Sittengeschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs

by Magnus Hirschfeld

Eyewitness reports by hundreds of men and women participants in the World War. Describing the sex life in the warring nations, at the battlefronts, behind the lines, in enemy prisons, in military hospitals.

Genres: History, Queer, Nonfiction, Psychology, LGBT, Sexuality

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Prof. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was a physician, sexologist, and founder of Institut für Sexualwissenschaft whose German citizenship was revoked and institute destroyed by the Nazi Party less than four months after coming to power in 1933.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got a copy of this pioneering work of sex research to check a couple of points for a writing project, but I challenge anyone to look at this table of contents and not want to just read the whole thing immediately:

1. The Release of Sexual Restraints
2. War Wives and Immorality
3. Eroticism of Nurses
4. Sensuality in the Trenches
5. Venereal Diseases
6. Women Soldiers and Female Battalions
7. Homosexuality and Transvestitism
8. Regulation of Army Brothels
9. Prostitution Behind the Lines
10. Lust in the Conquered Areas
11. Civilian Debauchery Back Home
12. Genital Injuries, War Eunuchs, etc.
13. Sex Life of War Prisoners
14. Amatory Adventures of Female Spies
15. Eroticism Behind Military Drill
16. Propaganda and Lies
17. The Bestialization of Man
18. Sadism, Rape, and Other Atrocities
19. Post-War Revolution and Sexuality

I mean of course I want to know more about all of those things. Many of the writers – especially in English – who came after Magnus Hirschfeld reused his research primarily for purposes of titillation, but the original opus is serious, sober and (for the time certainly) admirably progressive. A pioneering and sensitive sexologist, Hirschfeld ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which during the First World War sought first-hand data from both Axis and Allied soldiers about the sexual implications of the conflict; this material is supplemented with readings of the war novels and memoirs published during or soon after the war.

The overall picture is that ‘war tends to excite the libido in general and the sadistically coloured impulses in particular’, which for most men either meant a variety of sexually-inflected war neuroses (impotence, for example, surged long after the armistice), or in the case of a nasty minority the opportunity to indulge in various ‘atavistic impulses of cruelty’. There is also a sensitive consideration of the ‘sex hunger’ felt, not just by men at the front, but by the women back home, in a time when the sexes had in large part been artificially separated.

Modern novels of the war sometimes try to make something romantic of the sexual relationships that obtained in halting-stations behind the line – a particularly egregious example, I thought, was Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War – but the reality was lines of filthy men queueing literally round the block, for ten minutes with a girl forced into a period of survival sex work. In the military-run brothels in German-occupied France, the system was methodical:

Every soldier had to show the sanitary official his book, containing his name and his official designation, all of which information would be forwarded to his division in order that they might be able to check up should any venereal disease develop. Every soldier also had to show the sanitary officer his genitals, which were examined for venereal disease, and had to submit to treatment with protargol and vaseline. Thus armed, the soldier went into the brothel; and upon his return he had to stop off at the sanitary official again, to urinate in the latter’s presence, after which he got another protargol injection. In addition he had to state which girl he had used. The sanitary orderly assigned to this duty certainly did not have an easy job of it

…though it was easy enough, one feels, compared to what the women were dealing with inside. Hirschfeld calls organised prostitution ‘one of the darker chapters’ of 1914–18, and his writing, despite being of its time, is full of sympathy for the neglected women involved. ‘Their names are not found on any casualty list,’ he says, ‘and yet they are not the least lamentable victims of the war.’

It's just a shame, given his welcome attention to women's experiences, that he never seems to think of actually speaking to any – he only quotes endless male doctors on what women were going through. The war was, thanks to the absence of men at the front, a time when women made huge gains in social, political and sexual independence, a fact of which Hirschfeld is very conscious – in fact he says at the outset that ‘the successful rebellion of the female sex against century-old enslavement is the historic act of our century’. Occasionally this new women's sexual freedom lures him into retailing dubious anecdotes about clubs full of ‘wild female sex-hyenas’, but most of the time he is satisfyingly outraged that ‘society continued to measure women by the gauge of a straight-laced morality applicable to normal times’.

He's also level-headed on homosexuality (‘neither a crime nor a vice but an emotional tendency deeply rooted in the nature of many human beings’, as Hirschfeld understood personally) and even – during a discussion of cross-dressing soldiers – on what he here calls ‘cases of erroneous sex determination, a concept which was unknown before our generation’.

This book does not have the kind of scholarly rigour that sociosexual research would demand nowadays, but given the constraints of the time it's an incredible piece of work, and, for the non-technical reader, full of eye-popping anecdotal detail.

Hirschfeld's work continued after the war for a time, but eventually the political climate turned against him. As a gay Jew, he was not on the Nazis' Christmas-card list: in 1933 they raided his Institute, burned all his books, and finally revoked his German citizenship. He died in exile in France, shortly before another world war broke out. His cautious optimism, based though it was on examining some of the worst moments of human behaviour, sometimes seems as vain as ever, but it's still bracing to read.

That every woman and especially every proletarian woman who went through the war necessarily became an adherent of pacifism and that the latter movement merged indissolubly with the women’s movement is perhaps the strongest hope for the future.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Nazis destroyed a large part of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's collection when they raided and destroyed the sexologist's Institute for Sexual Research, which makes any remaining portion of the man's written record all the more valuable. This book functions as a time capsule nonpareil of progressive attitudes toward human sexuality in the aftermath of the Great War. Modern sensibilities may chafe at some of the language or ideas (women "inviting" rape or the behavior of "homosexuals versus the normal") but it's important to place the work in its historical context and to understand that at this time the other side was obsessed with using shock therapy/modalities that were really thinly-disguised torture to cure what they regarded as aberrations.

Although Dr. Hirschfeld was by his own admission an endocrinologist, "Sexual History" explores the subconscious, primitive impulses unleashed by the Great War and the consequent changes in sex life and sex pathology attendant to turning men into killers. It's as close to a Freudian work as Hirschfeld would get. Areas explored include sex crimes like rape and desecration of corpses (the book is unvarnished, candid, and not for the squeamish) as well as prostitution and cases of men returning from the front sans their genitals or with waning libidos as a result of shell shock. The work is a cooperative effort, but every chapter bears the stamp of Hirschfeld's voice, compassionate, wise, and sometimes funny. Along with Ludwig Lenz's book "Memoirs of a Sexologist", this is probably the most indispensable, compulsively readable artifact from post-Wilhelmine, republican Germany. There are a handful of illustrations inside, and an appendix that includes an American news item about the Army trying to discourage "camp followers" from giving GIs sexually-transmitted diseases, but what really sticks out about the work is all of the other accounts (both fictional and memoir) that Hirschfeld quotes alongside case studies. The book has no official bibliography but dust from an unofficial goldmine is scattered throughout the text. Highest recommendation.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Came across an old sensationalist ad for the is book on the internet. Book itself isn't that sensationalists matter-of-factly told but with some dated designations (urning for homosexual man).

[Victoria Janssen]

An interesting period view of psychologists and psychological theory.