existed when it came
to sexual matters. Adults should be free to make up their own minds in
this area, without any government restrictions to worry about. Her audi-
ence apparently agreed, because the 500 participants who remained at
the end of the conference voted overwhelmingly to pass a resolution
asking the Federal Ministry of Justice to do what they could to bring
about an immediate repeal of Paragraph 175.120
In 1969 came the release of Rolf Italiaander’s Neither Sickness nor a
Crime: A Plea for a Minority, probably the most impressive book of this
period geared towards convincing the educated middle class that legal
reform was necessary. Dedicated to public prosecutors Ernst Buchholz
and Fritz Bauer (the latter had passed away in July 1968), this book
compiled over three hundred pages of essays and prose excerpts, some
appearing for the first time in print, by authors such as Sigmund
Freud, Theodor Adorno, Jean Cocteau, Kurt Hiller, Karl Jaspers, John
Addington Symonds, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Ralf Dahrendorf,
Max Horkheimer, and Alexander Mitscherlich. As a list of famous and
influential people, past and present, who opposed the criminaliza-
tion of homosexuality, it might be seen as an expanded and updated
version of the petition once put together by Hirschfeld’s Scientific-
Humanitarian Society.121 The book’s preface declares that the primary
intention of this compendium was to portray the movement against
Paragraph 175 as a fight for tolerance and minority rights. ‘Only those
people,’ Italiaander wrote, ‘who accept others different from themselves
are free of prejudice.’122 The preface’s appeal to the ‘average citizen’ and
‘the widest classes of our society’ notwithstanding, the book also had a
much more select audience in mind: Germany’s lawmakers. Members of
Parliament received an advance copy of Italiaander’s book in 1968.123
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
The debate incited by reform bill E-1962 briefly generated some efforts
among homophile activists to bring their movement back to life. A small
group of friends with connections to Kurt Hiller founded yet another
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1962 and proceeded to circulate
a parliamentary petition for signatures that was eventually presented to
the Bundestag in 1963.124 At roughly the same time, Erwin Haarmann—
onetime editor of Humanitas and the key figure in the 1950s Society for
Human Rights—reappeared in the small town of Reutlingen in south-
western Germany, where he tried to transform a small ‘friendship club’
into the nucleus of a new nationwide organization.125 Both groups
failed to last long, though. The new Scientific-Humanitarian Commit-
tee was soon torn apart by personality conflict, while Haarmann’s hopes
evaporated as soon as the men of Reutlingen faced the prospect of

serious legal trouble.
On a wider political level, however, the debate about homosexuality
had a significant political impact. A poll conducted by the Allensbach
Institute in February 1969 suggested that even if many older Germans
still resisted removing the laws against homosexuality, nearly half of
those between 16 and 29 years old favored repeal. Der Spiegel suggested
that wider social and cultural changes were responsible for this shift.
Young people were increasingly open and tolerant when it came to sex-
ual matters. Moreover, young men influenced by the counterculture
were abandoning the ideal of the ‘rock-hard He-man’ that had been
so important in the 1950s and instead imitated a more ‘supple type’
whose long hair and loose clothing made him look more feminine than
masculine. These men apparently were not haunted by the charge of
effeminacy and did not feel as threatened by homosexuals.126 Whatever
the cause, it was clear to many that the ‘sense of shame and moral-
ity’ that had been invoked by the legal courts of the late 1940s and
1950s was no longer serving as a universal moral compass. In a situation
in which uncertainty prevailed, a liberal attitude towards legal control
seemed to many the wiser course.
These changing attitudes and the growing public debate about
homosexuality were not ignored by West Germany’s Bundestag.
Although the CDU-led government brought the bill E-1962 before the
legislature for consideration three times between 1962 and 1965, each
time it faced serious criticisms. During the final discussion, it became
clear that revisions were necessary if the bill were ever to become law. So,
the Bundestag formed a Special Committee for Penal Law Reform. The
Special Committee soon went to work, making a report of their progress
to the legislature during the last meeting before the new elections
of 1965, but otherwise introducing nothing definitive. The elections
occurred in September, and soon thereafter the opportunity for a more
radical revision of the Penal Law Code seemed to present itself when the
Erhard government collapsed in January 1966.
Despite the success of the CDU in the 1965 election, Erhard had not
been able to resolve tensions that grew within his government coalition.
The liberal FDP grew increasingly anxious in 1964 and 1965 that they
might disappear completely if they did not reassert their own political
identity, while within the CDU factional struggles erupted between the
religious and secular wings of the party. When Erhard—the architect
of the economic miracle—proved incapable of stopping the economic
downturn of 1966, his party revolted and replaced him with Kurt Georg
Kiesinger. Kiesinger organized a new government based on the Great

Coalition, as it was called—a union between the CDU and the SPD,
made possible by the increasingly moderate position of both parties.
The Great Coalition justified itself in part by pointing to the grow-
ing crisis of the country, which by 1966 was clearly in the midst of a
serious political upheaval. Within the universities, student activism was
picking up over issues of free speech; the Peace Movement was gain-
ing support thanks to opposition to the American war in Vietnam; and
Marxist-inspired anti-authoritarian rhetoric was issuing from the Social-
ist German Student Federation (Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund).
Before 1966 was over, university sit-ins, mass demonstrations, and polit-
ical congresses would become common, well-publicized occurrences.127
The loosely organized Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, as the forces of
political protest were generally called, despised the Great Coalition as
proof that West German democracy was a sham—a façade of popu-
lar control when in fact no real political choice existed. The fact that
the Great Coalition was led by two ex-Nazis, Chancellor Kiesinger and
President Heinrich Lübke, indicated to New Leftists that West Germany
had not really left its fascist past behind. Only adding wood to the fire,
the new government passed the notorious Emergency Laws, giving the
government extensive power free of parliamentary control in case of
war, nuclear disaster, or other serious emergency; for many, this law was
entirely too reminiscent of the article of the Weimar constitution that
had been used by Hitler to seize power.128
For a long time, the New Leftist critique of the Great Coalition has
colored historian’s perception of the government. We should not over-
look, though, the real opportunities for policy change that the Great
Coalition represented. There is no better indicator of these opportuni-
ties than the new Federal Minister of Justice, Gustav Heinemann of the
SPD, who breathed new life into the legal reform process. A well-known
advocate of the repeal of Paragraph 175, Heinemann outlined his posi-
tion most fully in a pamphlet distributed in early 1969 to members of
the Bundestag and other politicians. Here he described ‘progress in legal
reform’ as a ‘demand of our time.’ It was a crime when politicians and
judges set themselves up as ‘the guardians of morality or virtue,’ since
this would only promote ‘hypocrisy, blackmail, and snooping into the
affairs of others (Schnüffelei).’129
Within a day of the new government being in office, the issue of
legal reform was brought up during the session of the Bundestag on
January 13, 1966. A small discussion ensued, during which Emmy
Diemer-Nicolaus from the Free Democratic Party foreshadowed the
changes that would soon come: ‘With regards to the contentious . . . we

should look beyond our borders and see which regulations other coun-
tries have struck upon. We must take into account the viewpoint that
the intervention into one’s personal life can no longer be considered
unconditionally necessary.’130 Once again, the issue was sent back to
the Special Committee for Penal Law Reform. This time, the commit-
tee activities would be energized, not only by the direction given by
Heinemann but also by a real alternative to E-1962 being available.
This alternative came from a group of 16 renowned legal scholars
who in 1966 published an Alternative Draft Penal Code (AE). The AE
included a new law dealing with homosexuality (Paragraph B8) that
notably dropped the word Unzucht (sexual vice). According to the pro-
posed law, all sexual activity between men who were over 18 years old
would be legalized. Only men over the age of 21 who had sex with a
minor between the ages of 14 and 18 would be punished under the law.
In accordance with the current attitude of sexual liberalism, the justifi-
cation for this legal revision declared that grown men should be allowed
to take responsibility for their own actions. Furthermore, it insisted that
any effort to restrict the sexuality of grown men to protect ‘the gen-
eral moral condition simply for its own sake’ allowed the state to assert
undue power over its citizens.131
The Bundestag’s Special Committee now had two distinct versions to
discuss, which it did quite extensively over the course of the next few
years. The committee members consulted with other permanent par-
liamentary committees that might have had an opinion on the topic,
including the committees for defense, health, law, and labor.132 They
soon expressed dissatisfaction with some of the language of E-1962,
and specifically with the term beischlafsähnlich, which in their minds
was ‘vague, difficult to prove, and not capable of distinctly defining the
criminalized behavior.’ The committee quickly moved past the prob-
lem by unanimously deciding to get rid of Paragraph 175 entirely, at
least as it applied to homosexuality among adult men. In its place
would go a new law that forbade homosexual rape and homosexual
contact with minors. The majority of the committee also spoke in
favor of maintaining laws specifically penalizing male prostitution and
sex with dependents (as covered at the time by articles 2 and 4 of
Paragraph 175a).133
By the end of 1968, the most basic decisions had been made, but
there were still a few issues to be worked out. With this purpose in
mind, the Ministry of Justice wrote a letter in November to all the
regional justice departments announcing that the German Bundestag’s
Special Committee for Criminal Law Reform would soon ‘be engaging
itself with the reform of Paragraphs 175 and 175a.’ The letter requested
input from the various justice departments regarding several questions,
including what legal protections for children needed to be in place in
case of legal reform, what age of minority (Schutzaltersgrenze) should
be set by law, and whether special legal restrictions should be placed
on male prostitution and sexual relations with subordinates.134 The
replies from the regional justice departments reveal a varying degree of
attitudes towards the reform, from tremendous enthusiasm to a grudg-
ing acceptance about the inevitability of the change. The departments
also disagreed a great deal in their answers to the specific questions
posed by the Federal Ministry of Justice. Several departments, includ-
ing Bavaria, Hamburg, Hannover, North Rhine-Westfalia, the Saarland,
and Schleswig-Holstein, answered conservatively, demanding that any
proposed law place the age of minority at 21. These departments also
generally wanted to maintain some laws specifically against male prosti-
tution and the abuse of subordinates, though there were a few dissenters
here. Bremen and Wiesbaden, on the other hand, answered more liber-
ally, suggesting that 18 would be adequate for an age of minority and
that the existent laws against heterosexual prostitution and child abuse
would be adequate to deal with these problems. West Berlin’s depart-
ment was clearly torn between the two positions, as the city’s Senator
for Justice explained in his response.135
The leading figures in the Federal Ministry of Justice and represen-
tatives of the regional justice departments met in Bad Tönisstein in
February 1969. By this time, a working draft of the new version of
Paragraph 175 existed, which was debated with the goal of polling the
opinions of the regional governments. A consensus emerged in agree-
ment with the new draft’s punishment of men 18 years old or over who
had sex with men under 21 (though the representative from Hessen still
insisted on lowering the age of minority to 18). Most also praised the
draft’s criminalization of any attempt to sexually abuse subordinates,
and several representatives wanted to extend this to the homosex-
ual abuse of minors as well.136 There were some voices of dissent, in
particular regarding the draft’s criminalization of male prostitution.
These opinions were duly noted but were not taken into account in
the final draft of the law. Why they were ignored was later clarified
in a document drawn up by the Ministry of Justice, which explained
that the bill was very much a compromise between various positions,
and changing it significantly would endanger its passage through the
Bundestag.137
In the following month, Gustav Heinemann left his office in the Min-
istry of Justice for an even higher post—President of West Germany.
Thankfully, this did not prove to be an obstacle to legal reform, as
his successor Horst Emkhe, former legal professor at the University of
Freiburg, carried on the work. The reformed bill was finally read to the
Bundestag on May 7, 1969, introduced by the SPD-representative Adolf
Müller-Emmert. Besides decriminalizing adult homosexuality, the pro-
posed ‘First Law for the Reform of the Criminal Code’ also removed
the penalization of adultery, bestiality, procuring, and obtaining sexual
favors under false pretenses (Erschleichung des Beischlafs). The bill also
allowed for some changes in legal punishment to bring the German legal
code more in line with modern criminological thinking, especially with
the introduction of the Einheitsstrafe, which abolished the older distinc-
tion between penal servitude and imprisonment.138 In relation to the
reform of Paragraph 175, most debates centered on the age of minor-
ity. Hermann Busse from the FDP declared, ‘It is today silly to keep up
the illusion that an 18-year-old person is not yet adequately educated in
matters of sexuality, is not yet mature enough or even is too unstable
[to handle such matters].’ The CDU quickly responded, with Gerhard
Jungmann appealing to the need to protect young men, but also specif-
ically to guard against homosexuality in the military: ‘Setting the age of
minority too low would consequently lead to an insufferable burden for
the army, if not even to a poisoning of the psychological atmosphere
among the military forces.’139
As Jungmann’s defense of the law suggests, the CDU at this point
were by no means united in opposition to legal reform. There were cer-
tainly a number who rallied behind the old version of Paragraph 175:
ex-Family Minister Franz-Josef Wuermeling, some speakers for the
Catholic Church, and especially the leaders of the League of People’s
Guardians, who warned of ‘libertine chaos’ that supposedly would ensue
if the ‘legal protections against perversion’ were lifted.140 However, there
were others within the party, especially younger or more secular mem-
bers, who rejected this alarmist rhetoric and announced their support
for reform, or at least their willingness to consider it. Even within the
West German Catholic Church, there were now a few individuals willing
to speak up for reform. Walter Bayerlein, for example, wrote in an article
published in a Bavarian-based Catholic journal, ‘Insofar as two grown
people of the same gender have sex with one another based on a freely
made decision, neither society as such nor a third party is endangered by
such an act. Furthermore, their behavior cannot be described as social-
ethically insufferable. One should not judge, but only feel sorry for,
their sexuality that has gone astray.’141 While still insisting on the need
to protect children, Bayerlein concluded that homosexuality in general
‘did not require legal punishment.’ A similar conclusion was reached
by this time within the Committee for Penal Law, which made recom-
mendations to the Catholic bishops of West Germany. Recognizing the
increasing tendency to make a distinction between law and morality, the
Church committee accepted the reform of Paragraph 175 as inevitable
and focused on measures that were perceived as necessary to protect
children.142
At the same time, individuals with more socialist leanings were not
necessarily in favor of legal reform. As we have seen, even in the SPD-
controlled city of Hamburg, some leaders saw homosexuality as a danger
to West Germany’s youth and public order. In particular, Walter Becker
from Hamburg’s Youth Welfare Office remained an outspoken supporter
of Paragraph 175, which he saw as necessary to protect youths from
homosexual predators. At the national level, many SPD representatives
showed signs of harboring reservations about supporting reform. One
party member in the Bundestag warned Willy Brandt that reform would
cost the party votes, especially among working-class families and the
lower middle class. Those who did favor reform made it absolutely clear
that they did so only for legal reasons, not on any moral or humanitar-
ian grounds. The SPD Social Minister from North Rhineland-Westphalia
commented in 1970 that he would never accept homosexuality as any-
thing worthwhile. Even Minister Ehmke declared that reform of the
law did not imply that he or any members of his party approved of
homosexuality.143
Despite these doubts, the SPD closed ranks, and enough Christian
Democrats joined them to finally bring an end to this remnant of
the Nazi era. On May 9, 1969 the last reading of the bill occurred in
the Bundestag, followed by a final discussion. Both Wuermeling and
Friedrich Zimmermann from the CDU waged a last attack on the bill.
Zimmermann, making a reference to the counterculture and the student
protests still raging in the country in 1969, declared, ‘The abolition and
limitation of significant portions of that segment of the Criminal Code
dealing with sexual matters makes us extremely worried, especially at
this moment when in so many areas not only the traditional restraints,
but also the ethical ones are in danger of breaking.’144 In support of the
law was the CDU-representative Max Güde:
On the question of the penalization of simple homosexuality

between men, I (along with those friends of mine who vote with me)
have decided to support decriminalization, not only because of the

turnover of public opinion, but also because inborn homosexuality—
which is now an indisputable phenomenon, even if it does not cover
all the cases—cannot easily be made into a matter of guilt.145
After a final call from Free Democratic representative Diemer-Nicolaus

for those opposing the bill not to stand in the way of progress, a vote
was taken. With 255 (along with 15 votes from West Berlin) votes in
favor and 61 against (along with two from West Berlin), the law was
passed by the Bundestag. It had the full support of the SPD and the FDP,
and partial support from the Christian Democrats.
The major hurdle was now over. The law passed on to the upper house
of Parliament, the Bundesrat (Federal Council), on May 14, 1969, where
a smaller discussion was held before the majority of this governing
body’s members passed the bill.146 The law was finally promulgated on
June 25, 1969. The First Law for the Reform of the Criminal Code, which
did not come into effect until September 1, replaced Paragraphs 175 and
175a with a new version of the law that still imprisoned men between
the ages of 18 and 21 who had sex with each other for up to a period
of five years. In addition, men who were 21 or older could not have sex
with men under 21. Lawmakers wanted to ‘protect’ the 18–21 age range
for the sake of the country’s armed forces, whose leaders still wanted
to be able to restrict men who could serve in the military from having
gay sex. Furthermore, the law maintained two of the provisions of Para-
graph 175a: it still punished male prostitutes as well as men who abused
those in some sort of subordinate position, whether at work or in some
other way. Infractions of any part of the law carried a maximum prison
sentence of five years, much lower than the ten-year maximum sentence
named in Paragraph 175a. However, in the most important case—the
case of two consenting adults who were 21 or older—both men were
free to do as they pleased.147
6
Conclusion: Between Persecution
and Freedom
The period between 1945 and 1969 brought a revival of the urban gay
scenes that had been destroyed by the Nazis, witnessed the emergence
of a more masculine understanding of homosexuality, and ushered in
a widespread debate about homosexuality that yielded the reform of
Paragraph 175. Although homosexuals found it difficult to organize in
this period amidst widespread prejudices, ultimately these years were
much more than a pause in the history of the homosexual move-
ment that separated the gay liberation movement of the 1970s from
the early-twentieth-century pioneers. It was also not simply an era in
which the Nazi persecution of homosexuality persisted under the cover
of democratic ideals, as argued by homophile leaders during the 1950s.
Instead, this era made a positive contribution to the history of German
homosexuality, without which it is impossible to imagine gay life in the
country today.
The steady growth of the gay scenes in the 1950s and the 1960s
laid the groundwork for the explosion of gay life that would follow
the reform of Paragraph 175 in September 1969. The number of gay
bars increased dramatically, so that cities such as Hamburg and West
Berlin had perhaps 60 or 70 such establishments by the early 1980s. The
first gay bathhouses appeared soon after the reform of Paragraph 175
took effect. Like similar establishments opening up in New York, San
Francisco, London, and elsewhere at the end of the 1960s and early
1970s, they generally offered saunas, whirlpools, a swimming pool, a
bar, and private cabins that could be rented out at an hourly rate.
New homosexual periodicals appeared on the market, beginning with
Du&Ich, him, and Don.1 In Hamburg, the Revolt shop opened in Febru-
ary 1976, laying the groundwork for other gay pornography stores.2
By the end of the 1970s, a number of gay cafés were also launched,
204
Conclusion: Between Persecution and Freedom 205
offering comfortable spots to eat or get some coffee in the afternoon.

