Dagmar Herzog

What Incredible Yearnings Human Beings Have

I was preoccupied by a number of puzzles during the time I was researching and writing Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History . Among other things, I was interested in the puzzle of historical causation. I was curious to use the tools of comparative history as well as the study of transnational flows of people and ideas, and of market forces and wars and diplomatic pressures, to understand what particular conjunctions of multiple factors may have caused sexual cultures (including laws, behaviours, and values) to move either in more liberal-progressive or more neotraditionalist-conservative or overtly repressive directions. At the same time, and throughout, I was all too acutely aware that ‘sexuality’ – that elusive and contested ‘it’ – was and is precisely one of those realms of human existence that continually defy and confuse our assumptions about what exactly constitutes restriction or liberation. I was thus also especially interested to reconstruct as well as possible, using the broadest range of types of sources, how exactly people in the past expressed how they imagined and experienced whatever they thought sexuality was and, in addition, how they battled over the ethics of sexual matters. On the one hand, sexuality – like faith or work – is one of those phenomena in which representations and reality are inevitably inextricable, and I was constantly fascinated with how people grappled with that inextricability, in all its complex manifestations. After all, not only what was considered appropriate or normal or good (in the eyes of God, or the neighbours, or the doctors, or the activists, or the popular advice-writers), but also what was considered (or even physiologically felt ) as anxiety-producing or immoral and/or – not least – as sexually thrilling or deeply satisfying has clearly varied considerably across time and place. On the other hand, I was particularly interested in the recurrent and remarkable gaps between lived experiences and personal, private insights, and that which was perceived to be publicly, politically defensible. The gap between the quietly lived and the openly articulable could be stark; it often took tremendous courage to defend sexual freedom, in dictatorships certainly, but also in democracies. I therefore also paid special attention to how those defences were framed, in each place and moment, and with what intended and unintended effects. So while the twentieth century in Europe is often called ‘the century of sex’ and seen as an era of increasing liberalisation, I was convinced of the need to complicate the liberalisation paradigm.

Introduction: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century

The transformation of European military history from a marginal enclave into a major growth area and enormously respected subfield of the discipline of history writ large has taken place within the last dozen years. Whether the sources of the booming growth in military history and its increasing integration into the mainstream of the discipline can be found in the end of the Cold War and the resurgence in many parts of the globe of interethnic strife and ‘hot wars’ (and, more recently, the increasing incidents of terrorism and subsequent attempts to combat it), or in the succession of numerous anniversaries related to past wars (perhaps most significantly the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1995), or in dynamics more internal to the subfield of military history which more and more opened itself to wider social historical trends (e.g. an interest in the daily lives of soldiers, the impacts of wars on home fronts, or the aftermaths of wars in military occupations and new regimes) even as social historians themselves became increasingly interested in utilizing diaries and letters produced during wars remains an open question. All these factors were consequential. What is indisputable is the richness and variety of the resulting research findings and analyses.1

Afterword—Looking for Love

The Afterword reflects on the contributions of this volume, emphasizing the benefits of a comparativist perspective: a wealth of new data about lived religion and ordinary people’s practices and beliefs in the realm of marital intimacy, and about just how powerfully national cultural-political contexts can shape reproductive behaviours; insight into the astonishing variability in the ways State–clergy–laity constellations could play out; and a far more robust grasp of the vigour of progressive opinion within Catholic Europe in the decades between the 1920s and 1970s than either secular historians or current official Catholic accounts might lead one to believe. But the Afterword also reflects on the historical conundrums of causality and contingency, exploring the paradoxical impact of the encyclical and its ambiguous afterlife in our twenty-first-century present.

Sex and Secularization in Nazi Germany

In the historiography of the Third Reich, the subjects of sex and religion have generally been considered separately, and the issue of Nazism’s impact on processes of secularization has hardly been considered at all. Yet if we are to make sense of Nazisms sexual politics we cannot do so without attending to the fierce struggle that raged throughout the Third Reich between Nazism and Christianity. Conversely, we cannot fully comprehend what was at stake in the combative relationship between Nazism and Christianity without taking into account how much of that relationship had to do with sex. Above all, historians of Christianity need to begin acknowledging how central sexual issues have been to processes of secularization in the twentieth century. Numerous books and articles have been written about the churches under Nazism, but while several of these do mention the Nazi campaign to charge Catholic priests with homosexuality, they have remarkably little to say about any other sexual issues. This is all the more perplexing considering how urgently—and despite the atmosphere of terror and reprisals against those who would disagree with the regime—Catholic spokespersons in particular, though at times also Protestants, criticized the Nazis for their celebration of nudity and strenuously tried to defend Christian marriage against Nazi encouragement of pre- and extramarital heterosexu-ality. It is also surprising in light of the fact that the competition and cooperation between Nazis and Catholics over sexual mores provided the single most important context for the regime’s elaboration of its own particular sexual vision.