"Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together": Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany

Rosemarie Trockel and the Body of Society

“…Dagmar Herzog (1998), in a fascinating analysis of post-Holocaust memory and the sexual revolution in West Germany, explores the troubling and intertwined role that gender and sexual identity experienced during these years, and the degree to which this coupling was filtered through the lens of history. For the generation of ’68, there was an implicit (and sometimes explicit) connection between sexuality and fascism, bearing a profound impact upon how the sexual revolution and the larger issue of sexual politics (inclusive and beyond the case of feminism) unfolded, as well as the internal conflicts that marked the leftist movement.…”

“…The pairings in Living Means Not Good Enough emphasize a consistent pattern in Trockel’s oeuvre, where reflections upon gender are never too far from reflections upon Germany’s political and cultural past: the former seemingly a vehicle through which historical memory is channeled, and societal sins are revealed. The ‘lessons of the Holocaust’, to return to Herzog’s (1998) analysis, were partially understood through the lens of sexual and gender conflict, and Trockel’s art seems intent to both insist upon and engage with this dialogue. The well-documented Nazi predilection toward gender stereotyping – including the feminization of weakness, marking Jews and other ‘undesirable’ groups as feminine – was coupled with what Herzog describes as the often ‘titillating relationship between pleasure and Nazi evil’, as documented by postwar testimonials by survivors and participants, where sadistic drives were often couched in sexual terms.…”

“… 10. Herzog (1998: 397) continues: ‘The general message seems to have been that the Nazis themselves encouraged promiscuity and illegitimacy and that their sexual immorality was inseparable from their other crimes.’ …”

Historical Research on the Self and Emotions

“…The rebellious youth of the 1960s and 1970s did not so much reject the cool style as demand a greater array of "safety valves" for "ventilating" inappropriate intensity-in rock concerts, transcendental meditation, or wife-swapping parties (Allyn, 2001;Herzog, 1998Herzog, , 2005Wattier & Picard, 2002). Doubting the usefulness of these developments, some social critics in the United States decried the soullessness of a public realm so dominated by concern for personal autonomy and neutrality that the whole burden of meaning, morality, and values had to be carried by the home.…”

Genetic Counseling for Sex Chromosome Anomalies (SCAs) in Israel and Germany: Assessing Medical Risks According to the Importance of Fertility in Two Cultures

“…It is this collective ideal that is responsible for the Israeli quest for a healthy and fertile child, a quest that also constructs Israeli collective identity by regulating mothers' and fetuses' bodies. 13 Regarding contemporary Germany, Dagmar Herzog (1998) argues that regulation of the private body is highly affected by that society's traumatic Nazi history and the Nazi regime's handling of racially or genetically "unworthy lives." This claim is exemplified, for instance, by Andrea Wuerth (1997), who argues that the history of the Third Reich is responsible for the morals of the unified German state, which strongly protects all life (including stem cells and embryos), a tendency she understands to be a reaction to the past and a hallmark of the new "morally rehabilitated" Germany.…”