words are weapons sharper than knives

[truepenny]

[ETA: Disambiguation: the book I am talking about is Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth, Harvard University Press, 2004. NOT Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow, Scholastic, 2005.]

There's a curious phenomenon in historiography of the Nazis; I've mentioned it before: the insidious way in which, if you aren't very careful, you will find yourself reinscribing the terms of the very discourse you're supposed to be studying. Hitler's ignorance and therefore innocence of the genocide of the Jews is probably the creepiest of these memes. It was a popular defense of the Fuehrer during his reign, and then got picked up by Hitler apologist David Irving on his long descent from fire-eating muckraker to Holocaust denier. Another example is the idea of the "ethnic German" which historiographers have a distressing tendency to treat as unproblematic despite its clear ideological freight. And a third, brought again and forcibly to my attention tonight by Michael H. Kater's Hitler Youth, is "homosexuality."

In discussing the endemic problem of discipline in the Hitler-Jugend, Kater says:

As early as 1933, Hitler told Schirach that Reich President Paul von Hindenburg was cross with him because "the young people did not show the necessary respect to old officers, teachers, and ministers of the church." Later in the Third Reich, HJ miscreants in their early teens were known for committing petty theft, obstructing railroad tracks, and accosting civilians in the streets. As for the older ones, traffic violations such as racing with staff cars became a serious problem, sometimes resulting in the injury of innocent bystanders. HJ leaders were habitually driving their cars with such speed that often "they cannot be brought to a necessary stop," according to an official complaint. Homosexuality and sadism became rampant among HJ members. In one notorious case in the summer of 1938, a mid-level teenage leader inflicted long-lasting torture on his charges by tying their wrists and ankles during an outing and then beating them with his steel-studded belt.
(52-53)

And again, just down the page:

During the war years boys and girls continued to engage in crimes like theft, impersonation, or gross acts of vandalism. [...] Nazi character training notwithstanding, homosexuality could not be curbed, and more women were being sexually molested than had been the case in peace time.
(53)

In both cases "homosexuality" is being vaguely lumped together with vandalism, rape, insubordination, theft, and joy-riding (the longer I look at these passages, the longer my list of problems gets), and Kater doesn't define either the Nazi use of the term or his own. He seems perfectly willing to accept homosexuality, like sadism, as nothing more nor less than a problem that crops up when discipline among teenagers is lax.

I know basically nothing at all about LGBTQ issues in Germany between the beginning of the twentieth century and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, but I do know, from reading about the Nazis, that there seems to have been a general association between thuggishness, love of (para)military social groups and structures, and what is referred to as homosexuality (also "perversion"), typified by Ernst Röhm, the SA leader murdered in the so-called "Röhm Putsch" of 1934. Röhm is invariably tagged as a "notorious homosexual" by historiographers of the Nazis; it's an epithet like rosy-fingered Dawn or ox-eyed Hera, and like those epithets, its meaning is actually kind of slippery. Certainly it is used, by both Röhm's contemporaries and historiographers of the Nazis, as code for "pervert" and "degenerate," a way to emphasize Röhm's bad character and general undesirability. I have no idea how Röhm understood his sexual identity, if he ever thought about it at all, but using the word "homosexual," as it was applied to Röhm by his contemporaries--or to these Hitler Youths--without stopping to interrogate it, unpack it, or even signal that it is a loaded term and neither transparent nor value-neutral, is sloppy scholarship, if nothing worse.

Comments

[boxofdelights]

I remember my father-in-law saying "criminals and homosexuals!" to describe the brownshirts. "And do you know who they were? Criminals and homosexuals! The worst scum Hitler could scrape off the streets!" I never managed to say, well, criminals, homosexuals, scum, one of these things is not like the others.

My father-in-law was a Viennese Jew, born in 1922, sent, alone, as a refugee to Palestine at the age of 15. I don't know whether "criminals and homosexuals!" was an association he picked up in childhood. But the idea that a certain portion of humanity is scum: he believed that.

[slweippert.livejournal.com]

IMHO, reading what you quoted, it sounds to me like the Hitler Youth bullies weren't really homosexual, they were rapists who weren't too picky about which sex they did it to. They were high on the power trip that torture and brutality gives.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality and Fascism may be the book you want on more general attitudes to homosexuality in C20th Germany. Since we don't, so far, to the best of my knowledge, have a decent work in English on the German sex reform tradition of the pre-WWI and Weimar periods (ignore the Wolff biography of Magnus Hirschfeld, or at least, read with caution because, although she had known Hirschfeld in her youth, there are quite a lot of bloopers to do with the wider context).

If you can bear a lot of rather naive psychohistorical rambling along with some really useful material, Klaus Theweleit's 2 volumes Male Fantasies (1989) are about Germany and the traumas of masculinity and the response in the White Terror, etc, immediately post-WWI.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you! (Thank you thank you thank you!)

[themagdalen.livejournal.com]

Second the motion on Theweleit, particularly I think Vol I.

[bluestalking.livejournal.com]

Yikes, thanks for pointing that out.

(I had a moment of fear where I confused it with the book by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, and wondered how you can win a Newbery Honor with that kind of thinking these days. Relieeeef.)

[(Anonymous)]

Same here. Had to do a google to be sure this wasn't the Hitler Youth *I* read.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up about the possible confusion! I have added a disambiguation note at the top of the post.

[fellphilosophy.livejournal.com]

What has disturbed me during my own research on the topic, is that homosexuality is quite often confused with pedophilia, especially when it comes to some of Hitler's officers and their actions during wartime.

[svalar-unnir.livejournal.com]

Is this in modern scholars? *cries*

Isherwood

[(Anonymous)]

If you want to know more about pre-1933 homosexuality in Germany, I highly recommend Christopher Isherwood's autobiography, Christopher and his Kind. It is best if you have a familiarity with his Berlin Stories. It is not scholarly, and it does not shed a lot of light on what homosexual relationships between Germans would have been like, but it does shine a spotlight on what I can only describe as sexual tourism in pre-ww2 Germany. Isherwood describes late-1920s, early-1930s Berlin as the Paris for "his kind" - meaning gay men. He outlines a fascinating arrangement wherein he lived with a young German man in the man's family home. The family was perfectly well aware of what was going on (they needed Isherwood's money and frankly did not seem to care what the two of them were doing in their room - their son was very handsome and Isherwood was not the first or only of his lovers who helped support them) but Isherwood's lover's brother was a budding Nazi and HATED it. You get the impression that the arrangement was not unique. It provides a window into sex and politics and exploitation in that era, and W.H. Auden has a cameo when he shows up and cohabitates with Isherwood for a few weeks.

Re: Isherwood

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

there's the whole jazz/degeneracy/homosexuality associations in Berlin of that era that you see in Isherwood's fiction (delightfully played with in All The Queens Men, which has Eddy Izzard as a bisexual german female impersonator)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

You've read The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
by Richard Plant, right?

Justifying Hitler' speech,July 13 1934.

[(Anonymous)]

Hitler was right saying he had Roehm to be shot,because the latter had had broken loyalty to Hitler as the Chancellor of the Reich.Roehm kept talks with others(including ex-Chancellor General von Schleicher,by intermediary) strict secret from the Fuerer,who was under high responsibility before the German nation.That was the main motivation of such a cruel Hitler' action against his "old friend".And one should dismiss whatever fables concerning President Hindenburg' blackmailing Hitler with marshal Law.I assert,Hitler was by no means manipulated.This is the man of absolute integrity.Adieu!