Table of Contents
1. Sex and the Third Reich
2. The Fragility of Heterosexuality
3. Desperately Seeking Normality
4. The Morality of Pleasure
5. The Romance of Socialism
6. Antifascist Bodies

"[A] brilliant, deeply researched and beautifully written book... Sex after Fascism is one of the best books of the past twenty years on the history of sexuality, and certainly the best book on this particular subject." - Thomas Laqueur, BookForum

"It is hard to imagine a more brilliant, original, and passionate reading of German discourses of sex and fascism, from the 1930s to the present, than this work offers. As scholars dig deeper, they may revise some of Herzog's conclusions. But they will have come to the task in large part because Herzog has so profoundly challenged our thinking on the history of sexuality, Nazism, and its aftermath." - Elizabeth Heineman, Journal of Modern History

"This is a conceptually 'big,' enormously ambitious, and stimulating book, one that tackles head-on a whole range of complex, interesting, and important questions and offers a wealth of convincing and exciting insights. Herzog's discussion of the sexual politics... is superb. All in all, whether historians agree or disagree with particular aspects of Herzog's account, the book is a bold contribution, one that will be fruitful not only because it offers readers important and original insights, but also because it will generate important questions." - Edward Ross Dickinson, Central European History

"Dagmar Herzog's approach is so new and so fresh that it will long serve as a standard for writing the history of sexuality in modern Germany. Basing her account on previously neglected source material from newspapers, advice manuals, church statements, public pronouncements and interviews, she writes with authority and with an enviable grasp of how politics and sex were entwined in the Nazi era and its aftermath. Possessing an amazing ability to cover many different themes and contexts at the same time, she brings her subject into focus with great verve and efficacy." - Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University

"In this powerful, persuasive, and richly documented work, Dagmar Herzog rewrites not only the history of sexuality but also the history of politics and religion in twentieth-century Germany. She offers a fascinating analysis of the emancipatory as well as the repressive elements in sexual discourse under the Third Reich and shows how Nazi ideology continued to shape sexual politics in Germany during the post-war period, even reaching into some of the progressive currents of the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s. Of the many surprises afforded by this widely suggestive and compulsively readable book, perhaps the most disturbing is that we are still living, whether we know it or not, 'after fascism.'" - David Halperin, University of Michigan

"Dagmar Herzog's source-rich and solidly researched analysis surprises and challenges; it convinces over and over again through an unpretentious presentation of forgotten facts and connections. With nuance and yet also with clarity, the American historian shows how human beings who talk about sex are always also talking about other things entirely--and thereby revealing much about themselves." - Urs Rauber, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Forcefully argued and elegantly written... Herzog's passionate insistence on the centrality of sexuality as an explanatory category and on the uncomfortably tight link between pleasure and evil provides fresh and bold insight into two of modern German history's most confounding questions: how National Socialism established and maintained its 'extraordinary appeal' and, conversely, how postwar Germans managed to morph so quickly into peaceful stability." - Atina Grossmann, American Historical Review

"An always provocative and fascinating account of 20th-century German social, political, and cultural history." - Jane Slaughter, Labour/Le Travail

"Sex after Fascism is an original contribution... Dagmar Herzog analyzes shifting attitudes towards two seemingly separate strands of cultural expression: sexual morality and discourse on memory... Fascinating and stimulating reading." - Bjorn Krondorfer, German Studies Review

"This study is highly original, deeply researched, and lucidly written, providing pioneering work on the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Germany and challenging and reshaping the extensive scholarship on memory and the Holocaust." - Mary Nolan, The Historian

"Dagmar Herzog's book makes a well founded case that what has become our conventional wisdom about sexuality in Nazi Germany needs to be revised. This is a pioneering work in contemporary history." - Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland

"In this superb study, Dagmar Herzog expertly demonstrates that when people talk about sex, they are always talking about much, much more. A major achievement, this book forces us all to think differently about the history of Germany in the twentieth century and illustrates how an historical account that focuses on sexuality can illuminate key aspects of National Socialism, a Germany divided between East and West, and the politics of reunification in the 1990s." - Robert Moeller, University of California, Irvine

"This book is a provocative analysis of the relationship between sexuality and politics in Germany. It debunks popular myths about the Third Reich and the generational revolt and, in the process, draws a sharp contrast between actual changes in behavior and what is remembered." - onrad H. Jarausch, University of North Carolina

