The fates of lesbian women in Nazi Germany have long been contested. When the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism opened in Berlin in 2008 it was an occasion for protest. Lesbian activists were frustrated that the monument focused exclusively on the fates of gay men, insinuating that women had not also faced persecution. This talk by Samuel Clowes Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, recounts several life stories of lesbians who experienced the Nazi dictatorship, highlighting the many trajectories that queer women followed in those twelve years. It argues that lesbians did, in fact, face persecution, ranging from everyday harassment and surveillance all the way to imprisonment in concentration camps. At the same time, the talk recovers these women’s agency, contending that many of them resisted fascism with solidarity that cut across lines of class, race, and gender.
Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. A historian of modern Germany, his research focuses on gender and sexuality, legal history, and the history of democracy. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany and A Queer Theory of the State, and he is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe.