Benno Gammerl’s beautifully written and presented book insists on the centrality of queer history to German history, and is well placed to realise its aim of reaching a broad audience with its compelling message. Gammerl, Professor of the History of Gender and Sexuality at the European University Institute in Florence, was the first scholar to be awarded a habilitation on the basis of their work in queer history (2017); his remains the only such habilitation in History in the German academic system to date. This sorry state of affairs will surely change in the coming years. Gammerl is playing a crucial role in building the field in Germany, not only through his scholarship, but also through his leadership of the “Queer Contemporary History in German-speaking Europe” research network1, funded by the German Research Foundation (2022–2024: co-led with Martin Lücke and Andrea Rottmann). In his latest book, Gammerl has written a stylish account, which conveys complex ideas in accessible prose: it is essential reading for anyone interested in how matters of gender, sex, and sexuality have shaped the course of German history across the last 150 years.

“Queer: Eine deutsche Geschichte“, in part, takes forward an intellectual and methodological trajectory from Gammerl’s habilitation.2 However, Gammerl ambitiously widens his focus by moving beyond the West German context and considering Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and East Germany. Gammerl begins his book with a succinct analysis of queer temporalities. He dismisses the view that the 2020s might be perceived as the “return” of the golden queer 1920s; a historiographical narrative of rise, fall, and then rise again is convincingly presented here as not much more persuasive than one of linear progress. Instead, queer historians have to be able to dynamically move between the ‘abyss of discrimination’ and the ‘heights of recognition’. Steps forward for some queer people have meant setbacks for others. For example, Gammerl details how the male transvestite readership of the 1920s magazine Das 3. Geschlecht welcomed their newfound space in print culture, but used this opportunity to distance themselves from more gender transgressive queer elements (p. 13). Therefore, Gammerl takes it as axiomatic that stigmatisation, emancipation, and normalisation are not separate but simultaneous developments. Hence, they are best analysed side-by-side.

Gammerl’s book is structured chronologically. His first chapter, on Imperial Germany, starts not with the sodomy law from 1871, Paragraph 175 – as is common in many accounts – but with an exploration of the queer potential of the women’s movement. Gammerl opens each chapter by analysing an arresting image, and that is especially effective at the start of the second chapter, on the Weimar Republic. Gammerl directly addresses the reader, asking us about our first associations to this image: do we see a collectable erotic photograph, or an illustration from a queer magazine? Is the subject of the photo a woman or a man? Or a male transvestite or a trans woman? Or perhaps we did not think about gender at all, but were struck by the orientalising pose of the individual? (p. 62) With this dialogic introduction, Gammerl adroitly sets the scene for an analysis not only of the profound gender upheaval of the 1920s, but also of the national and racialised perspectives that continue to influence the course of queer movements.

After a chapter on queer persecution – and survival – in the Third Reich, Gammerl moves onto discussing the 1950s and 1960s in East and in West Germany. This fourth chapter opens with a still from the film Anders als du und ich (Par. 175), directed by Veit Harlan (17 years after the film-maker’s notorious Jud Süß). Harlan’s involvement alone points to some troubling continuities from the Third Reich into the Federal Republic. The National Socialist version of Paragraph 175, introduced in 1935, went totally unchanged until 1969: as Gammerl alludes to, a fact that ought to be more central in our understandings of denazification and democratisation in the Federal Republic. The East German state, meanwhile, did not enforce the Nazi version of Paragraph 175, and repealed the statute altogether in 1968. In one of several brief yet clarifying references beyond German borders, Gammerl explains how Anders als du und ich, in order to make it past the censors, was significantly changed in the Federal Republic (an additional scene was filmed, featuring the arrest of a queer protagonist, who was presented as a danger to youth). Yet the film ran in its original form, under the original title of Das dritte Geschlecht, in both Austria and Switzerland.

A fifth chapter explores gay, lesbian, and trans social movements in the 1970s, starting with the East German Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB). Gammerl then moves onto the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The pandemic was certainly a stigmatising and deathly force, but Gammerl shows how the sexual health response brought with it normalizing consequences. Those who called for the most restrictive and oppressive measures, such as Peter Gauweiler in Bavaria, did not win out. Sexual health campaigns resulted in an increased circulation of images of naked men, and an increased frankness in dealing with intimate matters and contraception.

As ever, Gammerl is alert to the shadow side. He draws attention to one poster designed by the DAH (German AIDS Help), which depicts the naked torso of a muscular man, reclining on the beach: the caption encourages the viewer to always bring condoms and lube with them when they visit the seaside. In this ‘beautiful new world of diverse sexual options’ Gammerl asks: how about the man who found no sexual partner and had packed condoms and lube in vain? How about those who doubted their attractiveness? Gammerl later applies the same scrutiny to debates over monogamy, child-rearing, and equal marriage. The title of the sub-heading here (p. 203) is fitting: ‘normality as challenge’. Such a perspective warns us against narrating history – whether consciously or unconsciously – as a teleological story towards ever greater equality. The way in which Gammerl confronts this tendency, and not just his attention to matters of gender and sexuality, is what makes this such a queer book.

Gammerl’s penultimate chapter opens with an image of five women sitting around a breakfast table, including Audre Lorde, whose stay in West Berlin in the 1980s gave a crucial catalyst to the Black German movement.3 In 2021, the district parliament in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg voted to rename the Northern part of Manteuffelstraße Audre-Lorde-Straße. That Prussian Minister President Otto Theodor von Manteuffel will have to – partly – make way for Audre Lorde, who once described herself as a ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, shows that there have been at least some step forwards in the direction of a more intersectional memory culture. Yet, in this chapter Gammerl also explores racism within queer German communities, and historicises the powerful force of homonationalism, including the process by which homophobic sentiments are projected onto racialised minorities. Given contemporary developments, not least the political success enjoyed by the AfD (Alternative for Germany), this historiographic task is all the more urgent.

Gammerl describes “Queer: Eine deutsche Geschichte“ as a ‘ride through 150 years of queer history’ (p. 233) and his book certainly has this sprightly quality: it is a pleasure to read. Some readers will of course prefer to stop the ride occasionally and to linger, in order to inspect the scenery in closer detail. In particular, readers should not expect to find footnotes or a formal referencing system. In lieu of this apparatus, Gammerl includes a helpful biographical essay in the appendix, which succintly familiarises the reader with recent academic scholarship in each chronological area. And indeed there has been an extraordinary burst of such scholarship over the last three to four years, predominantly in English. Not all of these books have won the recognition they deserve beyond the field of queer history. But it is not enough for queer historians to talk (mostly) to each other. Benno Gammerl offers here an instructive roadmap for queer historians – and historians more generally – in reaching beyond the intellectual circles with which they are most familiar, and in helping move supposedly “marginal” questions towards the centre of how we think about and approach the past.

Notes:
1 Queere Zeitgeschichten im deutschsprachigen Europa, Wissenschaftliches Netzwerk der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG, https://www.queere-zeitgeschichten.net/index.html (01.12.2023).
2 Benno Gammerl, anders fühlen. Schwules und lesbisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik: Eine Emotionsgeschichte, München 2021.
3 See further Tiffany Florvil’s excellent book: Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, Urbana, IL 2020, which has recently been translated into German: Tiffany Florvil, Black Germany. schwarz, deutsch, feministisch – Die Geschichte einer Bewegung, Berlin 2023.