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The Homosexual & State Repression In THE HOMOSEXUAL & STATE REPRESSION IN THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM: RUPTURING THE DISCURSIVE FRAMEWORK OF PROVENANCE RESEARCH Clinton Glenn and Braden Scott In 1934, at the behest of the National Socialist leadership, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenshaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin was raided by a group of students from the College of Physical Exercise. The students ransacked the institute, destroying papers, scattering artifacts, and hauling off much of the material.1 While this was hardly the formative moment in the backlash against what would be described as “degeneracy” in Germany, it was in effect the death knell for the burgeoning homophile movement that began in Wilhelmine Germany around the turn of the twentieth-century and flourished in the Weimar Republic. What followed would completely reverse any apparent advances towards sexual and gender equality that had been promulgated by Hirschfeld and other sexual reformers in Germany. By 1935, Paragraph 175, the inherited section of the Prussian Legal Code that forbade “unnatural acts” including homosexual behavior, was amended to enable prosecution of any individual who was suspected of homosexual activity.2 The subsequent persecution homosexuals faced parallels the Jewish experience during the Holocaust: gay men were sent en masse to work and concentration camps where a great many perished.3 This paper will focus on the ways in which the restitution models of provenance research are detrimental to an understanding of queer lives and queer family structures. Provenance takes into account the cross-temporal ownership, transmission, and histories not only of art objects, but the human associations, feelings, and memories of them. In contemporary art historical discourse, provenance acts primarily 158 159 as the structure for the understanding of the transfer of art objects, rightfully deserves more attention than it has received to date.5 through familial inheritance and kinship ties. However, it does not take into account the multitude of ways in which these objects Returning to the topic of homosexual men and the Holocaust, may pass from person to person. This framework is fundamentally this paper’s primary focus is on the ways in which homosexuals heteronormative in nature and precludes queer subjectivities from were persecuted under National Socialism and how survivors have this type of research. This paper is concerned with opening up been silenced, stigmatized, and written out of official narratives alternative ways of investigating the material culture of homosexuals of the Third Reich. This silence, which persists to this day, is persecuted and killed during the Holocaust with the explicit aim of amplified by contemporary scholarship and research surrounding uncovering further questions that have been omitted by the normative provenance of art objects, particularly those stolen from individuals provenance framework. This is a topic that has remained at the by the Nazis. While there have been a great number of cases margins of Holocaust studies and Art History, and is a fertile field referring to Jewish families and issues surrounding restitution for research and criticism. This paper will first examine the rise of and repatriation of art objects, there have been few, if any cases the Homophile movement in Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar regarding homosexual men. This paper asks: Why is this the case? Republic, noting some of the problematic issues with contemporary portrayals of the period. Next, the rise of National Socialism and It is clear that there is some contemporary understanding of the the resulting period of repression will be studied. Finally, we will repression that gay men in particular faced during the rise and examine the ways in which restitution models following the Second dominance of the National Socialist regime. AIDS activism in World War have precluded the claims of homosexuals and added to the 1980s, for example, took up the symbol of the pink triangle the atmosphere of silence and marginalization that survivors faced. that had been used to indicate homosexual men in concentration camp populations. As Dr. Klaus Müller notes, the reason why One area of study that this paper will not touch on, unfortunately, this symbol was so readily taken up by gay and lesbian activists is the lived experience and material culture of lesbians. This is not is because contemporary discourse has not necessarily put a because lesbians did not “exist” or that there was not sufficient face to the image of those who were forced to wear the triangle: evidence of lesbian visibility during this period: far from it. However, the legal framework that existed at the time, Paragraph This empty memory that Müller referenced from his own vantage 175, impacted homosexual men and women in vastly different ways. As Dr. Klaus Müller notes in the introduction to The Men A with the Pink Triangle, there was debate amongst the Nazi leadership lthough as to whether lesbians should be included in the expansion of