In the evening, gay men could head off to discos such as the Pit Club in
Hamburg or the Metropol in Berlin to dance through the night.3
The reform of Paragraph 175 set the stage for the rebirth of homo-
sexual activism. In late 1969 and early 1970, several short-lived groups
following the old homophile model appeared in Hamburg, Wiesbaden,
Kassel, Berlin, and Munich; the only successful one was a local Hamburg
chapter of Denmark’s International World Organization of Homophiles
(Internationale Homophile Welt-Organization, or IHWO), which survived
until 1974 in part because of its reliance on the network of members
built by the Danish group through the 1950s and 1960s.4 A better sign
of what was to come, though, could be found in the gay student groups
that organized at the Universities of Bochum and Münster beginning
in 1970. By this time, news of the Stonewall riot that took place in
New York City on the night of June 27, 1969 had left its mark on a
younger generation of homosexual men and women. Deeply influenced
by the student movement of the 1960s, they consciously rejected the
term ‘homophile,’ indicating that a new chapter in the country’s history
of homosexual organization had begun.
For the German gay liberation movement, the single most important
galvanizing event was the premier of Rosa von Praunheim’s film It is
Not The Homosexual That Is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives
(Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt)
on July 5, 1971. Produced with the help of the New Left sociologist
Martin Dannecker, Praunheim’s film criticized the efforts of gay men
and lesbians to fit into the straight world. Homosexuals, it suggested,
should not reject traditionally pejorative terms like schwul but should
embrace them and transform their meaning into a positive description
for an alternative form of love and sex free of bourgeois norms. Implic-
itly, Praunheim attacked the homophile strategy of the 1950s, which
had emphasized adopting respectable behavior in public and advocated
establishing long-standing relationships between two people that resem-
bled heterosexual marriage. Such conduct, he suggested, was in fact a
rejection of one’s own homosexuality: ‘Gay people (Schwule) don’t want
to be gay; instead, they want to live the bourgeois, trashy life of the
average citizen.’5 Like the young militants in the new American gay
movements, he suggested that a radicalization of personal behavior and
self-conception could lay the groundwork for a more thorough social
transformation.
In less than a month after the premiere, a number of young radi-
cals came together to found the Homosexual Initiative of West Berlin
(Homosexuellen Aktion Westberlin, or HAW). Like the Gay Liberation

Front that organized in New York City in 1969 and London in 1970,
the HAW was made up of university students, New Left intellectuals,
and young academics who generally had some experience in the stu-
dent movement of the late 1960s. Similar groups soon appeared in many
other cities across the country. They established newsletters and other
publications, operated information centers and telephone counseling
lines, and sponsored fringe theater performances and other opportu-
nities for artistic expression. They organized international conferences
such as the annual ‘Pentecost Convention’ in West Berlin and the 1979
Frankfurt ‘Homolulu’ of July 1979. And, of course, there were many
demonstrations, which gave gay men a chance to announce their pride
but also to protest against symbols of oppression.6 By the middle of the
1970s, drag (often combined with copious facial hair) was increasingly
used in these demonstrations as a provocative form of political protest—
a theatrical act that both proclaimed one’s homosexuality and implicitly
called into question assumptions about gender roles.7 These demonstra-
tions were eventually institutionalized in 1979 with the Christopher
Street Day parades held annually to celebrate the anniversary of the
Stonewall Riots.8
As in other countries, the gay movement of West Germany gradually
fell victim to factional disagreements. Older homophiles soon split with
younger activists, while lesbians separated from gay men to form their
own organizations. Divisions emerged between gay men who enjoyed
the pleasures of the gay scenes and homosexual activists who approved
of nothing but sober political work. Drag also proved controversial,
leading to a split between, on the one hand, the so-called ‘feminists’
(Feministen) or ‘Party of Delight’ (Lustfraktion), who advocated this tac-
tic and, on the other, both conservative homophiles and serious-minded
Leftists, who questioned its effectiveness.9 Such differences caused many
of the original gay liberation organizations to fragment or disappear
by the end of the decade, and yet many of the men who came of age
within the 1970s movement left lasting contributions. Two members of
West Berlin’s HAW founded the Pink Triangle Press (Verlag rosa Winkel)
in 1975, the country’s first publishing firm dedicated to homosexual
material.10 Others became involved in projects such as gay newspa-
pers, gay theater, gay cafes, and, by the early 1980s, gay community
centers.11 Several prominent activists opened gay bookstores: Berlin’s
Prinz Eisenherz in 1978, Hamburg’s Männerschwarm in 1981, Cologne’s
Lavendelschwert in 1982, and additional stores in Munich, Stuttgart,
Nuremberg, and Frankfurt.12
In the 1980s and 1990s, the German gay community increasingly

focused on new matters: the challenges of AIDs, the promotion of
openly gay political candidates, the establishment of a public memorial
for the homosexual victims of the Nazi era, the passage of antidiscrim-
ination laws, and the legal recognition of same-sex relationships and
adoption rights. A persistent concern, though, was the interest in uncov-
ering gay history. Beginning in the early 1970s, a host of historians
emerged from the gay liberation movement to begin work on Germany’s
gay past.13 Their work provided an important dimension to gay libera-
tion as the persecution of homosexuality under Nazism was transformed
into a key component of gay collective memory—in West Germany, but
also elsewhere in Europe and North America. Sparked by the publica-
tion of Heinz Heger’s memoirs The Men with the Pink Triangle in 1972,
gay men began to lift up the pink triangle as a symbol of their political
movement.
Although it was not universally embraced at first, over time the pink
triangle proved effective in conjuring up individual memories of fear
and discrimination, creating a shared identity based on victimhood,
and establishing the group’s political credibility within the context of
the antifascist New Left movements of the 1970s.14 By the end of the
1970s, pink triangle stickers became a common symbol in gay areas of
West Germany’s major cities, as were pink triangle earrings, pins, and
buttons.15 In the meantime, knowledge about the Nazi persecution had
been spread by articles published in the gay press and the 1976 film The
Pink Triangle? That was Such a Long Time Ago. Academia was also intro-
duced to the topic through the work of sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann,
whose 1977 book Seminar: Society and Homosexuality included several
essays dealing with the treatment of homosexuality under ‘German
fascism.’16
In writing a history of their past, members of the West German gay
liberation movement looked back to Magnus Hirschfeld, Adolf Brand,
and the organizations of the early twentieth century as their forerun-
ners. As Manfred Baumgardt once wrote, ‘In Germany we can speak of a
first and a second gay rights movement.’17 The homophile movement of
the 1950s, on the other hand, was consciously rejected, if not ignored
entirely. The term ‘homophile,’ argued 1970s activists, was meant to
disguise one’s sexuality and was thus anchored in self-hatred and the
sexually repressive past. Homophiles’ efforts to bring about legal reform
did little to solve the problem of social prejudices. What strategies had
been developed to address this issue—namely gaining social acceptance
through education and respectable behavior—failed to deal with the
deeply grounded mechanisms of sexual repression and other kinds of

social oppression that underpinned these prejudices.
These criticisms of the homophile movement were fair, but at the
same time they caused gay liberation activists to ignore the way that
their own movement in many ways built upon the success of the pre-
vious generation. The homophiles had propagated arguments for legal
reform that had eventually contributed to the decriminalization of adult
male homosexuality. Their efforts to define homosexuals as victims
of Nazism left their mark on the progressive and Leftist discourse of
the 1960s, from which the pink triangle could eventually be taken up
by a new generation of gay activists as a badge of their identity. The
homophiles’ successful creation of an imagined community in the 1950s
and the 1960s is attested to by the fact that, before it dissolved in
1974, the homophile IWHO was the single largest homosexual orga-
nization in the country. Furthermore, the redefinition of homosexuals
as a minority that required legal protection—a concept championed by
many homophile writers in the 1950s and progressive spokespersons in
the 1960s—was widely embraced by the gay liberation movement of the
1970s and eventually resulted in antidiscrimination laws in the 1990s.
The social dynamics within both the gay liberation movement and
the wider gay scene were shaped by the spread and acceptance of a
more masculine image of the homosexual man during the 1950s and
1960s. In the context of gay liberation, many gay men embraced the ‘gay
macho’ style pioneered by leathermen in the 1960s. Manliness taken to
an extreme became a badge of homosexual pride, while also having the
advantage of making one desirable at the discos and saunas of the gay
scene. By the late 1970s, the international style of the ‘gay clone’ had
coalesced, expressing the same appreciation for Western wear, leather,
facial hair, and emblems of working-class masculinity that the leather-
men had once cultivated, but now given an updated look through the
fashions of the day: button-fly Levi 501s, plaid flannel shirts, tank tops,
and American tennis shoes.18 In West Germany, the clone style was
never as ubiquitous as it was in San Francisco’s Castro District for a
time, nor did it become entirely distinct from the style of the leather-
men, which continued to be popular. Cologne’s and Hamburg’s leather
scenes continued to grow. Cologne’s Motor Sport Club (MSC) added
hundreds of members and organized an annual leather convention dur-
ing the early 1970s; Hamburg eventually had its own MSC, put on its
own leather convention (the Fucktory), and by the end of the decade
possessed three bars devoted to leather (the Loreley, Tom’s Saloon, and
Chaps).19 Eventually, though, both cities were outdone by West Berlin,
which boasted numerous leather bars and a local MSC, as well as being
the site of the annual ‘Easter Convention’, which soon became one of
the largest of such events in the world.20
The hypermasculinity of the leathermen and the gay clones may
have become popular in the decade before the AIDs crisis, but it was
never universally embraced. Many older men found it hard to give up
the coat and ties that they had always associated with respectability;
the effeminate style of Tunten and transvestites also never disappeared
from the scene, though it was regularly updated to keep up with the
latest fashions. Younger gay men often opted for a boyish look that
took advantage of the many youth styles emanating from America and
Britain. Radical activists associated with the New Left, on the other
hand, tended to prefer a slightly harder version of the countercultural
styles (often with some facial hair). For them, the look of the ‘politicized
hippie who eschewed traditional manliness, conventional aspirations,
and established institutions’ avoided both the social constraints asso-
ciated with traditional masculine dress and yet also the Americanized,
consumerist implications of the gay clone.21 There was also the ‘gender
fuck’ embraced by gay liberationists who combined elements of both
masculine and feminine style—Victorian dresses with full beards and
leather boots, for example.22 This diversity of styles and the persistent
controversy over appropriate behavior among homosexuals themselves
demonstrate that even before the emergence of the LGTBQ category
in the 1990s, personas based around gay identities were multiple and
contested.
The 1969 reform of Paragraph 175 was just the first of many changes
to the law. In 1973, the law was altered again, this time to take out
some of the more objectionable language (specifically, Unzucht) and to
lower the age of consent from 21 to 18. It stayed on the books until
1994, when it was finally repealed altogether. The deep-seated preju-
dices have taken more time to uproot. The association of homosexuality
with illness was taken on internationally by gay activists through a
series of public confrontations in the early 1970s.23 On the level of
theory, gay sociologists such as Martin Dannecker, Reimund Reiche,
and Rüdiger Lautmann promoted theoretical alternatives to the earlier
medical, psychological, and sociological models that had undergirded
this association.24 The social constructivist viewpoint promoted by
these sociologists and later modified by Michel Foucault and other
thinkers associated with the linguistic turn undermined whatever was
left of the idea that homosexuality was unnatural. The association of
homosexuality with criminality—which flared up in the daily press
in the early 1970s due a sensational murder trial involving two les-
bians and was aggravated by the fascination with United States serial
killers—provoked a series of public demonstrations against the press.
It was also implicitly the target of a series of demonstrations in 1980
against the ‘pink lists,’ the two-way mirrors installed in public bath-
rooms, and some of the other notorious tactics of the Hamburg police.25
Finally, the longstanding equation of homosexuality with sin that had
already come under attack from progressives in the 1960s gradually
faded as Christianity’s influence in West Germany and much of Europe
weakened.26 Prejudice against homosexuality is certainly not dead in
the country, but homosexual men (and women) can find in Western
Europe today an environment more accepting of their sexual behavior
than arguably anywhere else in the world.
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
This book has tried to suggest that the history of homosexuality is an

important lens through which to view the German past. The changes in
attitudes towards homosexuality were the complicated result of a num-
ber of factors: the clash between religious and scientific ways of viewing
same-sex behavior; cultural transformations created by the decline of
Christianity, the rise of a consumerist society, and the conflict over the
meanings of sexuality; the legacy of Nazism, whose failure discredited
racist theory and language and made it increasingly difficult for the
state to tolerate minority persecution; and, last but not least, the persis-
tent efforts of homosexuals themselves to change popular notions about
their sexual relationships. The complicated ways that such processes
interweaved with one another suggests that thinking about German his-
tory in the simple terms of either continuity or radical rupture is bound
to fail. The fact is that when it comes to the experience of homosexuals
between 1945 and 1969, there were elements of both. The persistence of
the Nazi-era versions of Paragraphs 175 and 175a long after 1945 was a
sign of a deeper continuity of prejudices against homosexuals. Negative
perceptions of same-sex desire did change in the course of the twentieth
century, but slowly and in ways that do not align easily with the most
significant moments of political history.
Prejudice and legal persecution were not the only ways that homo-
sexual men of the 1950s and 1960s connected the present and the past.
Memories of both the Weimar era and the Nazi Reich affected how
homosexuals perceived the young Federal Republic of Germany, inform-
ing their experience of the local gay scenes and their activities within the
homophile movement. And yet memories generally led gay men to per-
ceive that, in some crucial ways, 1945 did represent a serious break with
the past. Gay men who remembered the 1920s often remembered it as
a Golden Era for homosexuals, with which the scene and organizations
of the 1950s and 1960s could not come close to comparing. Yet, there
was a scene, and even for a time some organizations and publications,
which were reminders that the horrors of the Nazi era were indeed gone.
This history represents a crucial dimension of the century-long con-
flict over the meanings and limits of sexuality that eventually culmi-
nated in the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Issues debated
at the end of the nineteenth century—such as the relationship between
gender and sexuality, the proper role of law in dealing with sexual-
ity, and the roles of biology and psychology in determining individual
sexuality—continued to be debated intensely in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. However, the answers given to these questions in the 1960s differ
radically from those given a century before. Again, issues of continuity
prove to be complex.
Narrowing our view from the longue durée to the two and a half
decades after World War II, we see that studying homosexuality gives
us an important perspective on the reconstruction of everyday life. Like
other research, this history has shown the importance of notions of sex-
ual and gender order, a key aspect of the conservative family politics of
the Adenauer government in the restoration of social order after the war.
Religious leaders and conservative Christian Democrats helped shape a
widespread consensus that rebuilding the country required strong, tra-
ditionally organized families. Restoring women and men to their proper
place in these families would help control the sexual forces suppos-
edly released by Nazism, the war and immediate postwar period, and
modern consumer society. Accordingly, it would also foster a proper
moral environment in which to raise exemplary German children. Such
a conservative atmosphere was more than simply heteronormative; its
construction of masculine norms around the ideal German father was
profoundly dependent on the ‘Other’ of the corrupting homosexual.
Yet, this conservative atmosphere did not prevent homosexual men
from finding some limited freedom to build relationships and social
spaces for themselves. They found themselves ‘between persecution and
freedom’—a title chosen because it refers to the time period between
the Nazi era and the reform of Paragraph 175 but can also be under-
stood to suggest the two alternate narratives by which we can interpret
this era. Since the appearance of the gay liberation movement, there has
been a tendency to remember the period between 1945 and 1969 as a
period of repression, in which men faced continued legal persecution

and were largely forced to hide their sexual desires from society. There
is certainly truth to this, as my study has shown. Nevertheless, I was
struck while I was conducting my research by the second narrative that
was told by many men at the time, and which continues to linger among
some of the older generation as the story that undergirds their memo-
ries of this period. This is a tale of liberation, told mainly by men who
are old enough to remember the violent persecution of homosexuality
under the Nazis. This pre-1969 ‘liberation’ is very different from the gay
liberation that came during the 1970s; indeed, its narrative provides a
sharp contrast with the tale of repression constructed by a minority of
homophile activists after 1945 and then adopted by the majority of gay
men who came of age in the late 1960s and afterwards.
These two narratives weave together different historical experiences
and reveal very different expectations and notions of emancipation. The
narrative of liberation includes regular police raids and Nazi concen-
tration camps as a real possibility; emancipation, therefore, means the
opportunity to quietly build a gay scene in which homosexual men can
carefully pursue their desires. The narrative of repression, on the other
hand, views any legal prosecution as a form of oppression and envisions
emancipation as involving greater social acceptance.
Neither of these narratives, of course, gives us a complete picture of
the gay scene between 1945 and 1969. Yet together they do give us a
slightly different approach to the period than the usual historical narra-
tive about this period, which divides the era into a ‘conformist’ 1950s
and a ‘rebellious’ 1960s. The narrative of repression reveals that, even if
the 1960s witnessed remarkable changes in attitudes towards sexuality,
these changes did not affect every portion of society evenly, and cer-
tainly did not prevent a massive crackdown on homosexual activity in
Hamburg during this decade. The narrative of liberation, on the other
hand, shows that, while there were certainly strong pressures towards
conformity and social and sexual order in the 1950s, people were able
to resist these pressures and, in some circumstances, were even able to
fight against them.
Notes
Note on Terminology
1. Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New York: Garland,
1999), 337.
1 Introduction: The Neglected Postwar Period

1. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (London: Quartet, 1977); and John D’Emilio, Sexual
Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).
2. Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present
(New York: Vintage, 1995).
3. Nan Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1964 (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California, 2005); Charles Kaiser, The Gay
Metropolis (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Lillian Faderman
and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and
Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic, 2006); Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Per-
ils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2005); Jens Dobler, Von anderen Ufern: Geschichte der Berliner Lesben
und Schwulen in Kreuzberg und Friedrichshain (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder, 2003);
Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia,
1945–1972 (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2004); David Johnson, The
Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal
Government (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004); Kristoph Balser, Mario
Kramp, Jürgen Müller, and Joanna Gotzmann, eds, Himmel und Hölle: Das
Leben der Kölner Homosexuellen 1945–1969 (Cologne: Emons, 1994); and
Clayton Whisnant, ‘Hamburg’s Gay Scene’ (PhD dissertation, University of
Texas at Austin, 2001).
4. See the Lebensgeschichten series edited by Andreas Sternweiler and pub-
lished by the Schwules Museum.
5. Robert Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and
the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham: Duke Uni-
versity, 1993); Richard Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance
and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham: Duke University, 1997); Julian Jackson,
Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from Liber-
ation to AIDs (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009); Scott Gunther, The
Elastic Closet: A History of Homosexuality in France, 1942– Present (London
and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired:
Gay and Lesbian Communication and Community, 1940s–1970s (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2006).
213
214 Notes
6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 92–3.
7. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800
(London and New York: Longman, 1981); Randolph Trumbach, ‘The Birth of
the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Cul-
ture, 1660–1750’, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,
ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York:
Meridian, 1989), 129–40; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic, 1994).
8. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California, 1984), 30–9.
9. Matt Houlbrook, ‘Cities,’ in The Modern History of Sexuality, ed. Matt
Houlbrook and Harry Cocks (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),
138–40.
10. Houlbrook, Queer London; Meeker, Contacts Desired; and Matti Bunzl, Symp-
toms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley:
University of California, 1999).
11. Robert Moeller, ‘Introduction: Writing the History of West Germany’, in West
Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era,
ed. Robert Moeller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), 1–30.
12. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University, 2003), 17.
13. Ibid., 18.
14. See the essays by Robert Moeller, Heidi Fehrenbach, Uta Poiger, and
Susan Jeffords in Signs 24 (Autumn 1998). See also Hanna Schissler,
‘ “Normalization” as Project: Some Thoughts on Gender Relations in
West Germany during the 1950s’, in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of
West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity, 2001), 359–75; Elizabeth Heineman, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Coming
to Terms with the Nazi Past’, Central European History 38 (January 2006),
41–75.
15. Robert Moeller, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of
Postwar West Germany (Berkeley: University of California, 1993).
16. The distinction between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘marginalized’ masculinities is
developed by R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California,
1995), 76–81.
17. Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality (London and New York:
Routledge, 2008), chapters 9–12.
18. Dagmar Herzog, ‘Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures’,
American Historical Review 114 (December 2009), 1295.
19. Stephen Garton, Histories of Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2004), 221.
20. Elizabeth Heineman, ‘The Economic Miracle in the Bedroom: Big Business
and Sexual Consumption in Reconstruction West Germany’, The Journal of
Modern History 78 (December 2006), 846–77.
21. Dagmar Herzog, ‘Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures,’
American Historical Review 114 (December 2009), 1298.
22. Jennifer Evans, ‘Bahnhof Boys: Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi
Berlin’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003), 605–36.
Notes 215
2 Policing and Prejudice after 1945

1. John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations
(Burlington, Massachusetts: Academic, 1975), Ch. 4.
2. Johnson, The Lavender Scare.
3. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed
American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic, 1997), 212–20.
4. Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 275.
5. Stephan Heiß, ‘Das Dritte Geschlecht und die Namenlose Liebe:
Homosexuelle im Münchner der Jahrhundertwende,’ in Mann Bilder:
Ein Lese- und Quellenbuch zur historischen Männerforschung, ed. Wolfgang
Schmale (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 1998), 189.
6. Abraham Flexner, Prostitution in Europe (New York: The Century Company,
1914), 31.
7. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002), 65–124.
8. This notion of an ‘imagined geography’ is borrowed from Meeker, Contacts
Desired, 12–13.
9. The phrase is borrowed from Matt Houlbrook, who uses it to describe
the pull that London had on British provincials. See Houlbrook, Queer
London, 9.
10. Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin: Rosa Winkel,
1991), 74.
11. Wolfgang Theis and Andreas Sternweiler, ‘Alltag im Kaiserreich und in der
Weimarer Republik,’ in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin,
1850–1950, ed. Michael Bollé (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), 63.
12. Cornelia Limpricht, Jürgen Müller, and Nina Oxenius, ‘Verführte’ Männer:
Das Leben der Kölner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Volksblatt,
1991); Bernard Rosenkranz and Gottfried Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen
Wegen: Die Geschichte des schwulen Lebens in der Hansestadt, rev. edn
(Hamburg: Lambda Edition, 2006); Rainer Hoffschildt, Olivia: Die bisher
geheime Geschichte des Tabus Homosexualität und der Verfolgung der
Homosexuellen in Hannover (Hannover: Selbstverlag, 1992); Heiß, ‘Das Dritte
Geschlecht und die Namenlose Liebe.’
13. James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
(New York: Arno, 1975), 77–8; Hans-Georg Stümke, Homosexuelle in
Deutschland: Eine politische Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 53–4.
14. Stefan Micheler, ‘Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-
Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism,’ Journal of the History of
Sexuality 11 (January/April 2002), 102.
15. Ludwig Finckh, quoted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg,
eds, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California,
1994), 414.
16. Curt Moreck and Thomas Wehrling, both quoted in Ibid., 564, 721.
17. Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: Die Verfolgung von
Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1990),
82; Manfred Herzer, ‘Hinweise auf das schwule Berlin in der Nazizeit,’ in
Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin, 1850–1950, ed. Michael
Bollé (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1992), 44–7.
216 Notes
18. Zweiter Runderlaß des Preußischen Ministers des Innern, February 23,1933,
quoted in Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit: Dokumente einer Diskriminierung
und Verfolgung, ed. Günter Grau (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch,
1993), 57.
19. Quoted in Karl-Heinz Steinle, Der Literarische Salon bei Richard Schultz
(Berlin: Schwulen Museum, 2002), 48.
20. Hans-Georg Stümke, ‘Vom “unausgeglichenen Geschlechtshaushalt”: Zur
Verfolgung Homosexueller,’ in Verachtet, Verfolgt, Vernichtet: Zu den ‘vergesse-
nen’ Opfern des NS-Regimes, ed. Projektgruppe für die vergessenen Opfer des
NS-Regimes (Hamburg: VSA, 1988), 54; Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem
Hakenkreuz, 100–10, 122–4.
21. Andreas Pretzel, ‘ “Als Homosexueller in Erscheinung getreten”: Anzeigen
und Denunziationen,’ in Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafen:
Homosexuellenverfolgung in Berlin, 1933–1945, ed. Andreas Pretzel und
Gabriele Roßbach (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2001), 18–42; Frank Sparing,
‘. . . wegen Vergehen nach §175 verhaftet’: Die Verfolgung der Düsseldorfer
Homosexuellen während des Nationalsozialismus (Düsseldorf: Grupello, 1997),
128–32.
22. Geoffrey Giles, ‘ “The Unkindest Cut of All”: Castration, Homosexuality
and Nazi Justice,’ Journal of Contemporary History 27 (January 1992),
41–61.
23. Erik Jensen, ‘The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness: Gays, Lesbians,
and the Memory of Nazi Persecution,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 11
(January/April 2002), 344, n. 122.
24. Carola Gerlach, ‘Außerdem habe ich dort mit meinem Freund getanzt,’ in
Pretzel and Rossbach, Wegen der zu erwartenden hohen Strafe, 305–32.
25. Hoffschildt, Olivia, 92.
26. Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 132–3.
27. Christian Schulz, Paragraph 175. (abgewickelt) Homosexualität und Strafrecht
im Nachkriegsdeutschland: Rechtsprechung, juristische Diskussion und Reformen
seit 1945 (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1994), 11.
28. Mario Kramp and Martin Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der
Bundesrepublik,’ in Balser et al., Himmel und Hölle, 125–6.
29. Jakob Kron, ‘Hamburger Erinnerungen und Neues Leben blüht aus den
Ruinen,’ in Hamburg von hinten 84/85: Ein Lese- und Reisebuch für Schwule,
Gays und andere Freunde 84/84, ed. Ernst Meibeck (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder,
1984), 9–16.
30. Albrecht M. (pseudonym), unpublished transcript of interview with
Arbeitskreis schwule Geschichte Hamburg, July 22, 1992, Hamburg, 17.
31. Christian de Nuys-Henkelmann, ‘Wenn die rote Sonne abends im Meer
versinkt. . .’: Die Sexualmoral der fünfziger Jahre,’ in Sexualmoral und
Zeitgeist im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Anja Bagel-Bohlan and Michael
Salewski (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1990), 111.
32. For a more general discussion of the relatively free discussion of sexual-
ity in the postwar years, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and
Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University, 2005), 64–72.
33. Konrad L. (pseudonym), unpublished transcript of interview with
Arbeitskreis schwule Geschichte Hamburg, June 16, 1994, Hamburg, 8.
Notes 217
34. Dennis Bark and David Gress, From Shadow to Substance, 1945–1963, vol. 1
of A History of West Germany (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 112.
35. Ibid., 252.
36. Heide Fehrenbach, ‘The Fight for the “Christian West”: German Film Con-
trol, the Churches, and the Reconstruction of Civil Society in the Early
Bonn Republic,’ German Studies Review 14 (1991), 39–63.
37. Martin Greschat, ‘Kirche und Öffentlichkeit in der deutschen Nachkrieg-
szeit,’ in Kirchen in der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Georg Kretschmar and Klaus
Scholder (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979), 100–24.
38. Fehrenbach, ‘The Fight for the “Christian West.” ’
39. For more on the importance of a ‘selective memory’ for the postwar order,
see Robert Moeller, ‘Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West
German Pasts in the 1950s,’ in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 99.
40. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 178.
41. Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 73–7, 103.
42. Eric Wietz, ‘The Ever-Present Other: Communism in the Making of West
Germany,’ in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 219–32.
43. Schissler, ‘ “Normalization” as Project,’ 361.
44. For more on the 1957 reform of the family law, see Heineman, What
Difference Does a Husband Make?: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and
Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California, 1999), 148. For the
hefty debates leading up to this reform, see Moeller, Protecting Mother-
hood. The prevalent idea that marital romance and companionship required
female ‘surrender’ is discussed in Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 87–8.
45. On the male role of breadwinner in the 1950s, see Moeller, Protecting Moth-
erhood; and Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make?, 150. For
the importance of the home as a site of consumer capitalism, see Victoria
de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th-Century Europe
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2005), 438–53.
46. For the ideological role of the nuclear family in the United States, see
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic, 1988). For the general significance of communism for
postwar West Germany, see Wietz, ‘The Ever-Present Other: Communism
in the Making of West Germany.’
47. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 78.
48. Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der Bundesrepub-
lick,’ 127.
49. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 78–9.
50. Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 101.
51. Ibid., 101–28.
52. Wolfgang Voigt, ‘Geschichte der Schwulen in Hamburg,’ in Hamburg ahoi!
Der schwule Lotse durch die Hansestadt, ed. Wolfgang Voigt and Klaus
Weinreich (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1982), 34; Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 92–3.
53. Schultz, Paragraph 175, 8, 12; Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 133.
54. Quoted in Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 94.
55. In comparison, Weimar convictions had peaked at 1019 in 1925, and Nazi
convictions had reached a high of 8,177 in 1938. See Rainer Hoffschildt,
‘140.000 Verurteilungen nach “§175,” ’ Invertito 4 (2002), 140–9.
218 Notes
56. For the modernization of Berlin’s police procedure at the end

of the nineteenth century, see Dobler, Zwischen Duldungspolitik und
Verbrechensbekämpfung, 145–76.
57. Hans G., interview by author, June 24, 1999, Hamburg, minidisc recording
in author’s possession.
58. Michael Schön, ‘Sitte und Sittlichkeit: Schwule und Polizei in den
Anfangsjahren der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,’ in Schwule, Lesben, Polizei:
Von Zwangsverhältnis zur Zweckehe, ed. Jens Dobler (Berlin: R. Winkel,
1996), 85.
59. Article from March 31, 1951, reprinted in Der Weg 7 (June 1957), 180.
60. ‘Verbrechen in Zweilicht,’ reprinted in Humanitas 2 (May 1954), 165.
61. Schön, ‘Einsatz für die Sittlichkeit,’ 160.
62. Letter aus Deutschland, Der Kreis 18 (August 1950), 23–4.
63. Colon, ‘Polizist als Lockspitzel. Polizeistaatsmethoden in München,’ Freond
Nr. 16 (1952), 26.
64. Ibid., 26.
65. Amtsgericht Tiergarten, 277 Ds 430/56. I want to thank Jennifer Evans for
allowing me to see her notes regarding a number of yet unarchived records
from the Amtsgericht Tiergarten.
66. The case is described in more detail in Michael Schön, ‘Einsatz für die
Sittlichkeit,’ in Balser et al., Himmel und Hölle, 162–3.
67. Eberhard Wieczorek, ‘Die Homosexualität im Spiegel eines Ermittlungsver-
fahrens,’ Kriminalistik 6 (1952), 154–7.
68. Konrad L., unpublished interview transcript, 18.
69. Jennifer Evans, ‘Reconstruction Sites: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Lim-
its of National Belonging in Divided Berlin, 1944–1958’ (PhD dissertation,
Binghamton State University of New York, 2001), 176–7.
70. Internationale Freundschaftloge, ‘Wir und der demokratische Staat,’ Die Insel
2 (March 1952), 4–5.
71. I use the number provided by Dieter Schiefelbein, which differs from the
number provided by the press. Der Spiegel reported that over 700 were
arrested, leading to 140 indictments. See ‘Eine Million Delikte,’ Der Spiegel
(November 29, 1950), 7.
72. Dieter Schiefelbein, ‘Wiederbeginn der juristischen Verfolgung homosex-
ueller Männer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Die Homosexuellenpro-
zesse in Frankfurt am Main 1950/1951,’ Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 5
(1995), 64.
73. ‘Prinzipielle Beobachtungen und Feststellungen,’ Der Kreis 18 (October
1950), 25.
74. David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1988), 397–433; Günter Grau, ‘Verfolgung, “Umerziehung”
oder Ausmerzung homosexueller Männer 1933 bis 1945,’ in Grau,
Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit, 29–34.
75. Günther Schmidt, ‘Homosexualität und Vorurteil,’ in Ergebnisse zur
Sexualmedizin: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Sexualforschung an der
Universität Hamburg, ed. Volkmar Sigusch (Cologne: Wissenschafts,
1972), 112.
76. Hans Giese, ‘Therapie der Homosexualität,’ Therapiewoche 6 (1955), 86.
77. Christian M., interview with author.
Notes 219
78. Michael Ruse, Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Oxford and New York:
Basil Blackwell, 1988), 84–129.
79. Walter Bräutigam, ‘Körperliche Faktoren bei der sexuellen Partnerwahl und
ihre Bedeutung für die Homosexualität,’ in Homosexualität oder Politik mit
dem §175, ed. Hans Giese (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), 53–74.
80. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, ‘Die Frage der Erblichkeit der Homophilie’
in Probleme der Homophilie in medizinischer, theologischer und juristischer Sicht,
ed. Theodore Bovet (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1965), 79–87. See also Barbara
Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese’ (PhD dissertation, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe Universität, 1988), 58–62.
81. Franz Kallmann, ‘Comparative Twin Study on the Genetic Aspects of Male
Homosexuality,’ The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 115 (1952),
283–98. For a discussion of Kallmann’s study which, unfortunately, mis-
reads his conclusions, see Allen, ‘The Double-Edged Sword of Genetic
Determinism,’ 246–50.
82. Peter von Rönn, ‘Die Homosexualitätsentwürfe von Hans Giese und der
lange Schatten von Hans Bürger-Prinz,’ Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 13
(2000), 277–310.
83. Hans Bürger-Prinz, ‘Gedanken zum Problem der Homosexualität,’
Monatsschrift für Kriminalbiologie und Strafrechtsreform 30 (1939), 433–7.
84. For a general discussion of ‘adaptational analysis,’ see Ruse, Homosexuality,
45–62.
85. Abram Kardiner, Sex and Morality (Indianapolis, Indiana, and New York:
Charter, 1954), 160–92.
86. Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Göring Institute
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1985).
87. Alexander Mitscherlich, Ein Leben für die Psychoanalyse: Anmerkungen zu
meiner Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980).
88. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, 428–9.
89. Irving Bieber, ‘Clinical Aspects of Male Homosexuality,’ in Sexual Inversion:
The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality, ed. Judd Marmor (New York: Basic,
1965), 250–1.
90. See, for example, Kurt Freund, Die Homosexualität beim Mann, 2nd edn
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1965), 205.
91. Machiel Zeegers, ‘Die Sicht des Psychiaters,’ in Der homosexuelle Nächste, ed.
Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Hamburg: Fursche, 1963), 166.
92. Helmut Thomä, ‘Zur Psychoanalyse der männlichen Homosexualität,’ in
Homosexualität oder Politik mit dem §175, ed. Hans Giese (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1967), 85.
93. Friedrich Wilhelm Doucet, Homosexualität (Munich: Lichtenberg, 1967),
177–81.
94. Franz, B. (pseudonym), unpublished transcript of interview with Arbeitskreis
schwule Geschichte Hamburg, July 23, 1992, Hamburg, 18–19.
95. Ibid., 9.
96. Walter Bräutigam, Formen der Homosexualität: Erscheinungsweisen, Ursachen,
Behandlung, Rechtsprechung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1967), 5.
97. Hans Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke,
1958), 235–56.
98. Bovet, Sinnerfülltes Anders-Sein, 37.
220 Notes
99. Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt, 236.

100. Herbert Grigat, ‘Das Erscheinungsbild der Homosexualität im Bezirk des
Oberlandesgerichts Hamburg im Jahre 1952’ (PhD dissertation, University
of Hamburg, 1955), 100.
101. See, for example, W. Fischer, ‘Homosexualität im Lichte der modernen
Psychologie,’ Der Weg 2 (October 1952), 24–5.
102. For a hint of this, see the inquiry sent to Die Freunde 1 (August 1951), 30.
One can also see clearly this appeal through the following article on youth-
ful sexuality: Dr. med. Hagen Hartmann, ‘Jugendliche Homoeroten in der
ärtzlichen Sprechstunde,’ Humanitas 2 (September 1954), 286–7.
103. Christian M., interview with author. See also Foucault, A History of Sexuality:
An Introduction, 57–67.
104. Hans Schmidt, ‘Die Angst verband uns: Frankfurt in den fünfziger Jahren,’
in Keine Zeit für gute Freunde: Homosexuelle in Deutschland 1933–1969, ed.
Joachim S. Hohmann (Berlin: Foerster, 1982), 148.
105. Some of the attractions of psychoanalytic theory are suggested in Edward
Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 145–89.
106. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (New York and London:
W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 500–24.
107. Dieter S., interview with author.
108. For a discussion of the Leftist attempt to use the homosexuality of Röhm to
discredit the Nazi party, see Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 87–91;
and Alexander Zinn, ‘ “Die Bewegung der Homosexuellen”: Die soziale
Konstruktion des homosexuellen Nationalsozialisten im antifaschistischen
Exil,’ in Die Linke und das Laster: Schwule Emanzipation und linke Vorurteile,
ed. Detlev Grumbach (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Skript, 1995).
109. Albrecht M., unpublished interview transcript, 8.
110. Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 115.
111. L. D. Classen von Neudegg, ‘Aus meinem Tagebuch 1939–1945: KZ
Oranienburg,’ Humanitas. Monatszeitschrift für Menschlichkeit und Kultur 2
(May 1954), 163–4.
112. Akantha, ‘Berlin tanzt!,’ Der Kreis 17 (September 1949), 22.
113. Some examples are provided in Volker Janssen, ed., Der Weg zu Freundschaft
und Toleranz: Männliche Homosexualität in den 50er Jahren (Berlin: Rosa
Winkel, 1984), 8.
114. Th.Ha., Letter aus Deutschland, Der Kreis 18 (August 1950), 23–4.
115. L. D. Classen von Neudegg, ‘Die Dornenkrone. Ein Tatsachenbericht
aus der Strafkompanie Sachsenhausen,’ Humanitas. Monatszeitschrift
für Menschlichkeit und Kultur 2 (February 1954), 58; ‘Versuchsobjeckt
Mensch. Aus meinem Tagebuch 1939 bis 1945 (KZ Oranienburg),’
Humanitas 2 (July 1954); ‘Ecce homo—oder Tore zur Hölle. Aus meinem
KZ-Tagebuch,’ Humanitas 2 (December 1954), 359–60.
116. L. D. Classen von Neudegg, ‘Aus meinem KZ-Tagebuch,’ Humanitas.
Monatszeitschrift für Menschlichkeit und Kultur 3 (January 1955), 385.
117. Kron, ‘Hamburger Erinnerungen,’ 10.
118. See the film Paragraph 175, dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, USA,
1999. This documentary includes a several interviews with lesbian and gay
survivors of Nazism. They discuss some of their experiences after 1945.
Notes 221
119. Pierre Seel, I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual: A Memoir of Nazi Terror
(New York: Basic, 1995), 91.
120. Ibid., 96–9.
121. Andreas Sternweiler, ed., Und alles wegen der Jungs: Pfadfinderführer und KZ-
Häftling Heinz Dormer, Lebensgeschichten (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1994), 150.
122. Hans-Georg Stümke, ‘Wiedergutmachung an homosexuellen NS-Opfern,’
in Nationalsozialistischer Terror gegen Homosexuelle: Verdrängst und ungesühnt,
ed. Burkhard Jellonek and Rüdiger Lautmann (Paderborn: Ferdinand
Schöningh, 2002), 330–31.
123. Andreas K. (pseudonym), unpublished transcript of interview with
Arbeitskreis schwule Geschichte Hamburg, 22 July 1992, Hamburg, 17.
124. Sternweiler, Und alles wegen der Jungs, 153–4.
125. Trumbach, ‘The Birth of the Queen’; John C. Fout, ‘Sexual Politics
in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and
Homophobia,’ in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of
Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1992), 259–92.
126. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement, 43–54; Claudia Bruns,
‘The Politics of Masculinity in the (Homo-)Sexual Discourse (1880 to 1920),’
German History 23 (2005), 306–20.
127. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the
United States (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 2002), 2–4.
128. Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin, Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male (Philadelphia and London: W. B. Saunders and Company,
1948), 650.
129. Peter von Rönn, ‘Politische und psychiatrische Homosexualitätskonstruktion
im NS-Staat. Teil I: Die politische Genese des Homosexuellen als
Staatsfeind,’ Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 11 (1998), 99–129.
130. Rudolf Klare, Homosexualität und Strafrecht (Hamburg: Hanseatische
Verlagsanstalt, 1937), 118.
132. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America, 67.
133. ‘Clifton Webb,’ GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, & Queer Culture (http://www.glbtq.com/arts/webb_c.html).
134. For more on Clifton Webb, see Vitto Russo, The Celluloid Closet:
Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. edn (New York: Harper and Row, 1987),
45–6.
135. Ibid., 94.
136. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989).
137. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America, 64.
138. Ibid., 62.
139. Theresa Webb and Nick Browne, ‘The Big Impossible: Action Adventure’s
Appeal to Adolescent Boys,’ in New Hollywood Violence, ed. Steven Jay
Schneider (Manchester: Manchester University, 2004), 96.
140. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America, 61–2.
141. Christopher Castiglia, ‘Rebel without a Closet: Homosexuality and
Hollywood,’ Critical Texts 5 (1988), 31–5.
142. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 112.
222 Notes
143. As Russo notes, though, this did not stop ‘a generation of gay men who
felt the sharp accusations of Tom Lee’s tormentors not as shy heterosexuals
but as terrified homosexuals.’ For them, the film gave a poignant portrayal
of the social pressures they felt to conform to the masculine, heterosexual
norm. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, 114–15.
144. For two interpretations of this film, see Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in
Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995), 195–202; and Alison Guenther-
Pal, ‘Sexual Reorientations: Homosexuality vs. the Postwar German Man in
Veit Harlan’s Different from You and Me,’ in Light Motives: German Popu-
lar Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit,
Michigan: Wayne State University, 2003), 148–70.
145. ‘Ein überflüssiger Film: “Anders als du und ich,” ’ Die Frankfurter Allgemeine
( November 6, 1957).
146. Karl Saller, Zivilisation und Sexualität (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1956).
147. Staatsarchiv Hamburg (hereafter StAHH), Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung
16 January 1981, 355-00.02-1 Band 1, ‘Aufgabe und Ziel der Arbeitsgemein-
schaft Jugendpflege.’
148. 350 Jahre Jugendwohlfahrt in Hamburg: Vom Waisenhauskollegium zur
Jugendbehörde (Hamburg: Jugendbehörde, 1955), 56.
149. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356-21.11 Band 1,
Dr. Klöckner, ‘Das Gesetz zum Schutz der Jugend in der Öffentlichkeit und
die sich daraus ergebenden Aufgaben der Bezirksarbeitskreise,’ Niederschrift
über die 4. Sitzung des Bezirksarbeitskreise für Jugendschutz Hamburg–
Mitte, 16 March 1957.
150. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 35-21.11 Band 1,
Dr. Fromber, ‘Der Jugendschutz heute,’ Niederschrift über die 1. Sitzung des
Bezirksarbeitskreises für Jugendschutz Hamburg-Mitte, 11 December 1956.
151. For many examples, see Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany,
92–117; and Frank Biess, ‘Survivors of Totalitarianism: Returning POWs and
the Reconstruction of Masculine Citizenship in West Germany, 1945–1955,’
in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 57–82.
152. The most prominent of the sociological works making this argument
was Gerhard Wurzbacher’s Leitbilder gegenwärtigen deutschen Familienlebens:
Methoden, Ergebnisse und sozialpädogogischen Folgerungen einer soziol-
ogischen Analyse von 164 Familienmonographien (Stuttgart: Ferdinand
Enke, 1954).
153. For the popularity of David Riesman in Germany, see Axel Schildt, Moderne
Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er
Jahre (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1995), 330.
154. Helmut Schelsky, Soziologie der Sexualität: Über die Beziehungen zwischen
Geschlecht, Moral und Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), 76.
155. Ibid., 82.
156. Walter Faber, Liebe, Sex und Sünde: Das Hausbuch der Liebe und Ehe (Schmiden
bei Stuttgart: Freyja, 1965), 68.
157. For example, see Theodore Bovet, Die Ehe, das Geheimnis ist Groß: Ein
Handbuch für Eheleute und ihre Berater (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1968), 63.
158. The first description is Elisabeth Selbert’s, a lawyer and Social Democratic
representative who helped to draw up the Federal Republic’s Basic Law
Notes 223
(Grundgesetz). She is quoted in Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 61. The

