Shifting Understandings of Lesbianism in Imperial and Weimar Germany

This paper seeks to understand how, and why, understandings of lesbianism shifted in Germany over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of both popular cultural productions and medical and psychological texts produced within the context of Imperial and Weimar Germany, this paper explores the changing nature of understandings of homosexuality in women. It argues that, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant conceptualization of lesbianism transformed from an understanding of lesbians that was rooted in biology and viewed lesbians as physically masculine “gender inverts,” to one that was grounded in psychology, and imagined lesbians as inherently traumatized, mother-fixated, and suicidal. This paper suggests that this shift was facilitated by the increasing influence of psychologists like Sigmund Freud, and greater German preoccupation with trauma and suicide following World War I, and highlights the importance of historical context in shaping self-understanding. As a state that began anew not once, but twice, in the early nineteenth and twentieth century, Germany was in a continuous process of reinventing itself and forming national self-understandings. This culture of redefinition facilitated a reexamining of values and beliefs previously taken for granted, including the association of homosexuality with moral depravity. Within this context, heterosexual doctors and scholars, in addition to gay and lesbian writers, became deeply invested in understanding what it meant to be gay or lesbian. This paper will focus on the more popular academic and cultural works that dealt specifically with lesbians, who have received relately scant attention compared even with gay men. These understandings did not remain static, but rather changed over time and were greatly influenced by their respective historical contexts. In particular, over the course of the Imperial and Weimar eras, both mainstream and lesbian understandings of female homosexuality shifted dramatically, with psychology replacing biology as the primary way of understanding lesbianism. While in the late nineteenth century, a lesbian would explain herself to others as neither fully biologically male nor female, by the 1920s she would understand herself as a woman, but a psychologically incomplete or damaged one. My analysis will begin chronologically with thinkers of Imperial Germany, a period that begins with Germany’s unification and establishment as a state in 1871, and ends in 1914 with the start of World War I. In this period, German sexologists, in addition to prominent lesbian writers and thinkers, understood lesbians primarily as “gender inverts” whose existence could be explained primarily through biology or medicine. The Weimar era begins in 1918 with the end of World War I and the establishment of a democratic government in Germany, and ends in 1933 when the Nazis come to power. Weimar-era writers began to question some of the assumptions of their predecessor and base their understanding of lesbianism in psychology. Lesbian women were increasingly viewed as woman who were mistreated by their mothers as children and were unable to recover from this abuse. Emerging over a backdrop of Weimar concerns about suicide, this conceptualization of the feminine mother-fixated lesbian also became inextricably tied to suicide. This paper will first very briefly look at understandings of lesbianism in theory and culture prior to World War I. It will then discuss the ubiquitous nature of suicide in Weimar culture and the new understanding of lesbianism within this context by Weimar thinkers. It will conclude with a discussion of this Weimar conceptualization of the lesbian in major cultural productions, namely Madchen in Uniform and Der Skorpion.