"Herzog's book succeeds elegantly as both a scholarly history of sexual morality in Germany and an examination of the way this history is so often distorted in the present day." - Publishers Weekly

"Dagmar Herzog's study is a magisterial account... Well researched, solidly reasoned, and drawing on a great wealth of resources ranging from low-brow magazines to highly theoretical treatises, it will establish itself as a standard reference work for the study of German civilization and its (post-)modern (dis-)contents." - Frederick A. Lubich, Monatshefte

"Sex in Crisis is a brilliant analysis of the ways in which our bedrooms have been invaded by the anxiety-mongers of Big Pharma and the moralists of the Christian Right. Dagmar Herzog's account of America's New Sexual Revolution is crisply written, often disturbing, and utterly persuasive." - Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher

"To appreciate the heady brew of contradictions bubbling in the evangelical right's secular campaign about sex - including its successful use of therapeutic language, double messages on chastity and salvation, and pro-sex view of marriage - Herzog's sharp-eyed critical study, packed with jaw-dropping evidence, is a must read." - Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University

"The religious right is celebrating sex to stroke its conservative message...Herzog's intriguing and deeply researched thesis is that evangelicals, over the last couple of decades, have beaten liberals at their own game by adapting liberal rhetoric for conservative ends." - Louis Bayard, Salon

"It's wishful thinking to imagine that the Religious Right is in retreat on all fronts in America and Dagmar Herzog fearlessly reveals how at the nexus of sex and politics, evangelical conservatives still control the agenda. How did this happen and why are progressive leaders silent on sex in America? With eye-popping research and reporting, Dagmar Herzog offers answers and, more important, issues a transformative challenge to all Americans. Sex in Crisis is a remarkable, necessary book." - David Brock, New York Times bestselling author of Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative

"This is a book by an anguished Christian looking at what some aspects of her faith have wrought...Herzog does a brilliant job in putting together an ugly and complex picture of 'the new sexual revolution' of the Christian Right and especially of its impact in the public sphere...At the core of Sex in Crisis is a debate about what kind of a world Americans want to live in." - Thomas Laqueur, Times Literary Supplement

"While extreme evangelicals have been poring over Christian porn for married straights, they've waged one hell of a war on sex for the rest of us...Herzog, who grew up with strict parents in the pre-lib South, lays out an interesting case, tracking the Right's targets from inter-racial dating to abortion to LGBTQ life. At every stage, they plugged into pre-existing angst about gender and desire and being good - not to mention good enough - and with the latter, they hit the jackpot...The toll is very real - consider the homicidal impact of the Bush regime's anti-condom campaign. And the hypocrisy is rank: while they damn sex for the rest of us, Christian sex manuals - and "Christian" vibrators and ticklers - proliferate. This stuff will raise eyebrows - at least." - Laura Flanders, GritTV

"The religious right has repackaged its anti-sex messages in a secular wrapping to suit the changing cultural and social world over the last decades, but inside the box is the same old message, sexual abstinence and sexual ignorance for all, except in marriage. What is new is that if the sex you are having is not heterosexual, marital and serving God's purposes it is the source of mental and physical illness in addition to being sinful. Dagmar Herzog has carefully documented the ways in which the religious right has through distortion and falsehood taken over the language of sexual health and played upon the sexual fears of the American public and its politicians to invalidate all other forms of sexuality. This is an important book about the way in which the sexual conversation in the United States has been shanghaied to advance the religious and secular agendas of the far right." - John Gagnon, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, The State University at Stony Brook, coauthor of Sexual Conduct and The Social Organization of Sexuality

"If you care to protect your sexual freedom, read this brilliant, bold, breathtaking, and blood-boiling book." - Penthouse

"Historian Dagmar Herzog exposes precisely how the religious right has co-opted popular discourse on Viagra, Internet porn, female orgasm, adultery, HIV and STDs to revise its abstinence-only, anti-abortion, homophobic, sexist and racist proclamations on sex and sexuality into a sizzling and seductive self-help package worthy of Sex and the City...Sex in Crisis is a must-read." - Jennifer Cognard-Black, Ms. Magazine

"This book is a disturbing, important and eloquent examination of one faith-cum-political movement's powerful - and pernicious - influence over human rights at home and abroad." - Publishers Weekly

