A New Morality

Left-wing Intellectuals on Sexuality in Weimar Germany

Bibliographic Data

ID10076940
AuthorsWillem Melching (corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume25
Issue1
Pages69-85
Publication date1990-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200949002500103
OpenAlexW2089755475
LanguageEN
Citations received8

A glance at recent historical publications teaches us that the study of sexuality and sexual behaviour is becoming a respectable subject in cultural history. An important example is Peter Gay's study From Victoria to Freud. Starting from a dusty collection of letters and diaries, he takes us on a tour through the landscape of late nineteenth-century sexuality in all its fascinating details. The fact that Gay uses Freud as his Baedeker on this itinerary more or less obscures the possible relation between sexual moral and political concepts. Fortunately, however, this aspect of ideas on sexuality has been explored in Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality. Mosse convincingly relates the obsession with respectability to the efforts to strengthen the state and the nation by nationalism.' He focuses on the ideas of late nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century conservatives, proto-nazis and nazis in Germany. Consequently, left-wing ideas and especially left-wing opinions on sexuality during the Weimar period remained outside the scope of his study. Despite the abundance of studies on the Weimar Republic, this theme is still by and large a white spot on the map. This article will try to remedy this omission in part by describing the opinions of those left-wing intellectuals who were advocates of the new sexuality that arose in Germany in the wake of the first world war. The attitudes toward sexuality, aside from their intrinsic interest, shed considerable light on the modernizing and democratic potential of these left-wing intellectuals. The right-wing neo-konservative intellectuals, being the intellectual predecessors of nazi ideology, have received the most attention from historians, but this should not obscure the vital democratic traditions which were an integral part of Weimar's political life. Besides neglect of important sources such as the Weltbiihne, the main reason for this omission is that the significance of ideas on

Human sexuality · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · German History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy

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