GLR July-August 2025

ESSAY Queer Life in Postwar Germany K EIRA R OBERSON

A FTER WORLD WAR II and the defeat of Nazi rule, homosexuality remained criminal ized in Germany for nearly another quarter century. Even so, queer life resumed, and communities slowly rebuilt themselves, even under periods of intense prosecution. Ger many’s anti-sodomy law, Paragraph 175, criminalized sex be tween men from 1871 to 1969 (when it was substantially modified in West Germany). But a vibrant queer subculture took root in Berlin during the 1890s and blossomed in the Weimar era of the 1920s with a political movement that nearly suc ceeded in abolishing Paragraph 175 in 1929. After the Nazi takeover, the regime revised Germany’s anti-gay law in 1935 to lessen the burden of proof for prosecutors and to enact harsher punishments for those who violated it. By the end of the war, Nazi courts had convicted nearly 50,000 men under Paragraph 175 and interned some 5,000 to 15,000 gay men in concentration camps. While the law applied specifically to men (and the male-bodied), prosecutors used other laws to target non-male queer Germans, though these con The enforcement of Paragraph 175 after the War faced sev eral challenges, including the suspension of Nazi-era laws by Allied authorities, the process of denazification within law en forcement, and general desperation among the populace result ing from the War. Resource scarcity, disease, famine, and homelessness created an environment in which, as historian Clayton Whisnant has written, “legality and crime blurred into one another.” The Allied authorities attempted to ameliorate the worst effects of Germany’s postwar crises through strict price controls and rationing, though many Germans turned to the black market to procure the items necessary for survival. There was confusion among judicial courts as to whether Paragraph 175 was going to remain in effect. Between the re structuring of police departments, legal ambiguity, and the everyday crimes of necessity, police did not appear interested in its enforcement. The lax imposition of Paragraph 175 (and other Keira Roberson (she/they) is a PhD candidate at Georgia State whose research focuses on tactics used by queer Berliners to protect themselves and their communities under the Nazi regime and its aftermath. victions were unstandardized, sporadically enforced, and often subject to the interpreta tions and prejudices of state enforcers. In the years that followed the war, social and legal opportunities for queer Germans waxed and waned. Despite changing political land scapes and conflict with local authorities, queer Germans resurfaced from their clan destine exile under the Nazi regime to re store their communities.

laws used to regulate sexuality) created a climate of relative freedom that queer Germans had not been permitted since be fore 1933. However, perceived sexual and gender deviance still carried risks, necessitating the continued concealment of sexual and ro mantic encounters. Nazi-era anti-gay sentiments persisted among large swaths of the German populace. Many considered homosexuality to be a corrupting influence that was spread through pedophilic seduction. Others, including government figures, regarded homosexuality as politically dangerous, whether due to the potential for blackmail or the notion that queer people were adept at creating clandestine networks. In several instances, even after Allied troops liberated Nazi prisons and concentration camps, imprisoned gay men were forced to serve out the remainder of their sentence. Even lesbians such as the anti-fascist activist Hilde Radusch experienced harass ment and violence at the hands of occupying authorities for such perceived transgressions. In cities like Berlin, where one-third of all apartments were uninhabitable or destroyed after the war, privacy was difficult to unexpected venues. The dark, cramped spaces of those same shelters for the homeless offered the plausible deniability and close contact to afford a chance sexual encounter. Train stations, both standing and those in ruins, quickly became favored places, especially for gay men, to meet potential partners (and male sex workers). From there, many took their sexual liaisons to public restrooms or bombed-out buildings that still retained enough structure to provide some privacy. Even as cities were rebuilt and stabilized in the late 1940s, many queer Germans continued to meet and have sex in semi-public spaces, including train sta tions and public bathrooms—but also parking lots, parks, and forests. Silence was key in each of these settings. A few surviving leaders of Weimar-era queer scenes resur faced to re-establish the subcultures they remembered. A hand ful of the Weimar-era bars, such as the Eldorado and the Kleist-Kasino, reopened in Berlin following the war. Several organizations emerged almost immediately after the war with the explicit aim of challenging Paragraph 175. Most of these organizations were led by a younger generation of Germans, though a few evoked cultural memories of Weimar-era organi find. Many people rented accommodations from the fortunate minority who still had homes; others resided in mass bunkers and shelters established by postwar authorities to temporarily house the homeless and refugee populations. Those who still had homes became popular sexual partners for the rare privilege of a private space. Even without such spaces, queer Ger mans found opportunities for intimacy in

What emerges when we examine postwar Germany (both East and West) is a climate in which poli ti cal, legal, and social freedoms periodically increased and then shrank back.

TheG & LR

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