second description is the anonymous church pastor’s, who is the subject
of Bovet, Sinnerfülltes Anders-Sein, 15.
159. Bovet, Die Ehe, das Geheimnis ist Groß, 24.
160. George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1996), 154–80.
161. May, Homeward Bound; Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America.
162. Till van Rahden, ‘Demokratie und väterlich Autorität: Das Karlsruhe
‘Stichentscheid’-Urteil von 1959 in der politischen Kultur der frühen
Bundesrepublik,’ Zeithistorische Forschungen 2 (2005), 7 (http://www.
zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Rahden-2-2005).
163. Heide Fehrenbach, ‘Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remascu-
linization,’ Signs 24 (1998), 107–27.
164. Uta Poiger, ‘A New “Western” Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in
the 1950s,’ Signs 24 (1998), 147–62.
165. Thomas Grotum, Die Halbstarken: Zur Geschichte einer Jugendkultur der 50er
Jahre (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1994), 196, 202–3; Uta Poiger, Jazz,
Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and America Culture in a Divided Germany
(Berkeley: University of California, 2000), 71–105.
166. For reactions to Kinsey in the United States, see D’Emilio, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities, 40–9.
167. Jennifer Terry, ‘The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant
Subjectivity,’ in Science and Homosexuality, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York
and London: Routledge, 1997), 274.
168. Christian M., interview with author.
169. Theodore Bovet, Von Mann zu Mann: Eine Einführung ins Reifealter für junge
Männer (Zürich: Paul Haupt Bern, 1962), 42–3.
170. StAHH, Oberschulbehörde VI, 1333, Otto Krieger, Klarheit: Gespräche mit
Jungen und Mädchen über die Geschlechtlichkeit, 1967.
171. Gerhard Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg’ (PhD disser-
tation, Universität Hamburg, 1955), 34.
172. The forward to Saller, Zivilisation und Sexualität.
173. Walter Thorun, Jürgen Beuche, Gisela Jacob, and Harald Weber,
eds, Öffentliche Jugendhilfe im Hamburg: Vier Jahrzehnte Aufbau und
Entwicklung nach 1945 (Hamburg: Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte,
1993), 365.
174. Walter Becker, Homosexualität und Jugendschutz (Hamm: Hoheneck,
1961), 11.
175. Ibid.
176. Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 118–22.
177. Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 160–1.
178. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, July 22, 1981, Lagebericht der
Oberfürsorgerinnen, 1962.
179. Richard Gatzweiler, Das dritte Geschlecht: Um die Strafbarkeit der
Homosexualität (Cologne: Volkswartbund, 1951), 29.
180. Ibid., 29.
181. Ibid., 27–8.
182. Ibid., 30.
183. Johnson, The Lavendar Scare.
224 Notes
184. Susanne zur Nieden, ‘Homophobie und Staatsräson,’ in Homosexualität und

Staatsräson: Männlichkeit, Homophobie und Politik in Deutschland, 1900–1945,
ed. Susanne zur Nieden (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2005), 17–51.
185. Hans Langemann, ‘Homosexualität und Staatsgefährdung,’ Kriminalistik 9
(1955), 88–90.
3 The Homophile Movement

1. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, 73–5.
2. Manfred Herzer, ‘Die Gemeinschaft der Eigenen,’ in Goodbye to Berlin? 100
Jahre Schwulenbewegung, ed. Schwules Museum (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1997),
89–94.
3. Andreas Sternweiler, ‘Die Freundschaftsbünde–eine Massenbewegung,’ in
Schwules Museum, Goodbye to Berlin, 95–104; and Glenn Ramsey, ‘The
Rites of Artgenossen: Contesting Homosexual Political Culture in Weimar
Germany,’ The Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008), 85–109.
4. Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, 308.
5. Karl-Heinz Steinle, ‘Homophile Deutschland—West und Ost,’ in Schwules
Museum, Goodbye to Berlin, 195.
6. Ralf Dose, ‘The World League for Sexual Reform: Some Possible
Approaches,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003), 1–15; and Nicholas
Matte, ‘International Sex Reform and Sexology in Europe,’ Canadian Bulletin
of Medical History 22 (2005), 253–70.
7. Karl-Heinz Steinle, Der Kreis: Mitglieder, Künstler, Autoren (Berlin: Rosa
Winkel), 6–13.
8. Ibid., 7.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. Johannes Werres, ‘Als Aktivist der ersten Stunde: Meine Begegnung mit
homosexuellen Gruppen und Zeitschriften nach 1945,’ Capri 3 (1990), 34.
11. For the coverage of international matters in Der Kreis, see Hubert Kennedy,
The Ideal Gay Man: The Story of Der Kreis (New York: Hawthorn, 2000).
12. Raimund Wolfert, ‘Skandinavien: Grundsteinlegung und Konsolidierung,’
in Schwules Museum, Goodbye to Berlin?, 233–7.
13. Jackson, Living in Arcadia.
14. The Mattachine Society Today, quoted in D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual
Communities, 81.
15. Miller, Out of the Past, 337; D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities,
58–71, 81–4; Manfred Herzer, ‘Professor Kinsey und die Gays von Los
Angeles,’ in Schwules Museum, Goodbye to Berlin?, 220–2.
16. Ramsey, ‘The Rites of Artgenossen,’ 96–102.
17. Theodore Bovet, Probleme der Homophilie in medizenischer, theologischer und
juristischer Sicht (Tübingen: Katzmann, 1965); D.Phil. Hans Otto Heedfeld,
‘Homosexualität, Inversion, Homoerotik und Homophile,’ Humanitas:
Monatszeitschrift für Menschlichkeit und Kultur 2 (December 1954), 373.
18. Kennedy, The Ideal Gay Man, 74.
19. Gert Hekma, ‘Amsterdam,’ in Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600, ed.
David Higgs (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 79–80.
20. Ibid., 82–3.
Notes 225
21. Jackson, Living in Arcadia, 69.

22. Kennedy, Der Kreis, 141.
23. Steinle, ‘Homophiles Deutschland—West und Ost,’ 203.
24. Steinle, ‘Homophiles Deutschland—West und Ost,’ 194; ‘International
Kongreß für sexuelle Gleichberechtigung,’ reprinted in Janssen, Der Weg
zu Freundschaft und Toleranz, 30.
25. Janssen, Der Weg zu Freundschaft und Toleranz, 32; Andreas Pretzel,
Berlin–’Vorposten im Kampf für die Gleichberechtigung der Homoeroten’: Die
Geschichte der Gesellschaft für Reform des Sexualrechts (Berlin: Rosa Winkel,
2001), 26.
26. Schmidt, ‘Die Angst verband uns,’ 149.
27. For a weekly program of the Association for a Humane Way of Life from Die
Gefährten, see Janssen, Der Weg zu Freundschaft und Toleranz, 25.
28. Schmidt, ‘Die Angst verband uns,’ 150.
29. Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese,’ 5–25. This section on Giese owes a
great debt to Zeh’s dissertation, which provides the clearest portrait to date
of this scientist and reformer.
30. Hans Giese, ‘Ein wesentlicher Aufruf,’ Der Kreis 17 (October 1949), 7–8.
31. Rönn, ‘Die Homosexualitätsentwürfe von Hans Giese,’ 288.
32. Hans Giese, ‘Das homosexuelle Syndrom,’ in Psychopathologie der Sexualität,
ed. Hans Giese and Victor Erich von Gebsattel (Stuttgart: Ferdinand
Enke, 1962), 381; and Giese, ‘Das Bild von außen,’ in ibid., 310–11.
Peter von Rönn even notes some specific phrases and terminology
that Giese takes verbatim from Bürger-Prinz’s work. See Rönn, ‘Die
Homosexualitätsentwürfe von Hans Giese und der lange Schatten von Hans
Bürger-Prinz,’ 290–1.
33. Rönn, ‘Die Homosexualitätsentwürfe von Hans Giese und der lange
Schatten von Hans Bürger-Prinz.’
34. Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese,’ 10, 13.
35. Rönn, ‘Die Homosexualitätsentwürfe von Hans Giese.’
36. Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt, 1–6.
37. This distinction is discussed in Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese,’ 24,
30–1.
38. Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt, 218–27.
39. Ibid.
40. Giese, ‘Moral in Regelwidrigen,’ in Giese, Mensch, Geschlecht, Gesellschaft,
vol. 2, 376.
41. Ibid., 377.
42. Giese, ‘Die Rolle der Sucht,’ in Giese, Mensch, Geschlecht, Gesellschaft,
vol. 2, 335.
43. Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt, 230.
44. Ibid., 231.
45. Hermann Weber, ‘Zum Geleit,’ in Jannsen, Der Weg zu Freundschaft und
Toleranz, 22–3.
46. Pretzel, Berlin, 7–8.
47. Ibid., 8.
48. Harald Lützenkirchen, ‘Kurt Hillers Bemühungen um ein ‘Logokratie‘ nach
1945,’ in Kurt Hiller: Ein Leben in Hamburg nach Jahren des Exils, ed. Rolf von
Bockel (Hamburg: Bonmann and von Bockel, 1990), 21–7.
226 Notes
49. Manfred Herzer, ‘Helmut Schmidt und die Flutkatastrophe: Das schwule
Hamburg 1950–1970,’ in Hamburg von hinten: Ein Lese- und Reisebuch
für Schwule, Gays und andere Freunde, ed. Ernst Meibeck (Berlin: Bruno
Gmünder, 1982), 72.
50. Quoted in Ibid., 72.
51. Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese,’ 51–5.
52. Ibid., 58–65.
53. Ibid., 50–1.
54. Pretzel, Berlin, 11.
55. Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter LAB), B Rep 020, 1328, 1490, Bl. 2.
57. Ibid., 16–17.
58. LAB, B Rep 020, 1328, 1490, Bl. 3.
60. Sternweiler, ‘Die Freundschaftsbünde,’ 98–9.
61. Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 89–90.
62. Herzer, ‘Helmut Schmidt und die Flutkatastrophe,’ 66.
63. Die Freunde 1 (May 1951), 29.
64. Die Freunde 1 (June 1951), 22; Die Freunde 1 (October 1951), 24.
65. Die Freunde (May 1951), 29, Vol. 1.
66. Ibid.
67. This biography is taken from Erwin Haarmann, ‘Charles Grieger: Mensch
und Künstler,’ Hellas 2 (April 1954), 132–6.
69. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, November 4, 1983, 1.8-1214 (Die
Freunde), Landesverwaltungsgericht Hamburg, Aktenzeichen VI b VG. Nr.
25/52, Urteil in der Verwaltungsstreitsache des Verlages Charles Grieger
gegen die Oberpostdirection Hamburg, 23 June 1952.
70. Bundarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK), B 141, 4677, Letter from Regierungs-
direktor Dr. Blome of the Landesjustizverwaltung Hamburg to the
Bundesminister der Justiz betr. Homosexuelle Zeitschriften, February 23,
1953.
71. Unfortunately, Hamburg’s Staatsanwaltschaft did not allow me to see
the relevant files concerning this case. The decision was luckily
quoted in a later decision found in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg. StAHH,
Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, November 4, 1983, 1.8–1214 (Die Freunde),
Landesverwaltungsgericht Hamburg, Aktenzeichen VI b VG. Nr. 25/52,
Urteil in der Verwaltungsstreitsache des Verlages Charles Grieger gegen die
Oberpostdirektion Hamburg, June 23, 1952.
72. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung 4 November 1983, 1.8–1214
(Die Freunde), Letter from Robert Schilling to Oberregierungsrat, Bonn,
January 21, 1952.
73. Letter from ein Freund aus Greifswald, Die Freunde 2 (January 1952), 32.
74. Letter from ein Freund aus Saarbrücken, Die Freunde 2 (January 1952), 32.
75. Letter from ein Freund aus München, Die Freunde 1 (November 1951), 26.
76. BAK B 141, 26574 Band 1, Letter from Dr. Fr. Franz Reinhard to the
Bundesminister der Justiz, Hamburg-Altona, October 16, 1951.
77. BAK B 141, 4679, Anlage zur Frage der Zuständigkiet des Bundes zum Erlaß
eines Gesetzes über jugendgefährdende Schriften, undated.
Notes 227
78. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, November 4, 1983, 1.8–1214 (Die

Freunde), Letter from Oberpostdirektion and die Hansestadt Hamburg,
Jugendbehörde Rechtsabteilung, January 10, 1952.
79. Ibid.
Freunde), Abschrift an das Landesverwaltungsgericht in Sachen Verlag
Charles Grieger & Co. vs. Deutsche Bundespost, Hamburg, March 22, 1952.
Freunde), Abschrift an das Landesverwaltungsgericht Hamburg, Klage des
Verlages Charles Grieger & Co., Rechtsanwalt Dr. Fr. Franz Reinhard,
January 3, 1952.
Freunde), Gutachten prepared by the Volkswartbund, January 18, 1952.
83. Letter from Heimleiter Stöwer to Oberregierungsrat Harder, February 2,
1952.
Freunde), Landesverwaltungsgericht Hamburg, Aktenzeichen VI b VG. Nr.
25/52, Urteil in der Verwaltungsstreitsache des Verlages Charles Grieger
gegen die Oberpostdirection Hamburg, June 23, 1952.
85. Letter from Johannes Dörrast, Freond 13 (1952), 28.
86. Ulli Steinbacher, ‘Schwule Spuren in Bremen,’ 28–30; Die Insel 2 (August
1952), 28.
87. ‘Unser Weg: Aufgaben und Ziele des “Weltbundes für Menschenrechte”
angeschlossen der ‘Internationale Freundschaftsloge,‘ Die Insel 2 (July
1952), 5.
88. LAB, B Rep 020, 1328, 1170, Bl. 1.
89. Der Weg 2 (November 1952), 31.
90. Der Weg 3 (April 1953), 29.
92. Steinbacher, ‘Schwule Spuren in Bremen,’ 30.
94. Werres, ‘Alles zog sich ins Ghetto zurück,’ 86.
95. Ibid., 84.
96. Report from Gessellschaft für Menschenrechte, Humanitas 2 (May 1954),
173. See also Pretzel, Berlin, 26; and Herzer, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen,’ in
Berlin von hinten: Lese- und Reisebuch für Schwule, Gays und andere Freunde
1983/84, ed. Bruno Gmünder and Christian von Maltzahn (Berlin: Bruno
Gmünder, 1983), 30.
98. Hoffschildt, Olivia, 153–5.
99. ‘Bilanz über ein Jahr Arbeit der GfM,’ Humanitas 2 (November 1954), 346.
101. Ibid., 83–4.
102. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 112.
103. Ibid., 117–23.
104. Letter from Berthold X., Vox Nr. 3 (April 1, 1953), 133.
105. Rudolf Neumann, ‘Das Inserat,’ Der Weg 2 (December 1952), 8–10.
106. Letter from ein sehr junger Leser, Die Insel: Monatsblätter für Freundschaft
und Toleranz 2 (April 1952), 34.
228 Notes
107. BAK, B 153, 317, Entschließung der Tagung der Volkswartbund in Köln-
Hohenlind, February 13, 1951.
108. BAK, B 141, 4677, Letter from Dr. Calmes to Bundesminister der Justiz betr.
Homosexuelle Zeitschriften, Köln-Kiettenberg, October 11, 1952.
109. Humanitas 2, Nr. 6 (June 1954), 194–205; Humanitas 2, Nr. 7 (July 1954),
226–37; and Humanitas 2, Nr. 8 (August 1954), 253–64. The essay has
been republished: Batho Lasterstein, Strichjunge Karl: Ein kriminalistischer
Tatsachenbericht (Berlin: Janssen, 1994).
110. Ibid., 66.
111. Ibid., 15.
112. Quoted in Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der
Bundesrepublik,’ 138.
113. Kramp und Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der Bundesrepublik,’
136–8; Hergemöller, Mann für Mann: Biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte
von Freundesliebe und Mann-Männlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum
(Hamburg: Männerschwarm Skript, 1998), 459–60.
114. See Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, The Riddle of ‘Man-Manly’ Love, vol. 1 (Buffalo,
New York: Prometheus, 1994), 286–8; Hirschfeld, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht,
113–37.
115. Ulrichs, The Riddle of ‘Man-Manly’ Love, vol. 1, 285; vol. 2, 416–8, 612. Sui-
cide was the major theme of the 1919 film Anders als die Andern produced
with the help of Hirschfeld.
116. Manfred Herzer, ‘Helmut Schmidt und die Flutkatastrophe: Das schwule
Hamburg, 1950–1970,’ in Meibeck, Hamburg von hinten 82,
75–6.
117. Rolf Italiaander, Das Recht auf sich selbst (Hamburg: Odysseus, 1982).
118. See Die Freunde 1 (October 1951), 22.
119. This letter was reprinted in Die Freunde 1 (October 1951), 22.
120. Italiaander, Das Recht auf sich selbst, 26.
121. Ibid., 29.
122. Ibid., 32.
123. Willem Melching, ‘ “A New Morality”: Left-Wing Intellectuals on Sexuality
in Weimar Germany,’ Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990), 71.
124. ‘ “Fünflinge” in den Kammerspielen: Zwischenbilanz des “Dramatischen
Kollegiums,” ’ Hamburger Echo (Hamburger-Stadt Ausgabe), 77 (3 April
1952).
125. ‘Und das Menschenrecht? Sechs junge Autoren dramatisieren Zeitkritik,’
Hamburger Morgenpost: Unabhängige Tageszeitung (April 4, 1952).
126. ‘Sind die Menschenrechte gültig? In den Kammerspielen suchten fünf
junge Autoren eine Antwort,’ Hamburger Abendblatt 5 (April 3, 1952).
127. ‘ “Fünflinge” in den Kammerspielen: Zwischenbilanz des “Dramatischen
Kollegiums,” ’ Hamburger Echo (Hamburger-Stadt Ausgabe) 77 (April 3,
1952).
128. Die Neue Zeitung: die Amerikanische Zeitung in Deutschland 8 (April 7, 1952).
129. ‘Im Kampf um das deutsche Theater,’ Hamburger Volkszeitung (April 4,
1952).
130. ‘ “Das Recht auf sich selbst” Zur Uraufführung des gleichnamigen
Kurzdramas in den Hamburger Kammerspielen,’ Freond Nr. 6 (June 1952),
5–9.
Notes 229
131. ‘ “Das Recht auf sich selbst” Zur Uraufführung des gleichnamigen
Kurzdramas in den Hamburger Kammerspielen,’ Freond Nr. 6 (June 1952),
5–9.
132. Dr. Fr. F. Reinhard, ‘Gleichhiet der Geschlechter? (Der 31. März 1953),’ Vox
(March 1, 1953), 70.
133. Akantha, ‘Neue wissenschaftliche Forschungsergebnisse über die Entstehung
der Homosexualität,’ Der Kreis 17 (November 1949), 5.
135. Manfred Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen,
und sozialistischen Sexologen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992), 8–10.
136. F. F. Wesely, ‘Homosexualität, Verbrechen und Öffentlichkeit,’ Die Insel 2
(February 1952), 3.
137. Jackson, Living in Arcadia, 113.
139. Ibid., 134–40.
140. Internationale Freundschaftloge, ‘Wir und der demokratische Staat,’ Die Insel
2 (March 1952), 4–5.
141. Johannes Dörrast, ‘Süss und ehrenvoll,’ Die Freunde: Monatsschrift für ideale
Freundschaft 2 (February 1952), 4–5.
142. Daniel Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach
(New York: Greenberg, 1951), 13–14. See also John D‘Emilio, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities, 33; Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 125–6.
143. See, for example, Der Kreis, 20, Nr. 9 (September 1952), 4.
144. Christian Graf, ‘Sexuelle Minderheit in Amerika,’ Vox, Nr. 4 (June 1,
1953), 158.
145. Verlag und Redaktion, ‘Was die Freunde wollen und was Sie nicht wollen,’
Die Freunde 1 (May 1951), 4.
146. Internationale Freundschaftloge, ‘Wir und der demokratische Staat,’ Die Insel:
Monatsblätter für Freundschaft und Toleranz 2 (March 1952), 4–5.
147. BAK, B 141, 4679, Begründung zum Gesetz betreffend jugendgefährdende
Shriften.
149. BAK B 141 4679, Begründung zum Gesetz über den Vertrieb jugendge-
fährdender Schriften.
150. BAK B 141 26586, Wolfgang Jäger, ‘Schon wieder Schwarze Listen?’
(Zum Gesetzentwurf gegen die Verbreitung jugendgefährdender Schriften),
Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Broadcasting), September
12, 1952.
151. BAK B 141 26586, ‘Schmutz and Schund,’ Die Zeit, September 25, 1952.
152. BAK B 141 26586, ‘Zuviel Zensur and zuwenig Rechtssicherheit,’ Die Zeit,
October 30, 1952.
153. Ibid.
156. Johannes Werres, ‘Als Aktivist der ersten Stunde: Meine Begegnung
mit homosexuellen Gruppen und Zeitschriften nach 1945,’ Capri 3
(1990), 44.
157. Meinhard B., Interview with author, June 17, 1999, Hamburg, minidisc
recording in author’s possession.
230 Notes

