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    A Gay History of Germany
    A Gay History of Germany
    A Gay History of Germany
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    A Gay History of Germany

    By Paul Knobel

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    About this ebook

    This is the chapter on Germany from the author's A Gay History of the World/Human Male Homosexuality; A World History. A Gay History of the World has a chapter for each of the world's 193 countries and there are thus 193 chapters. The whole work can also be purchased on the internet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPaul Knobel
    Release dateAug 13, 2015
    ISBN9781310307140
    A Gay History of Germany
    Author

    Paul Knobel

    Paul Knobel is a poet and gay researcher who was born in Australia. He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry (2002) which covered the world and came to 1 million words. He is also the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art (2005) and other works including GAYFBA: gay fashion bibliography annotated (2019) and a short biography of Martin Smith, Australia's first gay historian. Both works were published in databases and the poetry encyclopedia is now on the internet. He is also the author of 7 volumes of poems .

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      Book preview

      A Gay History of Germany - Paul Knobel

      Paul Knobel

      A gay history of Germany

      Sydney: Burke and Wills

      Copyright Paul Knobel 2020

      This is part of the author’s A gay history of the world. No one is specifically to be regarded as gay in the text accept as stated.

      Germany

      Male with male sexual acts are legal in Germany with a legal age of sexual consent of 14 (and 16/18 in certain cases), the same as for heterosexuality. Homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1968 in East Germany with a legal age of sexual consent of 18 and in 1969 in West Germany with a legal age of sexual consent of 21 (lowered to 18 in 1973). After being spilt into two parts in 1945 following the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, the country was reunited in 1990. The present law came into existence in 1994 with a new legal code for the whole country. There are limited antidiscrimination provisions: for instance discrimination is banned in employment and in certain areas federally, but only banned overall in some states (Germany is a federation of states). German gays may register as partners but gay marriage, which now exists in several European nations, has not yet come about. In August 2012 the country’s constitutional court expanded gay rights by giving registered gay couples the same tax benefits as heterosexual married couples. Germany falls under the European Convention of Human Rights and has signed many United Nations covenants guaranteeing civil rights, for example the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights.

      Facts

      Germany is situated in north central Europe; to the east is Poland, to the south the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland and to the west France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Across the Baltic Sea to the north lies Sweden. The name Germany goes back to the Latin Germania used by the Romans to refer to the area. The German name is Deutschland, land of the Germans. The estimated 2010 population was 81,800,000 and the capital is Berlin. Germany is a federal parliamentary constitutional republic; the head of state is the president and the chief minister the chancellor.

      Germany has the largest and strongest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. The estimated nominal GDP per person in 2012 was $US 41,168, one of the largest in Europe. At 357,021 square meters (137,847 square miles), Germany is one of the largest countries in western Europe by size and ethnicly consists 81% of Germans, 7% other Europeans, 4% Turks, 2% Asians and 6% others. German, a west Germanic language of the Indo-European language group, is the official language. Turkish is the second most spoken language due to a large number of Turkish guest workers, now numbering 3 million. German is one of the 23 official languages of the European Union and 16% of people in the European Union speak it as a first language. It is also spoken in Austria and Switzerland as a primary language and as a second language in northern, eastern, central and southeastern Europe. The country is a federal parliamentary republic.

      With 100 million people speaking German as a first language, it is the 11th most widely spoken language in the world. Christianity is the largest religion in the country: in 2008 62.8% of Germans stated they were Christians (51.5 million) in the census while there were some 4 million who stated they were Moslem, the next largest group. Thirty percent of people state that they are Catholics while 29% say they are Protestants (almost all being members of the Evangelical Protestant Church, a federation of 22 churches including the Lutheran Church which was formerly the largest Protestant church). In 2008 the country had 250,000 Buddhists (about 50% being Asian emigrants) and some 220,000 people stated they were Jews, Europe’s third largest Jewish population after France and Great Britain. Some 34% of people state they have no religious adherence.

