From Weimar to Unification: Queering Space Through Film

Among Germany’s rich history of cinema, particularly intriguing are queer films. These films provide a unique lens through which to view and analyze Germany’s historical treatment of queer bodies under the state. Film... [ view full abstract ]

Among Germany’s rich history of cinema, particularly intriguing are queer films. These films provide a unique lens through which to view and analyze Germany’s historical treatment of queer bodies under the state. Film holds not only the ability reflect tensions and movements in the popular culture, but also possesses the particular capacity to share and preserve opinions that may have otherwise been lost or forgotten. The queer cinema offers a more nuanced space for systematically marginalized identities and experiences to exist, allowing individuals to escape the binaries of everyday life.

I will be examining the complex and tangled histories of East and West German attitudes towards homosexuality against the paradoxical backdrop of both the visibility of homosexuality and alternative lifestyles during the Weimar period and the repressive National Socialist rule that followed. While the German state has historically attempted to regulate homosexuality through a strict set of binaries between public and private spaces, those categorizations did not always prove successful. The central focus of this presentation is to examine the ways in which queer bodies effectively disrupted the very binaries created by the state to contain them.