164. Robert Moeller, ‘The Homosexual Man is a “Man,” the Homosexual Woman
is a “Woman:” Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar West Germany,’ Journal
of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994), 522.
165. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood, 76–108, 181–4.
166. Moeller, ‘The Homosexual Man,’ 405–6.
167. Moeller, ‘The Homosexual Man,’ 395–429.
168. For excerpts, see Stümke and Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen: Homosexuelle
und ‘Gesundes Volksempfinden‘ von Auschwitz bis heute (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 460–71.
169. Ibid., 471, 473.
170. Der Weg 15, Nr. 9 (1965), 199.
4 Struggle over the Gay Scenes’ Boundaries

1. Chauncey, Gay New York, 195.
2. Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carrol
and Graf, 1998), 689, 696.
3. Ibid., 709.
4. Quoted in Ibid., 703.
5. Albrecht M., unpublished interview transcript, 20.
6. ‘Der Quicksilberspiegel,’ Der Ring 1, Nr. 1 (1955), 6.
7. Julia Sneeringer, ‘The Assembly Line of Joys,’ Central European History 42
(2009), 74.
8. Steven D. Stark, Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of the Band that Shook
Youth, Gender, and the World (New York: Harper, 2005), 82.
9. Philip Norman, Shout!: The Beatles and Their Generation, rev. edn (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2003), 87.
10. Sneeringer, ‘The Assembly Line of Joys,’ 80.
11. For the importance of the Mattachine Review in establishing the prominence
of San Francisco, see Meeker, Contacts Desired.
12. Andreas Sternweiler, Fotos sind mein Leben: Albrecht Becker, Lebensgeschich-
ten (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1993), 69.
13. Rolf B. Alexander, Prostitution in St. Pauli (Munich: Kindler, 1968), 24.
14. Angelika Ebbinghaus, Heidrun Kaupen-Haas, and Karl-Heinz Roth,
ed., Heilen und Vernichten im Mustergau Hamburg: Bevölkerungs- und
Gesundheitspolitik im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Konkret, 1984).
15. Whisnant, ‘Hamburg’s Gay Scene,’ 97–9.
16. StAHH, Behörde für Inneres, 1792, Letter of the Polizeipräsident betr.
Transvestiten-Unwesen, September 30, 1964.
17. Jürgen Müller, ‘Das Lokal am Abend: Subkultur im neuen Köln,’ in Balser
et al., Himmel und Hölle, 21.
18. Grigat, ‘Das Erscheinungsbild der Homosexualität,’ 87.
Notes 231
19. Hans G., interview with the author, June 24, 1999, Hamburg, minidisc
20. Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 57, 78.
21. StAHH, Polizeibehörde II, 562, Vierteljährliche Sittenbericht, January 5,
1954.
22. Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 1.
23. Quoted in Schön, ‘Einsatz für die Sittlichkeit,’ 155.
24. See, for example, Amtsgericht Tiergarten, Case 274 Ds 231/55.
25. Gesetz zum Schutze der Jugend in der Öffentlichkeit vom 4. December
1951, Bundesgesetzblatt I, Nr. 56 (1951), 936–7.
26. In Cologne, such a list was already drawn up in the mid-1950s. See Kramp,
‘Homosexuelle machen sich in Köln breit,’ 198. In Hamburg, reports from
patrolling officers reveal that they clearly had regular places that they vis-
ited in the second half of the 1950s, but the first actual list that can be
found in the archival material is from the 1960s. See StAHH, Jugendbehörde
II Ablieferung, January 16, 1981, 356-00.02 Bd 1, Vermerk betr. Übersicht
über jugendgefährdende Gaststätten, December 8, 1960.
27. Hans G., interview with the author, June 24, 1999, Hamburg, minidisc
28. See ‘Berlin: Belästigung durch die Polizei,’ Der Weg (October 1954),
356; and Manfred Herzer, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Das schwule
West-Berlin 1945–1970,’ in Gmünder and Maltzahn, Berlin von hinten
83/84, 32.
29. Erwin, ‘Die Freiheit der Persönlichkeit: Nächtliche Razzia auf Andersartige
im Berlin,’ Der Kreis 29 (February 1961), 2–5.
30. This article, from an unnamed newspaper out of West Berlin, is reprinted
in Humanitas 2 (May 1954), 163–4.
31. J. Paul de River, ‘Der Sexualverbrecher,’ Kriminalistik 4 (195), 249–52.
33. Hans G., interview with author. For more on Hamburg’s homosexual squad
and its difficulty in monitoring Hamburg’s scene, see Whisnant, ‘Hamburg’s
Gay Scene,’ 81–98.
34. In addition, a small number of men had sex in ruins near the main train
station and were therefore put into this category. Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen
der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 109.
35. Jürgen Müller, ‘Orte anonymer Lust: Klappen, Bädern, Trümmern und
Parks,’ in Balser et al., Himmel und Hölle, 41–2.
36. Ibid., 41.
37. LAB, B Rep 051, 1566, 11621, Bl. 5.
38. Peter Schult, ‘Anarchy in Germany,’ 76.
39. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356-10.05 Band
1, Aktenvermerk, 25 September 1946.
40. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356-21.11 Band
1, Vortrag über ‘Das Gesetz zum Schutz der Jugend in der Öffentlichkeit und
die sich daraus ergebenden Aufgaben der Bezirksarbeitskreise,’ Niederschrift
über die 4. Sitzung des Bezirksarbeitskreises für Jugendschutz Hamburg–
Mitte, March 16, 1957.
42. Schildt, Moderne Zeiten, 91.
232 Notes
43. Grigat, ‘Das Erscheinungsbild der Homosexualität,’ 47.

44. Jens Uhle, Jugendgewalt gegen Schwule: Eine Studie zu psychosozialen Faktoren
bei Tätern (Berlin: Verein psychosozialer Projekte, 1994), 46–85.
46. Norbert Schmidt-Relenberg, Hartmut Kärner, and Richard Pieper, Strichjun-
gen-Gespräche: Zur Soziologie jugendlicher Homosexuellen-Prostitution (Darm-
stadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1975), 185.
47. For more on the ritualized codes of communication between gay men,
see Chauncey, Gay New York, and Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade:
Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
1970).
48. Chauncey, Gay New York, 179–205. See also Wolfgang Theis and Andreas
Sternweiler, ‘Alltag im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,’ in Bollé,
Eldorado, 48–73.
50. Ibid., 104.
51. Schmidt-Relenberg, Kärner, and Pieper, Strichjungen-Gespräche, 185.
52. Heinz Winterberg, Die gleichgeschlechtliche Prostitution in der männlichen
Jugend und die Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Dipa, 1964), 45.
53. LAB, B Rep 051, 1687, 10099, 5, 16.
54. LAB, B Rep 051, 1004, 10685, 10.
55. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, November 11, 1992, 356–10.05–1
Band 1, Streifenbericht des Jugendschutztrupps, 22/23 October 1963.
57. Chauncey, Gay New York, 197; see also Humphreys, Tearoom Trade.
58. Dieter S, interview with author.
60. Florian Georg Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung 1969 bis 1996:
Eine Fallstudie über die zweite deutsche Schwulenbewegung (Bochum: Dieter
Winkler, 1999), 18.
61. Quoted in Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 66.
62. Ulrich Pieplow, ‘Die Hygiene der öffentliche Bedürfnisanstalten dargestellt
am Beispiel Hamburgs’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hamburg,
1949), 11.
63. Ibid., 11.
65. Wolfgang Voigt, ‘Geschichte der Schwulen in Hamburg,’ in Hamburg ahoi!:
Der schwule Lotse durch die Hansestadt, ed. Wolfgang Voigt and Klaus
Weinrich (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1982), 16.
66. Hans Goedke, ‘Hexenjagd in the Bad 50th oder Glück muss der Mensch
haben,’ in Meibeck, Hamburg von hinten 84/85, 18–19.
68. Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung, 18; Stephan Heiß and Albert
Knoll, ‘Übrigens kommt derlei im Hofbräuhaus fast jede Woche vor,’ in
München und Bayern von hinten, ed. Ralf Walden (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder,
1995), 18.
69. Jürgen Müller and Helge Schneberger, ‘Schwules Leben in Köln,’ in
‘Verführte’ Männer: Das Leben der Kölner Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich, ed.
Notes 233
Cornelia Limpricht, Jürgen Müller, and Nina Oxenius (Cologne: Volksblatt,

1991), 20–1; Müller, ‘Orte anonymer Lust,’ 43.
70. Heinz Birken, ‘Im Tiergarten,’ in Hohmann, Keine Zeit für gute Freunde,
127–8.
73. Hans G., interview with author.
74. Müller, ‘Orte anonymer Lust,’ 39.
78. Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung 1969 bis 1996, 18.
79. Müller, ‘Orte anonymer Lust,’ 40–1.
81. Grigat, ‘Das Erscheinungsbild der Homosexualität im Bezirk des
Oberlandesgerichts Hamburg im Jahre 1952,’ 86.
82. Die Freunde 1 (May 1951), 27.
83. Akantha, ‘Berlin tanzt!,’ Der Kreis 17 (September 1949), 8–9.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Helmut Bendt, ‘Wie schnell doch die Jahre enteilen. . .: Ein Knabe wird
zum Knabenlieber,’ in Gmünder and Maltzahn, Berlin von hinten: Lese- und
Reisebuch für Schwule, Gays und andere Freunde 83/84, 48–9.
88. LAB B Rep 020, 1328, 1418, Bl. 5.
89. Bendt, ‘Wie schnell doch die Jahre enteilen,’ 50.
90. Herzer, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen,’ 26–7.
91. Akantha, ‘Berlin tanzt!,’ 8.
92. Bendt, ‘Wie schnell doch die Jahre einteilen,’ 50–2.
93. Peter Schult, Besuche in Sackgassen: Aufzeichnungen eines homosexuellen
Anarchisten, 2nd rev. edn (Berlin: Foerster, 1982), 70.
94. Ibid., 70.
95. Dobler, Von anderen Ufern, 250.
96. Ibid., 251–2.
97. Ibid., 253.
98. Ibid., 234.
99. Ibid., 232.
100. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, I Am My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s Most Distinguished Transvestite, translated by Jean
Hollander (Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1995), 110.
101. Schramm, ‘Das Strichjungenwesen,’ 95.
102. Müller, ‘Das Lokal am Abend,’ 15.
103. For more information on the early scene in Frankfurt, see Schiefelbein,
‘Wiederbeginn der juristischen Verfolgung,’ 60.
104. Hoffschildt, Olivia, 141–9.
105. Die Freunde 1 (May 1951), 27.
107. Ibid., 68.
234 Notes

109. StAHH, Polizeibehörde II, 562, Zwischenbericht über Gaststätten ver-
schiedener Art und öffentliche Sittlichkeit, September 7, 1950; Kuhn, ‘Das
Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’ 68.
schiedener Art und öffentliche Sittlichkeit, May 2, 1950.
schiedener Art und öffentliche Sittlichkeit, June 6, 1950, and August 2,
1952.
112. ‘Der Quicksilberspiegel,’ Der Ring 1, Nr. 1, 6.
113. Die Insel: Monatsblätter für Freundschaft und Toleranz 2 (January 1952), 38.
114. Die Insel: Monatsblätter für Freundschaft und Toleranz 2 (March 1952), 38.
115. ‘Der Quicksilberspiegel,’ Der Ring 1, Nr. 1, 7.
116. Die Insel: Monatsblätter für Freundschaft und Toleranz 1 (November 1951), 32.
119. Ibid., 6.
120. Akantha, ‘Berlin tanzt!,’ 8.
123. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
124. Bräutigam, Formen der Homosexualität, 107.
125. StAHH, Polizeibehörde II, Zwischenbericht über Gaststätten verschiedener
Art und öffentliche Sittlichkeit, May 5, 1951.
126. StAHH, Polizeibehörde II, Vierteljährlicher Sittenbericht, January 3, 1950.
128. Hans Ostwald, Männliche Prostitution (Leipzig: Walther Fiedler, 1908), 87–8.
129. Ernst Schramm and Karl Kaiser, ‘Der homosexuelle Mann also Opfer von
Kapitalverbrechen: Ursachen und Aufklärungsschwierigkeiten,’ Kriminalistik
16 (1962), 256.
130. Heinz Winterberg, Die gleichgeschlechtliche Prostitution in der männlichen
Jugend und die Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Dipa, 1964), 51–2.
131. Trumbach, ‘The Birth of the Queen,’ 129–40.
132. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New
Hampshire: Harper Collins, 1992), 151–2.
133. Wolfgang Fischer, ‘Homosexualität und Verweichung,’ Die Insel 2 (February
1952), 23.
134. F. F. Wesely, ‘Homosexualität, Verbrechen und Öffentlichkeit,’ Die Insel 2
(February 1952), 4–5.
135. Anonymous letter to the editor, Der Kreis 23 (November 1955), 9.
136. Wissenschaftler, ‘Ärztliche Behandlung erfolglos,’ Der Weg 4 (March
1954), 105.
137. Houlbrook, Queer London, 198–201.
138. Hans-Heinz Pukall, ‘Volker und Stefan,’ Der Weg 4 (1954), 16.
140. Theodoor Kempe, ‘Die Homophilen und die Gesellschaft,’ in Studien zur
männlichen Homosexualität, ed. Theodoor Kempe and Reinhard Redhardt
(Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1954), 9.
141. Konrad L., unpublished interview transcript, 50.
Notes 235
142. Christian M., ‘Bunte Kuh,’ unpublished manuscript in author’s

possession.
143. Portraits of such men can be found in several sources. To begin with, try
Steinle, Die Geschichte der Kameradschaft die runde, and Pretzel, Berlin.
144. Kennedy, The Ideal Gay Man, chapter 8.
145. Giese, Der homosexuelle Mann in der Welt.
146. Dr. Rudolf Klimmer, ‘Der frauenhafte Homosexuelle,’ Der Kreis 25 (February
1957), 5.
147. For more on Tom of Finland, see F. Valentine Hooven III, Tom of Finland:
His Life and Times (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); and Micha Ramakers,
Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality (New York: St.
Martin’s, 2000).
148. Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York:
Random House, 1967).
149. Chauncey, Gay New York, 113–14; Weeks, ‘Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-
Annes: Male Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England
in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,’ Journal of Homosexuality
6 (1980/1981), 121. In the West German gay magazines of the early 1950s,
there are enough photographs of young, working-class men to suggest that
these insights apply to Germany as well.
150. Mommsen, ‘Ledernes Berlin,’ 86.
151. Hölper, ‘Männlichkeit in R(h)einkultur,’ 48–9.
152. ‘Herr Mannequin trug zartgelbe Söckchen: ‘Ledermanner’ samt Zuchtinstr-
umenten vor Gericht,’ reprinted in Jannsen, Der Weg zu Freundschaft und
Toleranz, 8.
153. This conclusion is somewhat speculative and will have to be confirmed
by more extensive research into the leathermen circles of the early 1950s.
It certainly applied to the United States. See Thom Magister, ‘Einer von
vielen. Verführung und Erziehung eines Ledermanns,’ in Lederlust: Berichte
und Erfahrungen, ed. Mark Thompson (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder, 1993), 124.
155. Manfred Mommsen, ‘Ledernes Berlin,’ in Gmünder and Maltzahn, Berlin
von hinten 1983/84, 88.
156. Karl Hölper, ‘ “Männlichkeit” in R(h)einkultur: Die Entwicklung der
schwulen Lederszene und der Lederclubs in Köln,’ in Balser et al., Himmel
und Hölle, 46–63.
157. Hans Goedeke, ‘Hexenjagd in Bad 50th oder Glück muss der Mensch
haben,’ in Meibeck, Hamburg von hinten 84/85, 18–19; Gerd Pohl,
‘Hamburgs harte Männer: Ein Streifzug durch die Lederszene,’ in Meibeck,
Hamburg von hinten 82, 35.
158. See, for example, ‘Der alte Mann und die Halbstarken,’ Der Ring 2
(August/September 1956), 218.
159. A semiotic analysis of leather within the framework of gay culture is
offered by Hölper, ‘ “Männlichkiet” in R(h)einkultur.’ See also Whisnant,
‘Hamburg’s Gay Scene,’ 213–28.
160. Hans Jürger Wolter, ‘Phänomen und Behandlung des Rockertums,’
Kriminalistik 27 (1973), 289–94; Titus Simon, Rocker in der Bundesrepublik:
Eine Subkultur zwischen Jugendprotest und Traditionsbildung (Weinheim:
Deutscher Studien, 1989).
236 Notes
161. Mommsen, ‘Ledernes Berlin’; Hölper, ‘ “Männlichkeit’ in R(h)einkultur”;

and Pohl, ‘Hamburgs harte Männer.’
162. Reinhard Redhardt, ‘Zur gleichgeschlechtlichen männlichen Prostitution,’
in Kempe and Redhardt, Studien zur männlichen Homosexualität, 53.
163. Evans, ‘Bahnhof Boys,’ 605–36.
165. Ibid., 101.
166. For example, see A. O., ‘Ethik der Freundschaft,’ Die Freunde 1 (September
1951), 26.
167. Schmidt-Relenberg et al., Strichjungen-Gespräche, 234–5.
168. Schmidt, ‘Homosexualität und Vorurteil,’ 136–55.
169. Schmidt-Relenberg et al, Strichjungen-Gespräche, 222.
170. Violence committed by hustlers was a frequently heard complaint. For
example, see Kuhn, ‘Das Phänomen der Strichjungen in Hamburg,’
126–40.
171. Schmidt-Relenberg et al., Strichjungen-Gespräche, 150–3.
172. Ibid., 230.
173. Ibid., 226.
174. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34–9.
175. The phrase comes from James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms
of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University, 1985).
176. For the story of Heinz Dörmer, a man who pursued love in the context of
the German Pfadfinder youth organization rather than in the gay scene, see
Sternweiler, Und Alles wegen der Jungs.
177. Whisnant, ‘Hamburg’s Gay Scene,’ 265–6.
178. B. Niggemeyer, ‘Sittlichkeitsdelikte und Strafrechtsreform,’ Kriminalistk 13
(1959), 225–9; and Bundeskriminalamt Wiesbaden, Sittlichkeitsdelikte.
179. For more on Hamburg’s ‘clean-up,’ see Sneeringer, ‘The Assembly Line of
Joys,’ 80–81; Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 99; and
Jürgen Kahmann and Hubert Lanzerath, Weibliche Prostitution in Hamburg
(Heidelberg: Kriminalistik, 1981).
180. Mario Kramp, ‘ “Homosexuelle machen sich in Köln breit”: Vom
Umgang städtischer Behörden mit einer diskriminierten Minderheit in der
Adenauer-Ära,’ in Balser et al., Himmel und Hölle, 202–3.
181. Ibid., 203.
182. Ibid., 203–11.
184. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356-10.05
Band 4, Polizeihauptkommissarin Peitsch, ‘Jugendgefährdung in Hamburg
(Zusammenarbeit zwischen Polizei und der Jugendbehörde), Niederschrift
über die Sitzung des Verwaltungsausschusses des Bezirksjugendamtes
Hamburg-Nord, July 19, 1967.
185. Kramp, ‘Homosexuelle machen sich in Köln breit,’ 195–6.
186. For more detailed information on the Jugendschutztruppen, see my dis-
sertation: Whisnant, ‘Hamburg’s Gay Scene in the Era of Family Politics,’
253–60.
187. Hans-Carl Gressmann, ‘Bekämpfung homosexuelle Umtriebe an und in
öffentliche Bedürfnisanstalten,’ Kriminalistik 21 (1967), 551.
189. Gressmann, ‘Bekämpfung homosexuelle Umtriebe,’ 552.
Notes 237