"Many myths have been produced about sexual pleasures and sexual terror in war and genocide. Dagmar Herzog's outstanding, disturbing, and ultimately fascinating anthology is the first to seriously historicize this most sensitive topic. Sexual desire was enmeshed in brutal violence all over Europe's most destructive century, but it was so in surprisingly diverse ways. A pathbreaking reference book and a must-read for each student of military history, gender history, and Holocaust and genocide studies."
– Thomas Kühne, Clark University, USA

"Astonishing and unforgettable, this book is one of a kind. Its explorations into the taboo territory of sex and war span the 20th century, from Anatolia to Ethiopia, Auschwitz, Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and points between and beyond. These chapters are as remarkable for the deep particularity they exhibit in each case as for the powerful and urgently universal nature of the viciousness, pain, exhilaration, and desire they reveal. Dagmar Herzog has assembled a compelling, indeed indisputable, case for the inseparability of war and sex, in all their manifestations."
- Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto, Canada

"This history of sexuality risks a great deal. It confronts the issue of sexual violence - against women, against men, and against children. It also takes on desire and love or, in any case, consensual relationships in times of war. The book succeeds and may serve as a model for further explorations because it is based on remarkably thorough research and on prudence as well as good judgment in making sense of sexuality in times of war."
- Michael Geyer, University of Chicago, USA

"Scholars and instructors from a broad range of disciplines will be grateful for this pathbreaking collection of essays that analyze the complex intersections of sexuality and war from the Armenian genocide to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. By focusing not only on sexual violence but also on desire and the consensual sexuality made possible by the dislocation and anonymity of war, the authors of this important book also provide an important history of both female and male sexuality during Europe's bloody century."
- Maria Höhn, Vassar College, USA

"This wonderful book makes a powerful contribution to the history of Europe in the 20th century. With their complex and comparative treatment of war, these collected essays carefully historicize the meanings and modalities of sexualized violence and sexual desire. Together they brilliantly demonstrate the intimate and integral ties between the history of sexuality and the history of European war."
- Judith Surkis, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, USA

"In her masterful integration of political, religious, and intellectual history, Herzog offers a brilliant, highly original and sophisticated analysis of how intra-Christian conflicts over the content and meaning of Christianity – particularly over sex and love and marriage – were interwoven into debates over Jewish rights, anti-Semitism, and philosemitism. This is a major contribution to the histories of German men and women, Christian and Jewish."
–Marion A. Kaplan, New York University

"Intimacy and Exclusion provides a richly detailed demonstration of the ways in which gender and politics are fundamentally intertwined. Herzog's accomplishment challenges all historians to reexamine political history in similarly exciting ways."
– Bonnie G. Smith, Rutgers University

"An impressive, pioneering, and broadly relevant work…. The combination of methodology and source material produces fundamentally new understandings of the mental universe of German politics in the crucial years before the revolution of 1848."
– Jonathan Sperber, University of Missouri

"An extremely interesting and complex book. It provides an impressive vindication of poststructuralist and feminist theoretical approaches, and shows how the imaginative reading of normally separated histories with and against each other can deliver important new insights. Herzog presents a novel and challenging case for the politics of the personal, for seeing sexuality, love and subjectivity as central to the terms of political discourse in the Germany of the 1840s. She also develops an original and revisionist argument about German liberalism, with far-reaching implications for the comparative and general intellectual history of liberal ideas. The impact on scholarly discussion will be very great indeed."
– Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

"An eloquent contribution to the ongoing scholarly interpretation of German liberalism…. No German historian should fail to read Herzog's compelling argument that sexuality, gender, love, and ethnicity were central to the liberal conception of the world."
– Marion W. Gray, Central European History

"Ferociously original…. will force historians of religion and religious dissent as well as historians of German liberalism to reconsider, in fundamental ways, their approaches to the past."
– Helmut Walser Smith, Journal of Religious History

"This is in many ways a model of what a monograph should be – disciplined, ambitious, thoughtful, enriched by insights drawn from multiple subdisciplines. This book will be read and discussed widely by historians of German liberalism, feminism, religion, and sexuality."
– Edward Ross Dickinson, European Legacy

"Dagmar Herzog has written a fascinating first book that provides an excellent example of successful use by a historian of methods of textual analysis developed by literary scholars. Her theme is a series of religious conflicts in the southwestern German state of Baden…. Her main contention is that 'it was on the ground of religious conflict that activists of the 1830s and 1840s sought to negotiate the "irrational" aspects of political life: to come to terms with intergroup prejudice and sexual desire, the power of ideology, and the complexities of individual psychology.'"
– James Albisetti, American Historical Review