the thepink legislation in 1935. However, Müller points to three reasons as to triangle why this did not occur. The Nazi leadership thought that lesbianism has become an was “essentially alien to the nature of the ‘Aryan’ woman” and international emblem of thus was not inherent in the Aryan identity. Within the leadership the gay and lesbian community structure of National Socialism, “there seemed to be no danger of today, we still know little about the a ‘lesbian conspiracy’” due to the dearth of women in positions of individual fate of those who suffered power. And finally, lesbians could “be used as breeders regardless of wearing it. A symbol invented by the Nazis, their own feelings, and reproduction was the most urgent goal of 4 the pink triangle was able to be a modern Nazi population politics.” Despite this view that lesbians were not symbol of gay and lesbian pride only because we impacted by Nazi policies, there is anecdotal evidence for lesbians are not haunted by concrete memories of those who were having been sent to concentration camps, and this area of research forced to wear it in the camps. Ours is an empty memory.6 160 161 point in 1994 is still somewhat valid almost twenty years later in Thus, the appropriation of the symbol of the pink 2013. The pink triangle as homosexual signifier has sprung up triangle, usually turned upright rather than inverted, since World War II in various modes of representation within visual was a conscious attempt to transform a symbol of culture. Spearheaded by Larry Kramer in the mid 1980’s, the AIDS humiliation into one of solidarity and resistance. Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed as an anarchist By the outset of the AIDS epidemic, it was well- group of gays, lesbians, and their allies in an effort to resist oppressive entrenched as a symbol of gay pride and liberation.8 government forces that hindered research and access to AIDS- related healthcare. During the formation of the coalition, multiple The triangle’s prevalence in visual culture was through first hand prints were made in the form of banners or wheat pasted as posters. visual experience and media coverage. Originating as the title of Saturated in black, the prints were contrasted by two other colours: an AIDS activist collective, The Silence=Death slogan caught on a pink triangle centered in the middle of the poster, and letter quickly, and became an important inclusion in the visual production based imagery that forms the equation “Silence = Death” (fig.1). In related to AIDS activism. The triangle’s history continued through small subscript underneath the message, some of the posters read: into the activism led by those identifying with marginalized sexualities, making itself present in public works that engaged with Why is Reagan silent about AIDS: What is really the politicized aspects of capitalism. This represented a break within going on at the Centers for Disease Control, the global discourse that furthered gay and lesbian studies to shift into Federal Drug Administration and the Vatican? a less exclusive theory concerning the word “queer,” and how it Gays and Lesbians are not expendable … Use relates to bodies that do not fit into a nationally reproductive model. your power … Vote … Boycott … Defend yourselves … Turn anger, fear, grief into action.7 Just as the triangle was once a symbol of oppression under National Socialism, the term “queer” has been reclaimed from its prior Various realms within lesbian and gay communities soon history of violence and repression. Historically used to refer to appropriated the pink triangle. Redeemed from its original something strange, bent, or not quite right, it eventually became, negative connotations, the symbol became iconic in its and still is used as a slur against people perceived to be lesbian or perpetuation of the histories that include persecution, gay, particularly against effeminate men.9 Just as the triangle came to imprisonment, and murder at the hands of government officials. be re-appropriated as a traumatic signifier of bodies perceived to be separate in classification based on their sexual practices, so too the ACT UP, in describing the inversion from a downward to an word queer has been turned around and used as an umbrella term for upward-facing triangle, state: sexual diversity. Shifting the discourse of sexuality from the confines of identity politics, the need to discuss issues of gender and sexuality The pink triangle was established as a pro-gay without ascribing definitive identities became prevalent. Alongside symbol by activists in the United States during the anarchist movements that ascribed community efforts to aid those 1970s. Its precedent lay in World War II, when living with HIV-related health issues, issues of the body, sexuality, known homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps gender, and identity were flourishing within the world of academia, 10 were forced to wear inverted pink triangle badges giving rise to theories that also adhered to the title of “queer.” as identifiers, much in the same manner that Jews were forced to wear the yellow Star of David.
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