Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914
Edward Ross Dickinson
Cambridge University Press, 2014
In this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault’s epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management.
Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution.
Audio interview with the author: http://newbooksinintellectualhistory.co ... e-up-2014/
BOOK REVIEWS
Journal of the History of Sexuality
Sex, Freedom, and Power in Imperial Germany culminates Edward Ross Dickinson’s recent series of influential articles on German public-sphere sexual politics. The book ambitiously proposes to follow the course of debates on sexuality through histories of the many organizations (and some individuals) that politicized sexual issues in the newly unified German state. The book does much more than simply collecting group biographies. Dickinson provides a fascinating view of publicly articulated concerns about sexuality “in the round,” dramatizing the connections, influences, overlaps, and conflicts between organizations and individuals. He convinces us not only that sexual issues were “one of the most important political and cultural conflicts” in modern German history but also that the intricate interrelationships portrayed here are significant to understanding the development of German sexual politics (1). In addition to tracing activism on issues of prostitution, venereal disease, reproduction, popular culture, and gender roles, Dickinson carefully analyzes the worldviews supporting these positions, leaving no doubt that the most vehemently opposed groups often shared strategies and philosophies, while allies became bitter enemies. Philosophies explaining the significance of sexuality to modern life developed within escalating contentions Dickinson compares to “a Hollywood saloon brawl” (304).
German History
http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/ea ... his.ghv023