Laurie Marhoefer | Revisiting the Nazi State’s Persecution of Gay Men

Center for West European Studies & EU Jean Monnet Center

Among its many other crimes, the Nazi State carried out modern history's most deadly persecution of men accused of having sex with men. Until the 1980s, little was known about the anti-homosexuality campaign. Since then, there has been an explosion of scholarship. Yet there are many unanswered questions. Recently, a wide-ranging, heated public debate among historians about the extent and nature of the campaign has broken out. It even got the attention of mainstream German media. This talk draws on new research on the anti-homosexuality campaign as well as on queer theory and trans studies to pose some new answers to old questions. Laurie Marhoefer is an assistant professor of German history at the University of Washington. Her first book, Sex and the Weimar Republic (Toronto, 2015) is on the politics of queer and transgender in Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazi Party. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review and elsewhere.