Queer Home Berlin? Making Queer Selves and Spaces in the Divided City, 1945-1970

Abstract

This dissertation examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners from the end of the Nazi reign in 1945 through the city’s Cold War division and to the onset of the gay and lesbian liberation movements in the early 1970s, offering a queer perspective on urban history, the history of sexuality and gender, and German and European history. Focusing on specific spaces – the home, bars, streets and parks, and prisons – it explores how these spaces facilitated and restricted the possibilities of living queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that in different ways characterized both German postwar states. This study critically engages with the myth and historiography of queer Berlin. It traces key elements of what defined it in the Weimar Republic, such as a large subculture; the cooperative relationships among police, sexual scientists, and activists; and the contentious position of male prostitution and asks if and how these re-emerged after 1945. After a period of openness in the immediate postwar years, the West Berlin police began to repress queer nightlife in the mid-1950s and revoked its politics of tolerance toward “transvestites,” a category that included transgender subjectivities and public cross-dressers. Effeminate men, “transvestites,” and young men were policed most intensely. Despite this, queer Berliners continued socializing in public. In the 1960s, they started actively resisting state repression, controlling access to queer bars through codes and legally challenging police surveillance. By privileging queer voices over those of state and medical authorities, with a focus on lesbian and transgender subjectivities, and attending to the role of non-normative gender for male queer subjectivities, the dissertation intervenes in English- and German-language historiographies of queer Germany that are presently focused on the state’s persecution of male homosexuality. With a theoretical toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the study explores sources from the archives of the LGBTQ movements, such as personal narratives, publications of the homophile movement, fiction, photographs, and artworks, and state-produced files, for instance police reports, Stasi documents, and prisoner files. In the end, Queer Home Berlin? illuminates how the practices of making spaces queer were entwined with the practices of making queer selves, and vice versa. The dissertation argues that the absences and imbalances of the archive and the law matter for queer German histories. The comparative paucity of sources on queer subjectivities from East Germany speaks of the different conditions for making queer publics in West and East Germany. The relative lack of documentation of lesbian lives is testimony to women’s limited access to public spaces. The law’s ignorance of female homosexuality did not stop the state from policing women’s queerness, and the GDR’s decriminalization of male homosexuality did not mean that queer men were liberated. By exploring Berlin’s queer(ed) spaces from the beginnings of the Cold War through the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the first decade of the city’s complete division, the study also contributes to the historiography of Berlin as divided and entangled city. Its close examination of the meanings of the Wall for queer East and West Berliners suggests that the East German government harnessed homophobic discourses to distract its own citizens and the world public from its murderous border regime, highlighting an as yet unexplored dimension of the Berlin Wall and the political uses of homophobia in German history.