In recent years the outlines of a new master narrative of modern German history have begun to emerge in a wide range of publications. This narrative draws heavily on the theoretical and historical works of Michel Foucault and Detlev J. K. Peukert, and on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, Max Weber, and the French theorists of postmodernism. In it, rationalization and science, and specifically the extended discursive field of “biopolitics” (the whole complex of disciplines and practices addressing issues of health, reproduction, and welfare) play a key role as the marker and most important content of modernization. Increasingly, this model has a function in German historiography similar to that long virtually monopolized by the “Sonderwegthesis”: it serves as a broad theoretical or interpretive framework that can guide the construction of meaning in “smaller” studies, which are legitimated by their function in confirming or countering this broader argument.
In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”
The politics of sexuality in modern Germany was complicated, contradictory, and multivalent. Reflecting on how to conceptualize that complexity is worthwhile, for doing so allows us to formulate multiple interpretive perspectives. After briefly sketching two of the most common scholarly interpretations, this article explores the usefulness of a third model, one in which the political dynamic of the broad and complex debate about sexuality is neither univalent (i.e., moving toward greater freedom or greater repression) nor binary (moving toward both), but "trivalent." This perspective reveals the usefulness of seeing a political dynamic set up by conflicts and contrasts among three loose groupings that stand out among the many voices debating the nature and meaning of sexuality. At the same time, it uncovers and defines the productivity of multiple contradictions and conflicts, as well as the contingent coherences, they generated. Making use of particular readings of Foucauldian theory and the theory of complex systems, the article suggests the value of thinking about the politics of sexuality in terms of processes of change, as well as structures of power.Die Sexualpolitik im modernen Deutschland war kompliziert, widersprüchlich und multivalent. Es lohnt sich darüber nachzudenken, wie sich diese Komplexität in Begriffe fassen lässt, denn dadurch können wir multiple Interpretationsperspektiven formulieren. Dieser Aufsatz skizziert zunächst zwei der gängigsten wissenschaftlichen Interpretationen und erforscht dann den Nutzen eines dritten Models, bei dem die politische Dynamik der breiten und komplexen Debatte über Sexualität weder univalent (im Sinne davon, dass sie sich auf größere Freiheit oder größere Unterdrückung zubewegt) noch binär (sich auf beides zubewegend), sondern "trivalent" ist. Diese Perspektive zeigt wie nützlich es ist, eine von Konflikten und Kontrasten zwischen drei losen Gruppierungen bestimmte politische Dynamik innerhalb der von zahlreichen unterschiedlichen Meinungen gekennzeichneten Debatte über die Natur und die Bedeutung von Sexualität zu sehen. Gleichzeitig werden die Produktivität von multiplen Widersprüchlichkeiten und Konflikten sowie die durch sie generierten eventuellen Kohärenzen aufgedeckt und definiert. Indem Foucaultsche Theorien und die Theorie komplexer Systeme herangezogen werden, wird der Wert des Nachdenkens über Sexualpolitik bezüglich Veränderungsprozessen sowie Machtstrukturen angedeutet. T HERE has been an extraordinary outpouring of books on the modern history of sexuality in Europe and particularly in Germany in the past two decades. A spate of recent publications surveying the field, or covering particular geographies over I would like to thank my colleagues , each of whom helped me to think through the issues presented in this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for CEH, and particularly the editor Andrew Port for his diligence and acuity in offering constructive criticisms and suggestions regarding both style and content.
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