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dashadashahi's review against another edition
4.0
Herzog’s analysis in Sex after Fascism (2005) traces the continuities and discontinuities between the pre-Nazi period, Nazi Germany, and post-World War Two era regarding the regulation and conception of sex, and how popular conceptions of sex worked to construct and reconstruct the memory of previous generations. In the wake of the Second World War West Germany set off to deal with the trauma of the war. Unlike East Germany, where they differentiated themselves from Nazi-era policy through their anti-capitalist stance, West Germany distinguished itself by reinstating conservative sexual morals, in contrast to the deeply racialized by permissive heterosexuality of the Nazi regime. Indeed, Herzog argues that the Nazi’s relaxed view on pre-marital and extra-marital relations found continuity with the Weimar period’s liberalizing notions on sex. Thus, conservative sexual politics reconstructed a domesticated view of heteronormative relationships (p. 88). These views, often informed by the church, reinforced the link between lax sex morality and vulgar crimes of the Nazi regime. Herzog argues that the New Left movement of the 1960s reconstructed the memory of the Nazi era as a sexually repressive period that produced horrendous war crimes. More importantly, the “68er” generation understood their childhood under the conservative, old-fashioned, and repressive period of the 1950s. This is best exemplified in the radical, anti-authoritarian parenting in which parents encouraged children to freely express themselves rather than reinforce their children’s subordination. Following the end of the sex wave and the New Left’s loss of influence, the 1980s saw people using sex, not to understand Nazism, but to understand “1968 itself” (p. 221). Indeed, Herzog demonstrates how changing constructions and reconstructions of sex are critical to understanding Germany’s development and how people understood and dealt with the memory of Nazism.
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