191. An example of the form can be found in StAHH, Jugendbehörde II,
Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356–10.10–4.
192. Gressmann, ‘Bekämpfung homosexuelle Umtriebe,’ 552.
193. Ibid., 552.
194. Ibid.
195. The first mention of these Einwegspiegel that I have found is in Adriaen von
der Aa, ‘St. Pauli–Ankerplatz der Freude,’ Der Weg 11/12 (1964), 240. This
article suggests they were installed earlier that year.
196. Gressmann, ‘Bekämpfung homosexuelle Umtriebe an und in öffentliche
Bedürfnisanstalten,’ 552.
197. Clare Kyler, ‘Treiben Homosexueller in Bedürfnisanstalt gefilmt,’ Kriminalis-
tik 17 (1963), 393. See also Humphreys, Tearoom Trade, 84–5.
198. Hans-George Stümke, ‘Die Hamburger Spiegel-Affäre von 1980,’ in Dobler,
Schwule, Lesben, Polizei, 105.
199. Stümke, ‘Die Hamburger Spiegel-Affäre von 1980,’ 106.
200. Rainer Hoffschildt, ‘140.000 Verurteilungen nach “§175,” ’ Invertito 4
(2002), 140–9.
202. Walter Stahl and Dieter Wien, Hamburg from 7 to 7: An Unusual Guide to an
Unusual City (Hamburg: Erik Blumenfeld, 1967), 270.
204. Ibid., 124.
205. Helmut A., quoted in Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf andren
Wegen, 103.
207. StAHH, Behörde für Inneres, 1792, Letter from Polizeipräsident betr.
Transvestiten-Unwesen, September 30, 1964. See also Schramm, ‘Das
Strichjungenunwesen,’ 95.
208. StAHH, Jugendbehörde II, Ablieferung, October 29, 1986, 356-10.10-4,
Vermerk betr. Bedürfnisanstalten, die als Treffpunkte Homosexueller
bekannt sind, 21 December 1966; and Niederschrift über die Besprechung
am, December 16, 1966, betreffend die unbefugte Benutzung öffentlicher
Bedürfnisanstalten im Bezirk Wandsbek, December 17, 1966.
209. ‘Jagd auf Strichjungen bisher weder nützlich noch sinnvoll. Unschuldige
kommen in der Kartei’ reprinted from a Berlin newspaper (B. Z. Berlin,
November 13, 1965) in Der Weg, Nr. 176, 231.
210. Der Weg (June/July 1964), 118; ‘Nachtleben soll gesäubert warden . . . in
Berlin,’ Frankfurter Rundschau (June 16, 1967).
211. From the online information describing the 2003 exhibition ‘Mittenmang:
Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1945–1969’ (http://www.
schwulesmuseum.de/html/au_1/au_fr_1_3_mmang_4_en.htm).
213. From the online information describing the 2003 exhibition ‘Mittenmang:
Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1945–1969’ (http://www.
schwulesmuseum.de/html/au_1/au_fr_1_3_mmang_2_en.htm).
215. Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung, 18.
216. Müller, ‘Das Lokal am Abend,’ 15.
238 Notes
5 Reforming Paragraph 175

1. Martin Kitchen, A History of Modern Germany, 1800–2000 (Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2006), 341–8.
2. Hermann Glaser, Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Zwischen
Grundgesetz und Großer Koalition 1949–1967 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986),
98–107.
4. Garton, Histories of Sexuality, 211.
5. See, for example, Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 152–4. Kramp and
Sölle’s ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der Bundesrepublik’ also fits this
description, although it is much more thorough in covering the debate
around the law up until its reform in 1969.
6. See, for instance, Detlef Grumbach, ed., Die Linke und das Laster: Schwule
Emanzipation und linke Vorurteile (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Skript, 1995);
and Harry Oosterhuis, ‘The “Jews” of the Antifascist Left: Homosexuality
and the Socialist Resistance to Nazism,’ The Journal of Homosexuality 29
(1995): 227–57.
7. Garton, Histories of Sexuality, 221–2.
8. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and
the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford and New York: Oxford, 1998), 13,
498–507.
9. Steinle, ‘Homophiles Deutschland—West und Ost,’ 207–8; Günter
Grau, ‘Ein Leben im Kampf gegen den Paragraphen 175: Zum
Wirken des Dresdner Arztes Rudolf Klimmer 1905–1977,’ in 100 Jahre
Schwulenbewegung: Dokumentation einer Vortragsreihe in der Akademie der
Künste, ed. Manfred Herzer (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1998), 47–64.
10. Rudolf Klimmer, Die Homosexualität als biologisch-soziologischen Zeitfrage
(Hamburg: Kriminalistik, 1958), 236.
11. Moeller, ‘The Homosexual Man is a “Man,” ’ 267–8.
12. Wolfgang Theis, ‘Anders als du und ich (§175),’ in Vergessene Zukunft, For-
gotten Future, ed. Christian Philipp Müller (Munich: Kunstverein München
and Edition Artelier, 1992), 56–75.
13. Zeh, ‘Der Sexualforscher Hans Giese,’ 114.
14. Hans Giese, ed. Homosexualität oder Politik mit dem §175 (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), 100, 170.
15. Willhart Schlegel, Körper und Seele: Eine Konstituionslehre für Ärzte, Juristen,
Pädagogen und Theologen (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1957).
16. Ibid., 113–15.
17. Willhart Schlegel, Die Sexualinstinkte des Menschen (Hamburg: Rütten and
Loenig, 1962), 164.
18. Willhart Schlegel, ‘Angeborenes Verhalten und Sittengesetz,’ in Der
homosexuelle Nächste, ed. Hans-Joachim Schoeps (Hamburg: Furche,
1963), 223.
19. Willhart Schlegel, ‘Über die Ursachen homosexuellen Verhaltens,’ in Das
große Tabu: Zeugnisse und Dokumente zum Problem der Homosexualität, ed.
Willhart Schlegel (Munich: rütten and Loenig, 1967), 153.
20. Schlegel, Rolf, 35.
Notes 239
21. Claudia Bruns, ‘Der homosexuelle Staatsfreund: Von der Konstruktion des
erotischen Männerbunds bei Hans Blüher,’ in Nieden, Homosexualität und
Staaträson, 147–92.
22. Schlegel, ‘Über die Ursachen homosexuellen Verhaltens,’ 161.
23. Schlegel, Rolf, 45.
25. Ibid., 90.
26. Schlegel, Die Sexualinstinkte des Menschen, 163–4.
27. Schlegel, ‘Über die Ursachen homosexuellen Verhaltens,’ 161.
29. Ibid., 73.
30. Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Problem of Homosexuality, 5.
31. Ibid., 20.
32. Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, x.
33. Ibid., 168–9.
34. Weeks, Coming Out, 164.
35. ‘Homosexuality, Prostitution and the Law,’ The Dublin Review 229 (Summer
1965), 57.
36. Ibid., 58.
37. Weeks, Coming Out, 164–5; and Miller, Out of the Past, 283–4.
38. The following history of religious debate draws heavily from Hans Bolewski,
‘Homosexualität als Problem der evangelischen Ethik,’ in Plädoyer für die
Abschaffung des §175, ed. Tobias Brocher, Armand Mergen, Hans Bolewski
and Herbert Ernst Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966).
39. Bovet, Sinnefülltes Anders-Sein, 7–8.
40. Hendrik Oyen, ‘Pastorale Bemerkungen zur Homophilie,’ Zeitschrift für
evangelische Ethik 8 (1964), 28–9.
41. Ibid.
42. Köberle, ‘Deutung und Bewertung der Homosexualität im Gespräch der
Gegenwart,’ Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 6 (1962), 146.
43. Ibid., 148.
44. Ibid., 149.
45. Hans-Joachim Schoeps, ‘Homosexualität und Bibel,’ Zeitschrift für
evangelische Ethik 6 (1962), 370–2.
46. Walther Eichrodt, ‘Homosexualität–Andersartigkeit oder Perversion?’ Refor-
mation 12 (1963), 67–82.
47. Klaus Bockmühl, ‘Die Diskussion über Homosexualität in theologischer
Sicht,’ Evangelische Theologie 24 (1964), 254.
48. Ibid., 256.
49. Ibid., 265.
50. Hekma, ‘Amsterdam,’ 83.
51. James Cavendish, ‘The Vatican and the Laity: Diverging Paths in Catholic
Understanding of Sexuality,’ in Sexuality and the World’s Religions, ed. David
Machacek and Melissa Wilcox (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 215.
52. Quoted in Gotzmann, ‘Der Volkswartbund,’ 180.
53. For a quick introduction to Thielicke, see The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Mod-
ern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1993), s.v. ‘Helmut Thielicke.’ His autobiography is also available in English
240 Notes
translation: Helmut Thielecke, Notes from a Wayfarer (New York: Paragon

House, 1995).
54. Helmut Thielicke, The Ethics of Sex (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 283.
55. Ibid., 284–5.
56. Ibid., 286–7.
57. Helmut Thielicke, ‘Erwägungen der evangelisch-theologischen Ethik zum
Problem der Homosexualität und ihrer strafrechtlichen Relevanz,’ in
Sexualität und Verbrechen: Beiträge zur Strafrechtsreform, ed. Fritz Bauer, Hans
Bürger-Prinz, Hans Giese and Herbert Jäger (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1963), 163.
58. Schulz, Paragraph 175, 22–3.
59. For the late-eighteenth-century Kantian arguments and their impact on
Revolutionary-era legal reform, see Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Soci-
ety in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1996).
J. S. Mill does not explicitly address the criminalization of homosexuality,
but his argument that legal power can only be used to ‘prevent harm to
others,’ not to enforce physical or moral welfare, can easily be applied
to homosexuality. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hackett, 1978), 9.
60. These two approaches to the control of sexuality are delineated in Jeffrey
Weeks, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern Sexualities
(London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 53–6.
61. Paul Robinson and Markus Dubber, ‘The American Model Penal Code:
A Brief Overview,’ New Criminal Law Review 10 (Summer 2007), 319–41;
and D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 144.
62. Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Problem of Homosexuality:
An Interim Report by a Group of Anglican Clergy and Doctors (London: Church
Information Board, 1954), 5.
63. Stephen Engel, Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay
and Lesbian Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001), 70.
64. BAK, B141, 17199 Mitarbeit des Strafrechtsausschusses der Deutschen
Rechtsanwaltskammern. Referate zu Grundsatzfragen des Besonderen Teils
eines künftigen Strafgesetzbuches 1955–6; Dr H. Reichhard, ‘Gutachten zu
der Frage, ob die Vorschrift des § 175 StGB beibehalten oder abgeschafft
werden soll,’ Ansbach, January 14, 1955; and (in the same file) Dr
Ackermann, ‘Welche Erweiterung des geltenden Strafrechts fordert die
Aufhebung des § 175?’.
65. BAK, B141, 17199 Mitarbeit des Strafrechtsausschusses der Deutschen
Rechtsanwaltskammern: Referate zu Grundsatzfragen des Besonderen
Teils eines künftigen Strafgesetzbuches 1955–6; Dr Ackermann, ‘Welche
Erweiterung des geltenden Strafrechts fordert die Aufhebung des § 175?’.
66. Heinrich Ackermann, ‘Zur Frage der Strafwürdigkeit des homosexuellen
Verhaltens des Mannes,’ in Bauer et al., Sexualität und Verbrechen, 153–4.
68. See Hubert Fichte, ‘Rosen für den Staatsanwalt,’ in Voigt and Weinrich,
Hamburg ahoi!, 59–65.
69. See Ernst Buchholz, ‘Plädoyer im Prozeß gegen Jean Genet’s “Notre Dame
des Fleurs,” ’ reprinted in Kunst, Recht und Freiheit: Reden und Aufsätze
(Munich and Esslingen: Bechtle, 1966).
Notes 241
70. Kron, ‘Hamburger Erinnerungen,’ 11.

71. Dieckhoff, Wer wirft den ersten Stein? Bericht zum Interim Report der
Anglikanischen Hochkirche, dem Griffin Report des britischen Regierungsauss-
chusses für die deutschsprachigen Protestanten (Stuttgart: F. Decker, 1961). For
more on Dieckhoff, see Karl-Heinz Steinle, Die Geschichte der Kameradschaft
die runde, 1950 bis 1969 (Berlin: Rosa Winkel), 18–19.
73. Ibid., 32.
74. Ibid., 32–3.
75. Ibid., 33–4.
76. Herbert Jäger, Strafgesetzgebung und Rechtsgüterschutz bei Sittlichkeitsdelikten
(Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1957), 38.
77. Ibid., 82.
78. Thomas Horstmann and Heike Litzinger, An den Grenzen des Rechts
(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006), 163.
80. Ibid., 24.
81. BAK B 141 17453, Letter to Herr Heinz Biesinger, Bonn, July 22, 1959.
82. Schulz, Paragraph 175, 25.
83. Orlan Lee and T. A. Robertson, ‘Moral Order’ and The Criminal Law: Reform
Efforts in the United States and West Germany (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1973), 174, esp. n. 8.
84. The process involved in working through and revising the draft penal code
was described by Dr. Richard Jäger (Ludwig Erhard’s Minister of Justice
in 1965) in the Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 5. Wahlperiode
1965, Band 60 (Stenographische Berichte, 1–24. Sitzung 1965/66),
552–3.
85. Christoph Krehl, ‘Reforms of the German Criminal Code—Stocktaking and
Perspectives—also from a Constitutional Point of View,’ German Law Journal
4 (May 2003), 423.
86. Schulz, Paragraph 175, 29.
87. Excerpts from the revision of E-1962 are included in the appendix to
Stümke and Finkler, Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen, 442–53.
88. Schulz, Paragraph 175, 25–30. See also Ackermann, ‘Zur Frage der
Strafwürdigkeit,’ 154–5.
89. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1993), 210, 214.
91. Buchholz, Kunst, Recht und Freiheit, 17.
92. ‘§175: Probleme schafft man nicht durch Schweigen aus der Welt,’ Quick 18
(November 28, 1965), 28–9.
93. ‘§175 in Deutschland: Wie sie leben, was sie furchten, wie sie sich tarnen,’
Quick 18 (December 12, 1965), 60–1.
94. ‘§175: Gibt es aus dieser Hölle eine Rettung?’ Quick 18 (December 19, 1965),
58–9.
95. Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform,’ 142–6.
96. Bolewski, ‘Homosexualität als Problem der evangelischen Ethik,’ 108.
97. Herbert Ernst Müller, ‘Der erwachsene Homosexuelle im deutschen
Strafrecht heute–morgen’ in Der homosexuelle Nächste, ed. Hans-Joachim
Schoeps (Hamburg: Furche Verlag, 1962), 254.
242 Notes
98. Armand Mergen, ‘Einspruch gegen die generelle Kriminalisierung der

Homosexualität,’ in Brocher et al., Plädoyer für die Abschaffung des §175,
41–71.
99. Alexander Lernet-Holenia, ‘Unverschämtheiten,’ in Weder Krankheit noch
Verbrechen: Plädoyer für eine Minderheit, ed. Rolf Italiaander (Hamburg: Gala,
1969), 279.
100. Wolfgang Abendroth, ‘Objectiv verfassungswidrig,’ in Weder Krankheit noch
Verbrechen, ed. Rolf Italiaander (Hamburg: Gala, 1969), 226.
101. Willhart Schlegel entitled his collection Das große Tabu (The Great Taboo).
The term ‘taboo’ was also used by the film and theater director Wolfgang
Liebenener: ‘Vergötterung von Grausamkeit und Bosheit,’ in Italiaander,
Weder Krankheit noch Verbrechen, 280. Similarly, the author and satirist
Walter Mehring called the law a ‘religious atavism’: ‘Religiöse Atavismen,’
in Italiaander, Weder Krankheit noch Verbrechen, 282–4.
102. Fritz Bauer, ‘Sexualstrafrecht heute,’ in Bauer et al., Sexualität und Verbrechen,
11–26.
103. Weitz, ‘The Ever-Present Other,’ 219–32.
104. Tobias Brocher, ‘Homosexuelles Verhalten als psychische Entwicklungs-
störung,’ in Brocher et al., Plädoyer für die Abschaffung des §175, 7–40.
105. Theodore Adorno, ‘Sexualtabus und Recht heute,’ in Bauer et al., Sexualität
und Verbrechen, 308.
106. Herbert Ernst Müller, ‘Die Strafbestimmung des §175 StGB als Ursache für
Tragik und Verbrechen,’ in Brocher et al., Plädoyer für die Abschaffung des
§175, 109–27.
108. Ibid., 141–83.
109. Niels Kadritzke, ‘Sexualitätsfeindlichkeit,’ in Italiaander, Weder Krankheit
noch Verbrechen, 269.
110. Wolfgang Hochheimer, ‘Sexualstrafrecht in psychologisch-anthropologi-
scher Sicht,’ in Bauer et al., Sexualität und Verbrechen, 113–4.
111. Fritz Bauer, ‘Sexualität, Sitte und ein neues Recht,’ Die Zeit (February 11,
1966), 44, republished in Von kommenden Strafrecht (Karlsruhe: C. F. Müller,
1969), 81.
112. Quoted in Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform,’ 143.
113. For the ‘wave’ of sexually themed plays of 1966, see ‘Orgie in Abonnement,’
Neue Revue 21 (December 4, 1966), 22.
114. On the New German Cinema, see Kieth Bullivant and C. Jane Rice,
‘Reconstruction and Integration: The Culture of West German Stabiliza-
tion 1945–1968),’ in German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns
(Oxford: Oxford University, 1995), 226. For a general discussion of Peter
Fleischmann and his Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern, see Robert Fischer and Joe
Hembus, Der Neue Deutsche Film 1960–1980 (Munich: Goldmann, 1981),
49–52.
115. Volker Baer, ‘Über die Verfolgung der Außenseiter: Peter Fleischmann’s Film
“Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern,” ’ Tagesspiegel (June 27, 1969).
116. Wolfgang Harthauser, ‘Der Massenmord an Homosexuellen im Dritten
Reich,’ in Schlegel, Das große Tabu, 7–37.
117. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 2003), 211.
118. See Evans, ‘Reconstruction Sites,’ 9.
Notes 243
119. Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity, 216.

