In postwar Germany, the psychology of fascism became synonymous with sexual repression. So much so that an entire generation premised its antifascist political struggle on associated precepts: Nazi leaders were closeted homosexuals, Nazi soldiers sexual sadists, Nazi sympathizers insalubriously repressed in their otherwise normative heterosexual desire. Political rehabilitation, the thinking went, would follow from sexual liberation. But whose sexuality was actually repressed under Nazism—and to what ends? How, moreover, did sexuality acquire this centripetal force in the imagination of the postwar German Left, as it not only grappled with the past but attempted to forge a new politics—one that would be uninhibited, truthful, democratic, and humane?
In this course, we will take up key questions posed in the work of intellectual historian Dagmar Herzog—questions concerning the intersection of law, medicine, sexuality, religion, and genocidal violence, as these came to expression in fascist, postfascist, and anti-postfascist discourses in the decades after the Second World War. Reading widely in three of Herzog’s major works—Sex After Fascism, Cold War Freud, and The Question of Unworthy Life—we will ask: To what extent was Nazism a reaction against the sexual liberalism of Weimar Germany? To what extent was it a continuation of extant Christian nationalism? And how have intellectuals, politicians, and artists, from the 1960s to the 1990s, utilized the terms of psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and disability to make sense of Nazi depravity? Additional readings from key theoretical and historical documents, including those by Wilhelm Reich, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Anna Freud, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, will provide context and frameworks for further questions, such as: How did fascist technologies of gender contribute to eugenicist discourse? What definitions of the “normal” and the “abnormal” facilitated the codification of ableism, antisemitism, transphobia, and homophobia in Nazi law and medicine? And what were the various responses of successive postwar generations, as ever more detailed and nuanced information about the Nazi regime, its sexual and reproductive politics in particular, came gradually to light?
This course is available for "remote" learning and will be available to anyone with access to an internet device with a microphone (this includes most models of computers, tablets). Classes will take place with a "Live" instructor at the date/times listed below.
Upon registration, the instructor will send along additional information about how to log-on and participate in the class.