JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled. ISBN13 Sex and the Weimar Republic shows how, in Weimar Germany, the citizen's right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.
Liberated, licentious, or merely liberal, the sexual freedoms of Germany's Weimar Republic have become legendary. The home of the world's first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized - however misleadingly - in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar's freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation.
Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen's right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.
Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded "immoral" sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Rohm.
Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer's observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today.