120. Only 7 of the 500 participants voted against the resolution, with 9 abstain-
ing. The conference members also resolved to demand the repeal of Para-
graphs 172 and 175b, which made marital cheating and sex with animals
illegal. See Schulz, Paragraph 175, 34–9.
121. A connection made by Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen
Wegen, 147.
122. Italiaander, Weder Krankhiet noch Verbrechen, 9.
123. Voigt, ‘Geschichte der Schwulen in Hamburg,’ 48.
124. Sternweiler, Liebe, Forschung, Lehre, 104–14; Stümke, Homosexuelle in
Deutschland, 76.
125. Steinle, Die Geschichte der Kameradschaft die runde.
126. ‘Homosexualität: Späte Milde,’ Der Spiegel 23 (May 12, 1969), 76.
127. Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany, 49–85.
128. Keith Bullivant and C. Jane Rice, ‘Reconstruction and Integration: The Cul-
ture of West German Stabilization 1945–1968,’ in German Cultural Studies:
An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (Oxofrd: Oxford University, 1995), 239; and
Torsten Oppelland, ‘Domestic Political Developments I: 1949–69,’ in The
Federal Republic of Germany since 1949: Politics, Society, and Economy before
and after Unification, ed. Klaus Larres and Panikos Panayi (London and
New York: Longman, 1996), 97.
129. Quoted in Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration and Reform in der
Bundesrepublik,’ 147.
130. ‘Stenographische Bericht, 14. Sitzung, Bon, den 13. Janaur 1966,’
Verhandlungen des Deutschen Bundestages, 5. Wahlperiode 1965, Band 60
(Stenographische Berichte, 1–24. Sitzung, 1965–66), 545.
131. Quoted in Schulz, Paragraph 175, 33.
132. ‘Ersten Schriftlicher Bericht des Sonderausschusses für die Strafrechts-
reform,’ in Verhandlung des Deutschen Bundestages, 5. Wahlperiod 1965, Anl.
Band 129 (Drucksachen, 4001–4100 1969), 1.
133. Ibid., 30.
134. BAK B141 25476, S. 6–8, Letter to the Landesjustizverwaltungen betr.
Strafrechtsreform; hier: Reform der §§ 175, 175a StGB.
135. BAK B141 25476, S. 12–40.
136. BAK B141 25493, ‘Ergebnisprotokoll über die Referentenbesprechung zum
Entwurf eines Neunten Strafrechtsänderungsgesetzes vom 19. bis 21.
Februar 1969 in Bad Tönisstein,’ 13.
137. BAK B141 25496, ‘Sprechzettel zu Artikel 1 Nr. 52 des Ersten Gesetzes zur
Reform des Strafrechts (§175 StGB),’ 15–16.
138. Krehl, ‘Reforms of the German Criminal Code,’ 424.
139. ‘Deutscher Bundestag, 230. Sitzung, Bonn, den 7. Mai 1969,’ Verhandlung
des Deutschen Bundestages, 5. Wahlperiode 1965, Band 70 (Stenographische
Berichte, 230.–247. Sitzung 1969), 12787.
140. Kramp and Sölle, ‘§175—Restauration und Reform in der Bundesrepublik,’
147.
141. Walter Bayerlein, ‘Sittenlose Strafrecht? Gedanken zur Strafrechtsreform,’
Die legendige Zelle (1969), 39–40. Also found in BAK B141 25464.
142. ‘Zur Reform des Strafrechts: Stellungnahme des Kommissariats der deutsche
Bischöfe,’ Jugendwohl: Zeitschrift für Kinder- und Jugendfürsorge 50 (1969),
149–53.
244 Notes
143. Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland, 153; and Kramp und Sölle, ‘§175–
Restauration und Reform in der Bundesrepublik,’ 148, 154, n. 112.
144. ‘Deutscher Bundestag, 232. und 233. Sitzung, Bonn, den 9. Mai 1969,’
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145. ‘Deutscher Bundestag, 232. und 233. Sitzung, Bonn, den 9. Mai 1969,’
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146. BAK B141 25498, Auszug aus dem Bericht über die 339. Sitzung des 5.
Deutschen Bundesrates vom 30. Mai 1969, 125–9.
6 Conclusion: Between Persecution and Freedom

1. Kreutzer, Chronik der Schwulen: Demos, Sex, und Village People (Hamburg:
Männerschwarm Skript, 2007), 5.
3. Guy Hocquenghem, ‘Berlin,’ in Berlin von hinten 1981, ed. Bruno Gmünder
and Christian von Maltzahn, 79; and Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf
anderen Wegen, 175.
4. Florian Georg Mildenberger, ‘Die Verfemten der Schwulenbewegung:
Zur Geschichte der Verbände/Vereine IHWO, DHO, IDH, SDH, IHID,’
Schwule Geschichte: Zeitschrift für schwule Geschichtswerkstätten, Archive und
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nach Deutschland,’ Schwule Geschichte, 6.
5. Quoted in Helmut Blazek, Rosa Zeiten für rosa Liebe: Zur Geschichte der
Homosexualität (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1996), 267.
6. Wolfgang Theis, ‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Öffentlich—Bundesrepublik,’
in Schwules Museum, Goodbye to Berlin, 279–93; Rosenkranz and
Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 149–83; Hoffschildt, Olivia, 181–90;
Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung.
8. Wolfgang Theis, ‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Öffentlich—Bundesrepublik,’ in
Schwules Museum, Goodbye to Berlin?, 291–2.
9. Mildenberger, Die Münchner Schwulenbewegung, 28–30; Theis, ‘Mach Dein
Schwulsein Öffentlich—Bundesrepublik,’ 283; Rosenkranz and Lorenz,
Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 154–5.
10. Theis, ‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Offen,’ 287.
11. Michael Holy, ‘Lange hieß es, Homosexualität sei gegen die Ordnung:
Die westdeutsche Schwulenbewegung (1969–1980),’ in Herzer, 100 Jahre
Schwulenbewegung, 103.
12. Theis, ‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Offen,’ 286; Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg
auf anderen Wegen, 254.
13. For a short overview, see Clayton Whisnant, ‘Gay German History: Future
Directions?’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (January 2008), 1–10.
14. Jensen, ‘The Pink Triangle and Political Consciousness,’ 326; and Theis,
‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Öffentlich,’ 283.
Notes 245
16. Rüdiger Lautmann, ed., Seminar: Gesellschaft und Homosexualität (Frankfurt

am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).
17. Baumgardt, ‘Coming Out of the Gay Movement,’ 32.
18. Martin Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone
(New York and London: New York University, 1998), 28, 55–61.
19. Hölper, ‘ “Männlichkeit” in R(h)einkultur,’ 60–2; Rosenkranz and Lorenz,
Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 206–18.
20. Gmünder and Maltzahn, Berlin von hinten 83/84, 224–5; Mommsen,
‘Ledernes Berlin,’ 94–100.
21. Livine, Gay Macho, 28. As John Lauritsen has noted, some gay Germans
would call a gay clone ‘ein falscher Amerikaner.’ See John Lauritsen,
‘Political-Economic Construction of Gay Male Clone Identity,’ Journal of
Homosexuality 24 (1993), 222.
22. Levine, Gay Macho, 58; Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen,
154–5.
23. Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 236–40; Theis, ‘Mach Dein Schwulsein Öffentlich,’
289.
24. Martin Dannecker and Reimut Reiche, Der gewöhnliche Homosexuelle: Eine
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(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974); and Lautmann, Seminar: Gesellschaft
und Homosexualität.
25. Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 153, 160–6.
26. On the decline of Christianity in Europe, see Peter Berger, Grace Davie,
and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe?: A Theme and Variations
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Index
Abendroth, Wolfgang, 190 Berfelde, Lothar “Charlotte,” 137

Ackermann, Heinrich, 181–3 Bergler, Edmund, 40
Adenauer, Konrad, 9, 11, 25, 26, 27, Berlin, 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20,
28, 63, 65, 97, 102, 166, 167, 182, 21, 22, 24, 30, 70, 72, 77, 78, 79,
185, 189, 211 80, 81, 82, 88, 89, 91, 93, 96, 100,
Adler, Alfred, 40, 184 107, 108, 110, 113–14, 117, 121,
Adorno, Theodore, 191, 192, 196 122, 123, 127, 128, 130, 134, 135,
agents provocateurs, 31 136, 137, 138, 142, 148, 150, 151,
Albrecht, M., 24, 43 156, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
Alster, 115, 130 184, 188, 191, 192, 200, 203, 204,
Alternate Draft Penal Code (AE), 199 205, 206, 208
American popular culture, 10, 155, Bieber, Irving, 40
166–7 Biederich, Paul Hugo, 184
Amicus-Briefbund, 70, 82 Bild-Zeitung, 44, 172
Amsterdam, 6, 69–70,107, 108, 148, blackmail, 44, 63, 87, 96, 97, 101, 104,
151 119, 121, 151, 152, 181, 182, 186,
Andreas, K., 47 192, 198
anxieties, 9, 13, 16, 17, 22, 52–4, 60–1, Blieweis, Theodor, 175
63, 65, 94, 104, 111, 112, 178, 190 Blüher, Hans, 48, 173, 175
Arcadie, 68 Bochum, 205
Argo, Jack, (pseudonym), see Werres, Bockmühl, Klaus, 179
Johannes Bolewski, Hans, 189
Asshauer, Else, 139 Borgward, Hans, 79
Association for a Humane Way of Life, Borowsky, Käthe, 138
71, 88, 91, 108 Boss, Medard, 39, 175
Bovet, Theodor, 57–8, 177–8, 179
Baier, Fritz, 189 Brand, Adolf, 18, 20, 48, 64, 65, 81,
Bailey, Derrick S., 176, 179 173, 207
Baldwin, James, 196 Brandt, Willy, 202
Ban against Dancing (Tanzverbot), 157 Braunschweig, 23
Barth, Karl, 180 Bräutigam, Walter, 38, 41, 83, 172
baths, 4, 132, 133, 204 Bredtschneider, Wolfgang, 70
see also pools Bremen, 35, 83, 88–90, 91, 102, 108,
Baudry, André, 68 200
Baumgardt, Manfred, 207 Brocher, Tobias, 191
Bayerlein, Walter, 201–2 Buchholz, Ernst, 95, 100, 188, 196
Becker, Albrecht, 116 Bundesrat, 203
Becker, Walter, 59–60, 202 Bundestag, 25, 71, 105, 187, 196,
Becker, Werner, 44, 77, 78, 100–1, 134, 197–203
135, 140–1 Bürger-Prinz, Hans, 38–9, 72–3, 78,
Bel ami, 81 171
Bendt, Helmut, 134, 135 Busse, Hermann, 201
253
254 Index
Calmes, Michael, 86, 94–5 consumerism, 8, 9, 13, 18, 54, 56, 112,
Carolina criminal code, 4 114, 167
Catholics, 25–6, 69, 90, 137, 175, 176, continuity of German history, 8, 210,
180, 201–2 211
CDU, see Christian Democratic Union Contribution toward Sexual Research
Celle, 23 (monograph series), 78
censorship, 12, 105, 166, 167, 171, corrupting homosexual, 9, 16, 51–63,
187, 188 76, 153, 155, 194, 211
Certeau, Michel de, 5, 142 Cory, Daniel Webster (pseudonym),
Charlottenburg, 114, 134, 135, 164 see Sagarin, Edward
Christian, M., 15, 57, 147 counterculture, 5, 102, 136, 153, 167,
Christianity, 25–6, 28, 55, 57, 61, 96, 168, 169
168, 174–81, 189, 190, 210 counterpublic, 92–5, 100, 103, 104
see also Catholics; Protestants Courbierestrasse, 135
Christian Democratic Union, 25–8,
36, 85, 166, 169, 197, 198, 202, Dahrendorf, Ralf, 196
203, 211 Dannecker, Martin, 205, 209
Christian Hansen Schmidt Publishers, The Dark Corner, 48
92, 107, 184 Dein Freund, 88
Christopher Street Day parades, 206 denunciations, 21, 32–3
cigarettes, 126, 128, 139 Deussen, Julius, 37
Circle (Swiss organization), 66–7 Deutschen Haus, 88
see also Kreis Dieckhoff, Albrecht, 184, 189
Circles (chapters of the Society for Diemer-Nicolaus, Emmy, 198, 203
Human Rights) 91 Dieter, S., 124, 125, 126, 129, 130,
Clasen, Leo, 45 131, 132, 133, 146, 149, 150
Cleland, John, 171 Different Than You and Me, 51–2, 171
Club of Friends, 65, 80–2, 88, 89, 91, Don, 204
184 Dörmer, Heinz, 46, 47
COC, see Dutch Center for Culture Dörrast, Johannes, 80–3, 87, 102, 103,
and Recreation 106
Cocteau, Jean, 196 Dortmund, 83
Cold War, 2, 9, 17, 27, 166, 195 drag, 142, 147, 206
Cologne, 2, 13, 19, 26, 30, 33, 61, 84, see also transvestite; gender fuck
90, 96, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, Dramatic Seminar, 98
122, 123, 130, 132, 137, 143, 148, Du&Ich, 204
150, 151, 156, 157, 158, 164, 165, Düsseldorf, 23, 95, 96, 127
193, 206, 208 Dutch Center for Culture and
Colonel Redl scandal, 62 Recreation (COC), 69–70, 108
communism, 17, 26, 27–8, 47, 56,
62–3, 65, 67, 68, 99, 105, 113, 195 E I-1959, 186
compensation payments, 46–7 E II-1959, 186
concentration camps, 20, 21, 32, 44, E-1962, 186–7, 188, 192, 196, 197, 199
45, 46, 65, 79, 99, 184, 194, 197, East Germany, 11–12, 28, 95, 113,
212 137, 166
Concepte, 180 Easter Convention, 209
Conference of German Jurists, 181, effeminacy, 16, 47–8, 50, 101, 143,
183, 195 144, 145, 147, 148, 197, 209
Conrad, Carl, 188 see also Tunte
Index 255
Ehre, Ida, 98 Freundschaft, 19, 65, 80, 81

Eichrodt, Walter, 179 Friedländer, Benedict, 48, 173
Eigene, 18, 64 Friedrichstrasse, 17
Eisenhower, Dwight, 62 friendship clubs, 64, 71, 80, 196
Emkhe, Horst, 201 Fucktory leather convention, 208
Endocrinal Research, 21, 37 Fursche Press, 189
English Garden, 17, 130
Erhard, Ludwig, 166, 197 Gatzweiler, Richard, 61–2, 180
Essen, 96 gay bars, 4, 17, 19, 20, 30, 32, 40, 45,
Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, 198 70, 81, 82, 88, 89, 90, 110, 114,
eye contact, 126 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125,
129, 133–41, 143, 144, 146, 147,
Faber, Walter, 55 150, 151, 157, 158, 163, 164, 185,
family politics, 9, 26–8, 53–6, 63, 145, 204
166, 175, 182, 189, 193, 211 Alte Stadtcasino, 162
FDP, see Free Democratic Party Amsterdam, 164
Federal Board of Review Artelier “Le Monocle,” 140
(Bundesprüfstelle), 105, 106, 107 Artistenklause, 136
Federal Bureau of Criminal Barbarina, 137
Investigation (Bundeskriminalamt), Bar Celona, 162
156 Bart, 134
Federal Constitutional Court, 29, Boheme-Bar (Courbierestrasse in
108–10, 170, 171 West Berlin), 135
Federal High Court Bohème (Lausitzer Platz in West
(Bundesgerichtshof ), 29, 102, 109 Berlin), 136
Federal Laws for Compensation of Boheme (Hamburg), 157
Victims, 46 Bronzekeller, 139
Feuerhelm, Bernd, 136 Burgklause, 164
fines, 29, 34–5, 87, 119, 120, 159, 161, Chaps, 208
162 Come Back, 164
First Law for the Reform of the Caroussel, 165
Criminal Code, 201, 203 David-Klause, 138, 140
Fleischmann, Peter, 194 Dult-Stuben, 138
Foucault, Michel, xi, 3, 209 Eldorado, 135–6
Franz, B., 41 Elli’s Place (Bei Elli), 136–7, 150
Frankfurt am Main, 35, 36, 39, 70–1, Flamingo, 138
72, 77, 79, 80, 88, 91, 93, 96, 106, Gottes Stuben, 140
108, 118, 137, 171, 188, 192, 206 Hafenschenke, 138
Frankfurter Rundschau, 96 Hollandia, 165
Franz, B., 41 Hütte, 82, 91
Free Democratic Party (FDP), 25, 105, Haus Thefi, 135
108, 169, 197, 198, 201, 203 Hummel-Klause, 138
Freond, 87, 92, 107 Kleist-Casino, 135
Freud, Sigmund, 175, 184, 196 Künstler Klause, 136
Freudian Psychoanalysis, 39–40, 42, Laubfrosch, 138
173, 191, 192, 193 Loreley, 138, 140, 151, 208
Freund, Kurt, 172, 191 Opernkeller, 134
Freunde, 80, 81, 82–8, 92, 96, 102, 104, Mamitas, 136
184 Max + Moritz, 138
256 Index
gay bars – continued gender, 9, 10, 26, 28, 38, 48, 50, 53,
Neu-Stadt-Casino, 161 54, 72, 87, 118, 142, 143, 144,
Roxi Bar, 81 153, 172, 173, 201, 208, 209, 211
Schlossklause, 137 see also effeminacy; masculinity
Schwanenburg, 82 gender fuck, 209
Schwarzer-Kater’s, 140 General Instruction to the Judges, 23
General Law Concerning the Results
Sombrero-Club, 165
of War, 46
Spinne, 138
Genet Case of 1962, 183–4, 187–8
Spundloch, 138
Genet, Jean ,171
Stadtcasino, 139, 142, 157, 162 Genetic Psychology, 37–8, 40, 100,
Stephan-Schänke, 165 172–4
Tabasco’s, 140 Gerhard Prescha Publishers, 92, 106,
Theaterklause, 139 107, 184
Tom’s Saloon, 208 German Friendship League, 80
Tunika, 165 German Society for Sexual Research, 78
Walterchens Ballhaus, 135 Giese, Hans, 37, 38, 41, 42, 70, 71–9,
Wielandseck, 89 80, 100, 101, 109, 148, 170–2,
Zum Steinernen Kännchen, 137 174, 175, 184, 189, 191
Zwitscher-Klause, 138 Glover, Edward, 40
gay clone, 208–9 Grassberger, Roland, 109, 170
Gay Liberation Front, 206 Great Depression, 8, 20
Great Penal Law Commission, 185–6
gay liberation movement, 13, 76, 204,
Grieger, Charles, 81–5, 87, 88, 91, 106
205–8, 209, 211, 212
Griffin, Cardinal Bernard, 176
Gay Museum, 2
Griffin Report, 176–7, 184, 185, 188,
gay publishing, 18, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70,
189
80, 81, 82–8, 89, 91–104, 106–7,
Gropius, Walter, 114
113, 114, 116, 117, 164, 184,185,
Güde, Max, 202
194, 206, 207
see also Amicus-Briefbund; Christian Haarmann, Erwin, 90–1, 92, 107–8,
Hansen Schmidt Publishers; 116, 196
Dein Freund; Du&Ich; Don; Habel, Hans, 37
Freond; Freund; Freundschaft; Halbstarke, see hoodlums
Gefährten; Gerhard Prescha Hamburg, 2, 3, 4, 13, 17, 19, 23, 24,
Publishers; Grieger, Charles; 28, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 53, 59,
Hellas; him; Humanitas; Ihne, 60, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84–8, 89, 90,
Rudolf; Insel; Kreis; Leue, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98–9, 107, 108,
Gustave; Pan; Weg 111, 114–18, 122, 123, 124, 128,
gay rights, see homosexual rights 129, 130, 131, 132, 138–40, 142,
gay scene, 1, 2–3, 4, 5–7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156,
13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 157, 158–63, 165, 170, 171, 172,
30, 34, 44, 81, 90, 93, 110, 181, 183, 184, 185, 197, 188, 192,
112–65, 183, 184, 185, 188, 204, 202, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210, 212
206, 208, 210, 212 Hamburger Abendblatt, 99
see also gay bars; parks; public Hamburger Echo, 99
bathrooms; baths; streets; ruins Hamburger Morgenpost, 98
Gebsattel, Victor von, 38 Hamburger Volkszeitung, 99
Gefährten, 71, 91, 92 Hamm, 23, 59
Index 257
Hannover, 19, 22, 82, 88, 89, 91, 95, Ihne, Rudolf, 80, 82
108, 118, 123, 127, 137, 162, 164, Insel, 19, 65, 89, 92, 94, 144, 164
200 Institute for Sexual Research, 72, 78,
Hans, G., 30, 117–18, 121, 122, 131, 171, 184
159, 161 International Committee for Sexual
Harlan, Veit, 51–2, 171 Equality, 70, 101, 108
Harthauser, Wolfgang, 194 International Correspondence Club of
Hartung, Elli, 136–7 Friendship, 80
Haug, Theodor, 175 International Friendship Lodge
Hausverbot, 159, 163 (IFLO), 88–9, 91, 102, 103, 108
Hay, Harry, 68 International Garden Exposition of
Heger, Heinz, 207 1963, 157
Heinemann, Gustav, 198, 199, 201 International World Organization of
Hell, Cheri, 81, 134, 142 Homophiles (IHWO), 205
Hellas, 92, 95, 107 interrogation, 21, 30, 32, 34, 50
Hiller, Kurt, 64, 71, 77–8, 98, 196, 183 Italiaander, Rolf, 96–8, 100, 101, 189,
Him, 204 196
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 18, 19, 37, 42, 64,
65, 66, 72, 77, 78, 96, 100, 101, Jäger, Herbert, 185, 189
108, 144, 173, 174, 196, 207 Jäger, Wolfgang, 105
Hitler, Adolf, 15, 16, 21, 43, 102, 103, Jahnn, Hans Henny, 96
194, 198 Jaspers, Karl, 196
Hochheimer, Wolfgang 191–2 Jensch, Klaus, 37
homoeroticism, 1, 49, 50, 70 Journal of Protestant Ethics, 177, 178,
Homolulu of 1979, 206 181
homophile, xi, 1, 2, 13, 35, 41, 62, Journal of Sexual Research, 78
64–111, 148, 150, 154, 155, 165, Jung, Carl, 40
168, 174, 177, 178, 185, 193, 196, Jungfernstieg, 129, 130
204, 205, 206, 207–8, 211, 212 Jungmann, Gerhard, 201
homosexual files, 29–30, 32, 121, 122, Just-Dahlmann, Barbara, 195
157, 159, 210
homosexual publishing, see gay Kallmann, Franz, 38
publishing Kardiner, Abram, 39, 54
homosexual rights, 66, 70, 77, 88, 92, Kempe, Gerrit Theodoor, 178
168, 207 Kiel, 23, 84, 147
homosexual squads, 32, 117, 118–19, Kiesinger, Kurt, 197–8
121, 122, 142, 157, 158, 159, 160 Kinsey, Alfred, 42, 48, 56–7, 73, 87,
Homosexuellen Aktion Westberlin 175
(HAW), 205–6 Klappen, see public bathrooms
hoodlums, 56, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156 Kleemann, Curt, 184
Hotel Schliefmühle, 88 Klein, Melanie, 40
Humanitas, 45, 90, 91, 92, 95, 107, 196 Kleine Blatt, 92, 107
Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, 194 Kleiststrasse, 135
hustlers, see male prostitutes Klimmer, Rudolf, 108, 148, 170, 174,
175
ICSE, see International Committee for Knop, Martin, 70, 82
Sexual Equality Köberle, Adolf, 178–9, 189
IFLO, see International Friendship Koblenz, 84
Lodge Konrad, L., 24, 34
258 Index
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 18 Lübke, Heinrich, 198

