Jason Crouthamel

Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War

Review Number: 2205 Publish date: Thursday, 7 December, 2017 Editor: Jason Crouthamel Peter Leese ISBN: 9783319334769 Date of Publication: 2017 Price: £74.50 Pages: 352pp. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Publisher url: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319334752 Place of Publication: Basingstoke Editor: Jason Crouthamel Peter Leese ISBN: 9783319334691 Date of Publication: 2016 Price: £63.00 Pages: 328pp. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Publisher url: https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319334691 Place of Publication: Basingstoke Reviewer: Ryan Ross

Gay Men's Emancipation Movement in Germany: 1897–1933

As has been true in contemporary actions for gay rights, tensions over gender identity in the early German homosexual rights movement presented a difficult challenge. This article provides an overview of the diverse scientific, ideological, and cultural perspectives on homosexuality within the male homosexual community in imperial and Weimar Germany. It also examines the effects of the World War I on how homosexual men conceptualized masculinity and the nature of homosexuality, and the struggle for civil rights in the Weimar years before the catastrophic Nazi seizure of power. Implications of German history for contemporary gay rights are noted.

“Don’t Think I’m Soft”

Since the late nineteenth century, the military had tried to instill in soldiers the sense that they were part of a new “family”—their military unit—which provided them emotional comfort, and the army emphasized that their primary bond was to their unit rather than their family of origin.1 Despite this expectation, men continued to seek emotional support from home. As the war dragged on, letters between soldiers and their families became a lifeline between men and women separated and suffering under hardships on the combat and home fronts. This chapter focuses on letters written by front soldiers, and it explores how soldiers described the emotional and psychological effects of the war to their wives, girlfriends, and families. What did they reveal and conceal about their emotional experiences at the front? How did they perceive themselves in relation to prevailing masculine ideals? How did they characterize the physical and psychological impact of mass violence to their loved ones at home?

Masculinity in Crisis

Medical, religious, and military authorities made unprecedented attempts to assert control over men’s sexual lives through mass media and militarization. However, it became impossible to conceal the contrast between the idealized image of the abstinent war hero and the reality of the war’s brutalizing effects. The trauma of war triggered ever-growing anxieties about the war’s impact on male sexuality. The failure to control soldiers’ sexual lives fueled escalating home-front fears of a crisis of masculinity, including anxieties about promiscuity, disloyalty, homosexual behavior at the front, and fears about sexual violence committed by soldiers returning home. Ordinary soldiers’ perspectives help us reconstruct this crisis “from below.” This chapter focuses on soldiers’ growing resentment of home-front expectations that they remain abstinent. In addition, it examines the impact of mass violence on their sexual and emotional life, including the effects of sexual deprivation.

I Wish I Were a Girl

In their letters home, front soldiers’ perspectives on masculine ideals were often ambivalent and changed in the face of violence and stress. However, it was in another medium, shared between men in the trenches rather than with civilians on the home front, where soldiers’ perceptions of masculinity were even more complex. Front newspapers produced by soldiers, the focus of this chapter, provide an interesting glimpse into how the war shaped their perceptions of masculinity and sexuality, shedding light on the complex and elusive ways in which soldiers constructed ideals of manliness. Brutalized soldiers tried to find a sense of intimacy and emotional sustenance, even when masculine norms prohibited them from exploring “effeminate” desires and emotions.

The Ideal Man Goes to War

Ideals of masculinity became increasingly militarized in imperial Germany. Middle-class social organizations coordinated efforts with military, medical, and political elites to carefully construct a hegemonic masculine ideal based on the warrior image. While subsequent chapters will analyze ordinary soldiers’ reactions to this hegemonic ideal and the behaviors and emotions they explored to cope with the stress of warfare, this chapter focuses on the dominant masculine ideal that was disseminated in imperial German culture before and during the war. It investigates three interrelated themes: the popular image of the “good comrade,” idealized emotional and sexual relations between front soldiers and women at home, and military and civilian efforts to control male sexual behavior.

Love in the Trenches: German Soldiers’ Conceptions of Sexual Deviance and Hegemonic Masculinity in the First World War

Germany’s traumatic experience with total war in 1914–18 presents challenges for historians dealing with the history of gender. The responses of common soldiers to the trauma of war, and their conceptions of masculinity and sexuality, were complex. While the all-pervasive image of the steel-nerved, disciplined warrior suggests an easily identifiable, militarized egemonic ideal, this masculine image was fragile and, as Monika Szczepaniak recently noted, tends to be oversimplified.1 Sociologist R. W. Connell argues that while hegemonic masculinity was defined in opposition to subordinate forms of masculinity, perceptions and constructions of hegemonic masculinity were elusive, contested and always changing.2 To what degree did soldiers embrace dominant images of masculinity? As Christa Hammerle recently observed, it is difficult to uncover the degree to which hegemonic, militarized conceptions of masculinity were accepted by the majority of soldiers who experienced the Great War.3

We Need Real Men

As heterosexual soldiers experimented with feminine characteristics in order to survive the brutality of the trenches, many homosexual men discovered their more masculine side. The war did not create new sexual identities, but it did allow men to explore, define, and evaluate their existing gender and sexual identities within the unique world of the front experience. For some men who considered themselves innately homosexual, to use the term employed by the famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, this meant that war and comradeship became a prism through which it was possible to define existing self-perceptions of sexual orientation in increasingly “masculine” terms.1

Contested commemorations: republican war veterans and Weimar political culture

entire British Expeditionary Force to the continent was actually a controversial matter. The quirks in this book are unfortunate, but its main argument, even if it takes some time to become clear, is an important one. Though not as original as the author claims, the book nevertheless has a place in a growing historiography about the Royal Navy and trade defence in the period before and at the start of the First World War.

Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918. By Andrew Donson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ix plus 329 pp.)

The first comprehensive history of German youth in the First World War, this book investigates the dawn of the great era of mobilizing teenagers and schoolchildren for experiments in state building and extreme political movements like fascism and communism. It investigates how German teachers could be legendary for their sarcasm and harsh methods but support the worlds most vigorous school reform movement and most extensive network of youth clubs. As a result of the war mobilization, teachers, club leaders, and authors of youth literature instilled militarism and nationalism more deeply into young people than before 1914 but in a way that paradoxically relaxed discipline. The book details how Germany had far more military youth companies than other nations as well as the worlds largest Socialist youth organization, which illegally agitated for peace and a proletarian revolution. Mass conscription also empowered female youth, particularly in Germanys middle-class youth movement, the only one anywhere that fundamentally pitted itself against adults. The book addresses discourses as well as practices and covers a breadth of topics, including crime, work, sexuality, gender, family, politics, recreation, novels and magazines, social class, and everyday life.