The story of trans life under Nazism is anticipated as tragic. Following the hard-won recognitions of gay and lesbian victims of the Holocaust and in the maelstrom of contemporary global attacks on trans existence, scholarly and public investments in this history are at their apex—provoking debates in the German Bundestag and libel cases. Yet the content of this history remains largely unknown. Using granular archival research, Zavier Nunn’s first book, Liminal Lives: Trans between Weimar and Nazi Germany, explores the micro and macro registers of how everyday trans life was experienced, policed, and cut short across the Weimar and Nazi regimes, sometimes in surprising—but always uneven—ways. This talk sketches out the contours and stakes of this monograph, the first definitive work on trans life before and after the Nazi’s rise to power.
Zavier Nunn is a historian of sex/change, the state, and subjectivity, specializing in the administration of medical and legal forms of transition in twentieth century Germany. He is currently a Fellow in the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. His first monograph, Liminal Lives: Trans Between Weimar and Nazi Germany is under review at Duke University Press. Tempering rosy accounts of queer life during Germany’s first democracy and challenging notions of uniform Nazi persecution against gender non-conformity with granular archival research, this book tells stories that overturn long-held assumptions in histories of gender and sexuality. Nunn is currently working on his second book-length project, a history of legal sex change that tracks its continuation across liberal and illiberal political regimes. He is published in Past & Present, Gender & History, and German History.