Kreis, 3, 30, 36, 44, 66–8, 70, 72, 75, Luxemburger, Hans, 191
77, 78, 90, 100, 103, 121, 134,
145, 148, 164 magistrates courts (Amtsgerichte), 31
Kretschmer, Ernst, 109, 170, 172 Mailer, Norman, 196
Kreuzberg, 136–7 male prostitutes, 17, 20, 21, 36, 44,
Kriminalistik, 62, 108 51, 58, 59, 60, 69, 75, 95, 96, 101,
Kron, Jakob, 24, 45, 184 110, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130,
Kuhn, Gerhard, 59, 60, 118, 122, 123, 132, 133, 140, 143, 150, 151–4, 203
124, 128, 129, 132, 133, 138, 141 Mamita, 135, 136, 142
Kurfürstendamm, 114, 127, 131, 134 Mann, Klaus, 137
Männerschwarm bookstore, 206
Landers, Werner “Therese,” 142, 157, masculinist homosexuals, 48, 64,
161, 162 144–5, 173
Lang, Theo, 37, 100 masculinity, 3, 5, 9–10, 39, 50, 52,
Langemann, Hans, 62–3 53–5, 94, 104, 125, 142, 149, 151,
Laserstein, Botho, 95–6, 101, 183 153, 154, 155, 204, 208, 209, 211
Laura, 48–9 masquerade balls, 17, 114, 139, 143
Lautmann, Rüdiger, 207, 209 mass shelters, 123
Lavendelschwert bookstore, 206 Mattachine Society, 1, 68
lavender scare, 17 Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, 176
Law against the Distribution of medicine, 61, 71, 100, 181
Printed Material Dangerous to see also endocrinal research;
Youth, 105–6, 119, 158 Freudian psychoanalysis;
Law for the Protection of Youth, 120, genetic psychology;
158 phenomenological psychiatry;
Law Nr. 11, 23 social psychology
League for Human Rights, 64, 67, 88, Meier, Karl, 67, 68
90, 148 Meinhard, B., 107
League of 1948, 68 Meininger, Heinz, 71, 76, 79, 80
League of People’s Guardians memory, 12, 15, 24, 26, 69, 77, 101,
(Volkswartbund), 26, 61, 86, 94, 102, 174, 186, 193, 207
157, 180, 201 Mergen, Armand, 190
leathermen, 69, 130, 146, 148–51, Merlin Press, 188
154, 155, 156, 164, 208–9 metropoles of the gay landscape, 2,
Lemke, Rudolf, 37 18, 69, 164
Lerchenfeld Bath, 132 Metropol disco, 205
Lernet-Holenna, Alexander, 190 Meyer, Andreas, 188
lesbian, 2, 10, 62, 63, 67, 71, 98, 109, Miller, Henry, 171
110, 134, 150, 171, 205, 206, 210 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 39, 40, 191,
Leue, Gustave, 87, 88, 91, 92 196
liberalism, 25, 95, 116, 168, 169, 183 Moll, Albert, 18
Liebe und Ehe, 104 Montagu, Lord Edward Douglas-Scott,
Lipps, Hans, 71 176
Loitering report (Anhaltemeldungen), moral purity organizations, 26, 52, 94,
158–9 105
Lombroso, Cesare, 172 see also League of People’s Guardians
London, 1, 2, 6, 204, 206 Motor Sport Club of Cologne (MSC
Los Angeles, 2, 68 Cologne), 151, 208
Index 259
Müller, Herbert Ernst, 190, 192 35, 36, 44, 46, 59, 61, 63, 68, 71,
Müller-Emmert, Adolf, 201 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 91, 95,
Munich, 13, 17, 19, 31, 82, 84, 99, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 109,
111, 118, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137, 110, 117, 120, 145, 159, 167, 168,
151, 164, 165, 183, 191, 205, 206 170, 171, 172, 173, 180, 181, 182,
Münster, 38, 205 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190,
191, 192, 193, 196, 198, 199, 200,
national body, see Volkskörper 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 209, 210,
National Federation for Sexual 211
Rights, 68 Paragraph 175a, 12, 21, 32, 35, 76, 78,
National Socialism, see Nazism 95, 117, 120, 159, 174, 182, 186,
Nazi era, 1, 2, 8, 12, 15, 17, 20–2, 23, 187, 188, 200, 203
25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 35, 43, Paragraph 183a, 119, 183
51, 53, 55, 88, 96, 112, 121, 122, Paragraph 184, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 104,
139, 166, 172, 175, 185, 190, 193, 105, 119
194, 195, 202, 204, 207, 211 Paragraph 184a, 82, 104, 119
Nazism 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, Paris, 1, 17, 70, 114
20–2, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, parks, 4, 17, 21, 22, 31, 32, 90, 115,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44–7, 48, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130–1,
52, 53, 57, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69, 141, 150, 157, 163
73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 88, 95, 99, 100, Aachener Weihe 130
102, 110, 119, 121, 128, 137, 149, Beethovenpark 130
166, 172, 174, 184, 186, 193, 194, Luitpold Park 129
198, 204, 207, 208, 210, 212 Planten un Blomen 130
see also Nazi era Rosengarten 130, 150
Neudegg, L. D. Classen von Stadtpark 130
(pseudonym), see Clasen, Leo Stadtwald 130
Neue Zeitung, 99 Tiergarten 130
Neumayer, Fritz, 185 Volksgarten 130
New Left, 3, 102, 166, 167, 168, 169, Pathfinders, 80
192, 193, 194, 198, 205, 206, 207, Penal Law Committee of the West
209 German Legal Bar Association,
New York, 1, 2, 6, 204, 205, 206 182–3
Night of Long Knives, see Röhm penitentiary (Zuchthaus), 35
Putsch Pentecost Convention, 206
Nilius, Willy, 80 phenomenological psychiatry, 38–9,
Nollendorfplatz, 135 40, 42, 71, 72–4, 173, 174, 191
Norddeutsche Zeitung, 108 Philadelphia, 2
North Rhine-Westphalia, 23, 200, 202 pink lists, see homosexual files
November Revolution of 1918, 19 pink triangle, 45, 207, 208
Pink Triangle Press, 206
Odeonsplatz, 129 Pit Club disco, 205
Oldenburg, 23 policing, 5, 13, 16, 20–1, 23, 29–36,
Oyen, Hendrik van, 177–8 62, 69, 80, 82, 84, 87, 110, 112,
113, 116–17, 118–22, 123, 125,
Pan, 82, 92 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132,
Papen, Franz von, 20 133, 138, 139, 141, 152, 156–61,
Paragraph 175, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 162, 163, 164, 177,182, 195,
16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 210, 212
260 Index
Pools, 131–2, 204 Right to Oneself, 96–9

see also baths Ritter, Erich, 77
popular culture, 49, 59 Robbins, Harold, 171
Post Office, 85–6 rockers, 151
Praunheim, Rosa von, 205 Röhm Putsch, 43–4, 61, 194
prejudices, 15, 16, 36–7, 43–4, 47–50, Röhm, Ernst, 43–4, 61, 137
51–63, 100, 104, 109, 140, 145, Rolf Putziger Press, 89, 92, 106, 107,
174, 183, 188, 194, 195, 196, 204, 164
207, 208, 209, 210 Rope, 50
Prescha, Gerhard, 92, 106, 107, 184 Rosa Listen, see homosexual files
Prinz Eisenherz bookstore, 206 Rüdin, Ernst, 38
prison sentences, 21, 23, 28, 33, 34, ruins, 114, 122–4
35, 79, 80, 89, 91, 95, 106, 108, rule of law, 32
119, 120, 159, 169, 186, 187, 201,
203 Sagarin, Edward, 103, 193
progressivism, 168–9, 170, 175, 177, Salzgitter-Bad, 33
184, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195 San Francisco, 2, 6, 116, 204, 208
protective custody, (Schutzhaft) 21, 32 Scheidplatz, 129
Protestants, 25–6, 175, 177, 178, 179, Schelsky, Helmut, 54, 109, 170, 175,
180, 181, 189 191
Prussia, 20 Schlegel, Willhart, 172–4, 189, 191,
pseudohomosexual, 40, 101 194
public bathrooms, 21, 22, 30, 33, 116, Schmidt, Christian Hansen, 92, 107,
122, 126, 127, 128–30, 152, 156, 184
157, 159, 160, 163, 210 Schmidt, Günter, 48, 171
public sphere, 18, 86, 92, 96, 103, 105, Schnurbartdiele, 140, 188
107, 110, 111, 151, 189 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim, 179, 189
Putziger, Rolf, 89, 92, 106, 107, 164 Schöneberg, 135, 136
Schorpp, Karl, 79
Quick, 188, 191 Schult, Peter, 123, 135
queer theory, xi, 2, 18, 209 schwul, xii, 43, 205
Schwules Museum, see Gay Museum
Radzuweit, Friedrich, 64, 65, 69, 148 science, 8, 10, 15, 16, 18, 37, 47, 48,
Rebel without a Cause, 49 77, 78, 79, 90, 91, 92, 100, 101,
Rechtsstaat, see rule of law 104, 145, 148, 168, 169, 170, 171,
Redhardt, Reinhardt, 151–2 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 190, 191,
regional district courts 193, 195, 210
(Landesgerichte), 28, 83, 87, 106, see also endocrinal research;
108, 184, 197 Freudian psychoanalysis;
regional supreme courts Genetic psychology; medicine;
(Oberlandesgerichte), 23 phenomenological psychiatry;
Reich, Wilhelm, 184, 192 sexology; social psychology
Reiche, Reimund, 209 Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
Reinhard, Franz, 84, 85, 86, 100, 184 18, 20, 64, 65, 70, 72, 76, 77, 78,
“respectable” homosexuals, 10, 75, 83, 79, 100, 108, 170, 173, 184, 196
104, 139, 144–8, 205, 207 Seel, Pierre, 45–6
Reutlingen, 196–7 sexology, 78, 101, 191
Revolt shop, 204 sexual liberalism, 4, 98, 169, 176, 177,
Riesman, David, 54 181, 182, 183, 185, 187, 189, 199
Index 261
Sexual Revolution, 3, 10, 14, 153, Three Mark Decision, 29, 117, 184
167–8, 171, 188, 189, 211 Tom of Finland, 148, 155
Sexwelle, see Sexual Revolution train stations, 115, 116, 123, 126,
Social Democratic Party of Germany, 127–8, 129, 140, 155
26, 43, 44, 105, 169, 198, 201, transvestites, 81, 116, 117, 119, 121,
202, 203 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142,
Social Psychology, 54, 191 143, 144, 150, 155, 156, 162, 171,
socialism, 27, 29, 77, 116 183, 209
Society for Human Rights, 65, 90–1, see also drag
92, 107, 108, 196, 185 trash and smut law, 19, 105
Society for the Reform of Sexual Law, Treaty of Final Settlement, 46
79, 82, 91, 108 Truman, Harry, 62, 63
Society of Self-Owned, 18 Tunte, 10, 15, 16, 47, 50, 56, 81, 90,
see also Der Eigene 101, 126, 142–4, 146, 147, 150,
sodomy laws, 1, 10 153, 155, 156, 209
see also Paragraph 175 two-way mirrors (Einwegspiegel), 160,
Sonderweg, 8 163, 210
SPD, see Social Democratic Party of
Germany Ulrichs, Karl-Heinrich 37, 96
Spiegel, 166, 197 Union of the Persecuted of the Nazi
Spohr, Max, 18 Regime (VVN), 47
state administrative court Unter den Linden, 113
(Landesverwaltunggericht), 85, 157,
159 Vaernet, Carl, 21
Sternen Sauna, 132 Verschuer, Otmar Freiherr von, 38–9
St. Georg (neighborhood of Victim, 192
Hamburg), 115, 116, 129, 130, Volkskörper, 36, 119
131, 140, 156, 157, 158 Vox, 87–8, 92, 93, 95, 100
Stonewall Riots, 1, 2, 205, 206
St. Pauli (neighborhood of Hamburg), Warme, 15, 17
115–16, 118, 129, 138, 139, 140, Washington, DC, 2
155, 156, 157, 158, 162 Webb, Clifton, 48–9
Strangers on a Train, 49 Weber, Hermann, 70, 77
strategies, 4, 5, 64, 68, 69, 75, 102, Weg, 42, 89, 93, 93, 145, 163, 164
132, 148, 158, 205, 207 Weimar era, 2, 12, 13, 17, 19, 29, 45,
streets, 4, 13, 17, 20, 22, 60, 115, 119, 58, 64, 65, 69, 70, 71, 78, 80, 81,
123–4, 125, 126, 141, 143, 152, 105, 113, 114, 135, 139, 144, 167,
153, 158, 161, 195 173, 198, 210
Strichjungen, see male prostitutes Weisenborn, Günther, 98
Stuttgart, 83, 89, 118, 181, 183, 206 Wenzky, Oskar, 109
subculture, see gay scene Werres, Johannes, 67, 90–1, 106, 107,
suicide, 7, 36, 74, 96, 97, 98, 101, 104 108, 164, 174
Symonds, John Addington, 196 Wildeblood, Peter, 176
Wilmersdorf (neighborhood of
tactics, 5, 21, 29, 31, 34, 68, 125, 142, Berlin), 114
154, 155, 206, 210 Winterberg, Heinz, 143
Tea and Sympathy, 50 Wolfenden report, 176–7, 181, 184,
Thielicke, Helmut, 180–1 185, 188, 189
Thomä, Helmut, 191 Wolfenden, John, 176
262 Index
World League for Human Rights, 88, 153, 154, 158, 167, 174, 182, 183,
90 188, 194, 202, 209
World League for Sexual Reform, 66 youth protection squads, 158
World War II, 1, 2, 7, 15, 17, 22, 25, youth welfare bureaus, 30, 53, 59, 82,
38, 39, 44, 49, 54, 59, 66, 67, 69, 120, 123, 132, 156, 157, 158
70, 103, 111, 114, 136, 151, 161, youth welfare department, see youth
165, 170, 172, 175, 211 welfare bureaus
Wuermeling, Franz-Josef, 28, 201–2
youth, 5, 9, 16, 21, 35, 44, 47, 53, 56, Zahn, Peter von, 189
57, 59, 60, 61, 78, 80, 84, 85, 86, Zeegers, Machiel, 40
95, 97, 104, 105, 106, 112, 118, Zeit, 105, 106, 193
119, 120, 121, 123, 145, 151, 152, Zimmermann, Friedrich, 202

Clayton J. Whisnant (Auth.) - Male Homosexuality in West Germany - Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945-69-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

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Clayton J. Whisnant (Auth.) - Male Homosexuality in West Germany - Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945-69-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2012)

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Genders and Sexualities in History

Series Editors: John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady

John H. Arnold and Sean Brady (editors)

Genders and Sexualities in History Series

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

ISBN 978-1-349-34681-3 ISBN 978-1-137-02834-1 (eBook)

List of Abbreviations and Translations x

1 Introduction: The Neglected Postwar Period 1

2 Policing and Prejudice after 1945 15

3 The Homophile Movement 64

4 Struggle over the Gay Scenes’ Boundaries 112

5 Reforming Paragraph 175 166

6 Conclusion: Between Persecution and Freedom 204

Select Bibliography 246

Several institutions gave me research money, without which I could

Portions of Chapters 2 and 4 were previously published as ‘Styles of Mas-

Bundesrat Federal Council, the upper house of West Germany’s

The issue of terminology is a signiﬁcant challenge facing any histo-

As a synonym for ‘homosexual,’ I will also use the term ‘gay’—

the energy and radicalism of the post-Stonewall organizations. And in

First, it was a period in which gay scenes were re-established after

The criminalization of homosexuality in Germany has a long history,

By reconsidering the importance of the mid-twentieth century for the

My choice to study male homosexuality was very much inﬂuenced

was either accepted or contested at the level of the ‘everyday’ (Alltag).

This book focuses on various, often intense, struggles over homo-

increasingly shaped the anxieties of West Germany and the identities of

The conclusion will offer some observations on the legacy of the

As a child living in the early 1960s West Germany, Christian M. remem-

conceptualization of homosexuality as a sign of criminality, a mark of

Although there is evidence of a nascent scene of Warme (the warm ones,

By the early twentieth century, a third factor besides urbanization

homosexuals. Although the patterns of migration among German gay

seems to have become more repressive in the mid-1920s, leading to

law: Paragraph 175a, which speciﬁed certain aggravated cases involv-

carefully than they had done in the 1920s. Homosexuals continued to

Given the legal confusion and administrative chaos of the postwar

A heightened level of co-operation between the Catholic and Protes-

government was deeply committed to Familienpolitik, or family politics

Thanks to a widespread equation of Communism with Nazism under

penalty possible in a case involving Paragraph 175, namely a ﬁne of

Legally there was a tremendous amount of continuity between the Nazi

extensively by nearly all large city police departments by the 1920s,

the pictures. A long investigation ensued in which the police tried to

with the arrest of 17-year-old Otto Blankenstein. He had already been

entirely, but after World War II it was normally used in conjunction

was a failure of self-realization rooted in an impulse towards addic-

of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Edmund Bergler, Edward

psychoanalytically could count on being healed.’92 The speciﬁc meth-

others who disregarded the instruction to seek counseling and instead

well as from encyclopedias. One can imagine what kind of self-image

The experiences of the Nazi and postwar periods, then, tended to

by Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedländer, Hans Blüher, and other ‘masculin-

revealed by the plot to be indications of criminality.134 The same can be

the subject of homosexuality ﬁrst with the character of mildly effem-

with illness, moral putrefaction, and national weakness—only now they

Probably the most well known portrayal of homosexuality to come out

‘excess of women’ (Frauenüberschuss) left by the death of so many men in

During adolescence, especially during puberty, [such factors]

In this way, homosexuality was subsumed under the much larger

coming from conservative circles, Saller asserted that the acceleration

quickly learn about this and respond to their ‘excited curiosity.’ He

the early 1950s. The identiﬁcation of homosexuality with communism