Part I

Before going into the sexual politics of both the GDR and the FRG, there are some common misconceptions about German history that need to be addressed first.

Although the Weimar Republic has since the 1930s become somewhat synonymous with decadence and sexual freedom, this experience was far from universal nor was it completely unchallenged. Although individuals advocating sexual freedom like Hirschfeld emerged as public intellectuals in the Republic, it does not necessarily follow that their advice seeped into everyday practice. Nor were all sex reformers as radical as Hirschfeld, most mainstream reformers emphasized healthy sexuality as a function of marriage, not sexuality for its own sake. Public celebrations of sexuality and other "decadent" pastimes generally tended to shrink once outside urban centers like Berlin. Historians of Weimar Germany today draw a more differentiated picture of Weimar's culture of sex. For example, examinations of Weimar's various discourses about the body and nudism often betray a profound concern over racial degeneration, strict militarization and regimentation of nudes, and an association of the health of an individual's body with that of the wider health of the nation. Many of Hans Suren's bestselling nudist books- NSFW warning for naked German people have völkisch overtones and celebrate an aesthetically pure Germanic body type.

Despite the fact that the Weimar era also saw the emergence of the "New Woman" into the public eye, most German references to modern German womanhood in print could be quite condemnatory and these attacks often spilled over into condemning her sexual profligacy and un-German materialism. Especially in the Catholic south and Protestant countryside, the New Woman became a symbol for much of what was wrong with Germany's Republic. Furthermore, even though the New Woman was a reality for many Germans, beneath the glitz and glamour of Weimar fashion was a sexual dynamic that was often quite disadvantageous towards women. While the showgirls of Berlin's cabarets symbolized a the new objectivity and openness, at the end of the day they were still very much objectified cogs in an entertainment machine. Moreover, new fashions and a modern lifestyle were expensive habits. In a very perceptive 1931 article "Twilight for Women?, Hilde Walter noted that beneath the mass of advertisements for the modern woman was an actual mass of working women who were underpaid and had to now shoulder the extra expense of appearing "modern" to keep their jobs. In her estimation, liberation often entailed a new set of burdens.

Walter's essay also noted that attacks on the new woman ran the gamut of the left and right, which underscores another aspect of sexuality and Weimar: its politicization. The most prominent advocates for sexual reform like Hirschfeld prominently connected sexuality with wider political reforms and they tended to be partisans of Germany's left. The Austro-German Wilhelm Reich, one of the most radical of the Republic's reformers, argued that sexual repression served the interests of capitalism and other social injustices. Right-wing German commentators castigated figures like the sex journalist and raconteur Hugo Bettauer as a puppet of the "reds." The NSDAP's paper Völkischer Beobachter relished in tales of Weimar decadence as part of an overall stratagem to discredit the Republic as unGerman. This highly politicized atmosphere surrounding sex helped propagate the impression of the Weimar Republic as a freewheeling Bacchanalia, when it was in fact much more complex. While there were prominent advocates for sexual reform and alternative sexuality, they were far from the only voices weighing in on sexual matters.