Love in the Time of Communism

It is no longer so unusual for historians to juxtapose the two seemingly most incompatible realms of human behaviour: sex and politics. While we may no longer have the faith of the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s and ʼ70s that sexual freedom can transform political life and foster emancipation and democratisation, the conviction that political structures influence our sexual identities and choices in the realm of bodily pleasure has become a commonplace of both scholarly and public debate. Josie McLellan’s engaging study of sexuality and intimacy in the German Democratic Republic convincingly demonstrates that historically tracking this interaction requires a nuanced and varied methodological approach. She consciously eschews simplistically drawn analogies between democracy and sexual freedom, listening instead to the voices of everyday citizens and taking full account of the myriad ways in which sex, sexuality, and sexual identity are intertwined with other spheres of social and political life. The East German example is particularly instructive, because the artificial division created in the aftermath of the Second World War isolates the political dimension from that of national culture. McLellan provides a nuanced and balanced discussion of the similarities and differences in sexual behaviour between East and West Germans, and she refuses to accept the most romantic stereotypes about how sex was better under socialism

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Emancipation · Human sexuality · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Sexology · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Gender Studies · German History and Society · Law · Psychology