Published to great acclaim in French and now available for the first time in English, Elissa Mailaender's groundbreaking book explores how the Nazi regime used sexuality to promote political loyalty, conformity, and cohesion among "ordinary" Germans. Beginning before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and continuing through the postwar American occupation of Germany, Mailaender's study highlights the complex and conflicted ways that sexual "liberation," repression, and violence were used and experienced in the everyday lives of citizens of the Reich. Her analysis draws on a vast array of sources, from legal dossiers to private photographs and letters, as well as public archives, magazines, and movies. Mailaender's findings are often uncomfortable; she demonstrates, for example, that a significant number of women who were not persecuted by the regime saw shifts in gender and sexual norms as positive developments-ones that some felt were lost under the American occupation, with its own routines of military sexual exploitation. What emerges is a portrait of a regime that was less interested in repressing sexuality than in reinventing it according to a racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.
Elissa Mailaender is a professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po Paris. She specializes in the history of violence, gender and sexuality, material culture, and the history of the everyday. Her first book was translated into English as Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. Darcie Fontaine is a writer, translator, and historian of the modern French empire. She is the author of Modern France and the World and Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria.
List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction: A Liberated Sexuality? Part I: A New Society (1930-1938) Chapter 1 The New Mother: Shaping Motherhood in Nazi Germany Chapter 2 To Have and to Hold? Divorce Austrian Style Part II: The Happy War (1939-1945) Chapter 3 Good Times, Good Friends, and a Bright Future: Four Austrian Women Under Nazism Chapter 4 Love Is in the Air! Women, War, and Aviators in Nazi Cinema Chapter 5 Soldiers, Conquerors, Colonizers: Excavating a "Rape-Joke" Photograph from the Eastern Front Part III: A Return to Normal? (1945-1951) Chapter 6 A Foreign Affair: Administering Sexuality in US-Occupied Bavaria Chapter 7 Whining and Winning: Male Narratives of Love, Marriage, and Divorce in the Shadow of the Third Reich Conclusion: What Remains of Nazism Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index
"Few studies on the links between intimacy and the Reich have been studied in depth. . . . Elissa Mailaender has filled this gap."- (Le Figaro, praise for the French-language edition) "A passionate study, remarkably well written and notable for the great diversity of archives it presents: private papers, medical archives, a rich iconography and filmography."- (L'Histoire, praise for the French-language edition) "Remarkable. . . . The merit of Mailaender's book is to show the day-to-day functioning of National Socialism. While the majority of works and studies are devoted to Nazi crimes and the political construction of the regime, profoundly linked to Auschwitz, rare are works on the immediate lived experience of Germans during this era."- (En attendant Nadeau: Journal des litterature, des idees, et des arts, praise for the French-language edition)