"Herzog's insightful and persuasive reflections on the interconnectedness of the debates that animated public life in pre-March Baden and her cogent demonstration of the close relationship between 'personal' and 'public' issues offer a suggestive alternative to high political accounts of early German liberalism and deepen our understanding of how political arguments evolved in this important and formative era."
– Christopher Clark, English Historical Review

"Provides a model of the ways in which questions about gender and sexuality can be merged with more traditional political and intellectual history so that it becomes impossible to understand how previous historians could have missed them."
– Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"Intimacy and Exclusion makes an important contribution to two neglected areas of early nineteenth-century German history – religious history and the history of sexuality…. Herzog shows that religious issues remained important in nineteenth-century politics and that a politically activist Catholicism arose long before the Kulturkampf."
– Judith J. Hurwich, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Accounts of early nineteenth German history commonly present Baden as the most progressive of all the German states, the Musterländle in which dominant liberal forces promoted secularization and reform, and which in 1848 and 1849 spear-headed the revolutionary movements in the whole of Germany. Dagmar Herzog's remarkable study of religious politics in the pre-revolutionary era suggests that this view is in need of serious revision. For if Baden was the breeding ground of liberalism it was also the source of a powerful politically sophisticated religious conservatism…. Herzog's book will be essential reading for anyone concerned with Vormärz Germany. Her analysis of intra-Christian conflicts and their implications for the arguments concerning both Jews and women sheds important new light on the development of early German liberalism and illuminates the emergence of political conservatism as a powerful force in the pre-revolutionary years. It represents a significant achievement."
– Joachim Whaley, German History

In this pathbreaking work, Dagmar Herzog situates the birth of German liberalism in the religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. During the years leading up to the revolutions of 1848, liberal and conservative Germans engaged in a contest over the terms of the Enlightenment legacy and the meaning of Christianity- – a contest that grew most intense in the Grand Duchy of Baden, where liberalism first became an influential political movement. Bringing insights drawn from Jewish and women's studies into German history, Herzog demonstrates how profoundly Christianity's problematic relationships to Judaism and to sexuality shaped liberal, conservative, and radical thought in the pre-revolutionary years. In particular, she reveals how often conflicts over the private sphere and the "politics of the personal" determined larger political matters, among them the relationship between church and state and the terms on which Jews were granted civic rights. Herzog documents the unexpected rise of a politically sophisticated religious right led by conservative Catholics, and explores liberals' ensuing eagerness to advance a humanist version of Christianity. Yet she also examines the limitations at the heart of the liberal project, as well as the difficulties encountered by philo-Semitic and feminist radicals as they strove to reconceptualize both classical liberalism and Christianity in order to make room for the claims of Jews and women. The book challenges fundamental assumptions about processes of secularization and religious renewal and about Jewish-Christian relations in German history.

"Everything you always wanted to know about the 'century of sex' – here it is, beautifully written, admirably strong in its analysis, compelling in its plea for different narratives that add ambivalences, conflicts and shadow lines to what at first sight appears as a clear-cut story of liberalization."
-- Ute Frevert, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin.

"A masterly synthesis of sexuality's most extreme century. From prostitution to porn, from eugenics to abortion, from homophobia to the gay liberation movement, or from 'sexual reform' in the 1920s to the return of romance in a post-AIDS age, Dagmar Herzog's book convincingly demonstrates that sex is anything but 'natural.' This virtuoso account always links sex to politics, but its real merit is to give emotions, bodies, and pleasures a history."
-- Philipp Sarasin, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich

"Licit and illicit, gay and straight, it's all here, in Dagmar Herzog's bold and productive overview of a century of sexual behaviors and beliefs. Both the politicization of desire and the relation of sex to cardinal values including love, consent, toleration, and personal autonomy figure in her canny treatment of national similarities and differences in Europe. There is no better comparativist than Herzog to illuminate the unexpected twists and turns of this composite history – a landmark in European synthesis and a must-read for all historians of sexuality."
-- Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University

"Herzog develops a sweeping analysis of the central role of sexual practices, cultures, politics, and violence in a century of war, mass mobilization, and wrenching social conflict and change. Her synthesis of the last generation of historical research is especially valuable because of the significant new insights she derives by considering together the histories of East and West, heterosexuality and homosexuality, and sexual liberalism and conservatism. A model of both comparative and transnational history."
-- George Chauncey, Professor of History, Yale University