words are weapons sharper than knives
Dec. 28th, 2010 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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:
And again, just down the page:
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.
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.
