Hate crimes against gay people stuttgart

The DFG Research Network Queer Contemporary History of the German-speaking world was out in force at the German Studies Association GSA in Montreal, October this 47 th annual conference of the GSA was the first to take place outside of the United States.

The panel was chaired by Andrea Rottmann FU Berlin , co-lead of the network: the three presenters were Kevin Heiniger University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland , Noah Julia Munier University of Stuttgart , and Eike Wittrock Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna.

Homosexuelle Subkulturen im Schweizer Massnahmenvollzug und in Erziehungsanstalten bis discussed the incarceration of young Swiss men and women in reformatories in Bern and in Aarburg in the s and s; in their paper entitled Spatial Practices As Subjectivation of Homo- and Bisexual Men in the Early.

I had the pleasure of providing a comment on this fascinating panel. In thinking about different queer spaces, Kevin Heiniger, Noah Munier and Eike Wittrock all raised crucial historiographical questions about the agency of the individuals subject to our historical gaze, even in such a regulated environment as the reformatory.

They also flagged up a range of methodological questions, including the issue of the source material to which we do and do not have access to try to reconstruct and analyse the experiences of historical actors. All three panellists were clear about the powerful forces of surveillance and control which are central to their research topics, whether the leadership of reformatories, the officials who policed—and closed down—homophile magazines and meeting spaces in the s, or the SED and the Stasi.

Yet all three presenters also drew attention to the diverse ways in which this coercion and control was met with subjectivity and consciousness-building from the bottom-up. Kevin Heiniger looked especially closely at the role of psychiatric officials in reformatories, who more often categorised and pathologized cases of intimacy between boys and young men, as opposed to between girls and young women due in part to the structural devaluation of female sexuality.

These psychiatric case reports are deeply othering and condescending, but Heiniger also discussed the sources which offer a glimmer of the perspectives of those incarcerated. These ego-documents include a confiscated diary and secret messages which were passed between the inmates.

We had a rich discussion about the extent to which we can meaningfully talk about agency here. To access and represent the perspectives of those incarcerated in reformatories, we discussed the work of Saidiya Hartman , whose book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals focuses on Black girls and women in the United States in the early 20 th century.

For example, Hartman thinks about the experiences of Mattie Nelson, whose voice is entirely missing from her case file, which consists only of sociological and psychiatric reports commissioned by the reformatory in New York to which Nelson was confined. Noah Julia Munier started their paper with a fascinating visual analysis: a lino print from Die Freunde , a short-lived West German homophile magazine from the early s.

The scene depicts two figures inside a living room perhaps a heterosexual couple , looking out the window at two men. My first association was to the common queer experience of being stuck on the outside looking in—except, in this instance, these two men were not looking in, but gazing in the other direction, and with forthright, assertive expressions.

Do we as historians know what is going on here?

Hassverbrechen in stuttgart: solidarität mit der gay community

Munier pointed to the significance of the cross-shaped lead lining of the window, an unmistakable allusion to the Christian conservative sexual morality of the early Federal Republic. This environment did not mean it was impossible to organize, however. Munier explored the Reutlingen group Kameradschaft Die Runde , showing us the complexity of queer attempts to navigate the banishment of homo sexuality from the public sphere.

Here we have a case of visibility—the resolute demand to keep the curtains open—not as a means of exposure, but quite the opposite, ultimately as a way of keeping things hidden. As Munier showed, practices of subjectivation are closely linked to spatial practices.

Here, like Heiniger, Munier thinks about agency, and demonstrates how dancing, as a particularly interesting example of how bodies move through space, might be seen as constitutive of consciousness, of subjectivity, of identity. Munier discussed touch — the touch involved in dance.

And here they cited Toni Simon, a trans woman who fought a running battle with the Reutlingen police to keep her bar open. In part, there was a commercial imperative here. If dancing were to be banned in her bar, her queer patrons would go elsewhere.

Putting these images of dancing and touching further together: if we can touch across time, or feel the touch of queer people from the past, do we also dance with our sources? Perhaps at times we strike up a good rhythm and stay in tune; occasionally we might lose focus and fall out of sync, feeling an inability to become intimate with the sources at our disposal.

Wittrock also brought into the discussion the scholarship of Heather Love, whose book Feeling Backward asks us to reflect on what we do or feel when sources resist us, seeming to turn away from us, or away from the frameworks within which we work. Munier ended their paper with an analysis of an inspection report of the Salon der Hundert , compiled by local authorities in Tübingen.

This textual source has a powerful visual quality which allows us a sense, however incomplete, of the photographic evidence that is largely missing from the archive.