      History

      Germanic tribes are thought to date from the bronze age and are known from 1700 BC. They included the Celts who existed in western Europe and Britain from about 1200 BC to Roman times. The Romans conquered these tribes in the year 9 AD (see the Roman historian Tacitus’s Germania). Around 260 the Huns, a Slavic people, invaded Germany and from 375 Germanic peoples moved south to conquer the Roman peoples. In 800 the Frankish king Charlemagne created the Holy Roman empire with its headquarters in Aachen, on the Dutch and Belgian border; the empire stretched south to northern Italy and west to Burgundy in France. Germany gradually became a series of states with different rulers, including Hannover in the north, Hesse to the west, Prussia to the northeast and Bavaria in the south. Each state had a royal family. An important event was the country’s break with Roman Catholicism in 1517 under a former monk Martin Luther who was disgusted by the corruption of the papacy. Luther founded the Lutheran Church and translated the Bible into German and is a major figure in the founding of Protestantism. The Germanic states of the north became Protestant and adhered to the Bible as the basic premise of Christianity. The name Protestant comes from the fact that the members of the new religion did not accept the authority of the Pope: they protested. Religious ritual tended to concentrate on sermons and Bible reading. The south (Bavaria) remained Catholic, and the Mass, or holy communion, the reenactment of the last supper of Jesus Christ, founder of Christianity (see Israel), was the central religious rite.

      In 1871 the German states united and the law code of Prussia was adopted for the new nation. This was unfortunate for gays since, though male with male homosexual acts were legal in other states, they were then illegal in Prussia, so they became illegal in all of Germany. Prussia was the dominant state from 1871 and its capital Berlin was made the country’s capital. In the last part of the 19th country Germany became an empire with German colonies in east, southwest and west Africa and the northeast half of the island of New Guinea (see Papua New Guinea) as well as Samoa in the Pacific Ocean north of New Zealand. (These colonies were all taken from Germany at the end of the first World War (1914–1918) when Germany lost the war; they became League of Nations mandates ministered by other countries; in Samoa’s case, for instance, by New Zealand.) The new country had a monarchy with the King of Prussia becoming the country’s monarch. World War One saw the defeat of Germany and horrendous conditions imposed on the country—especially advocated by France, an ancient foe of Germany—and where the war had been mainly fought. The war led to the collapse of government and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919, dramatic inflation which saw savings wiped out, and the rise of the Fascist right wing Nazi dictatorship under Adolf Hitler from 1933 when the Weimar Republic collapsed.

      Ultimately World War One and the huge allied reparations led to World War Two (1939–1945) in which Germany invaded and occupied all of north western Europe to the Atlantic and, in eastern Europe, Poland and parts of Russia, nearly capturing its two major cities Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and the capital Moscow; in Stalingrad there was a horrendous battle which went on for months and Leningrad was besieged for over 3 years.

      Germany was again defeated but only at huge cost to all concerned. German cities were destroyed by bombing and Germany was split between East Germany controlled by the Russians (with its capital in the east half of Berlin) and West Germany under the control of the US, Britain and France. The west German capital was transferred to Bonn.

      West Germany literarily rose from the ashes from the 1950s but economic conditions remained grim in East Germany where the standard of living was much lower. France and west Germany were the main founders of what is now the European Union, initially formed to make trading easier. The two halves of Germany were reunited in 1990 when the Soviet Empire collapsed and Berlin returned to being the capital. Several parties including the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, the Free Democrats, The Left and the Greens have won blocks of seats in the Bundestag, the federal parliament, leading to coalition governments in recent years. From 2008 the country was hit by the worldwide financial crisis but has emerged with the strongest economy in Europe, but even so economic conditions are difficult.

      Germany’s gay achievement

      Special note. Germany’s gay achievement is unique among countries of the world especially in the field of scholarship. No other country in the world has what is now an over 150 year old tradition of scholarly engagement with gay culture. Because of this huge gay achievement of Germany it has been thought helpful to have a shortish summary of what the achievement consists of. Information is elaborated and repeated in the main history which follows this section; some material is necessarily repeated. (This section is an amended and expanded version of a pamphlet published by the author in 2013 titled Germany’s gay achievement.)

      Germany has one of the most richly documented gay histories of any country. As in other cultures gays have been at the center of German culture and society. In addition German education teaches people to think and as a result the country has a great scholarly tradition going back at least to the Renaissance.

      Germany gays have led the gay world in many areas. Germany produced two of the greatest bisexual writers of Europe, Goethe and Thomas Mann (though Thomas Mann may have been primarily gay and

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