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in Nazi Germany
by Jane Caplan
History Workshop Journal Issue 72 Advance Access Publication 23 August 2011 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr021
ß The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
172 History Workshop Journal
individuals who so starkly tested the norms of bipolar sexual identity would
be automatic candidates for repression and exclusion.
Was this because the numbers were too small and the anomalies too
marginal to generate any public danger or any clear standard of decision?
Even though historians must sometimes be content with this kind of unsat-
isfactory conclusion, we must also note that each case cited here was in fact
investigated in some way, demanded some form of official negotiation, and
was brought to some kind of conclusion, whether permanent or provisional,
and whether or not this was satisfactory for the parties concerned. It also
depends what questions one wants to answer.
I started my investigation of these cases out of simple curiosity: they were
surprising, and I wanted to know how they arose and how to explain their
threat to public order, the police used their discretion to leave them in the
various states of limbo to which their subjective gender ambiguity already
consigned them.26
In Alex S.’s case, the Interior Ministry’s decision may have reflected the
view that a potential man would be demeaned by being forced to live as
a woman.27 The register offices were in theory somewhat more familiar with
the problem of sexual if not gender ambiguity, since there were recom-
mended procedures for the provisional registration of an infant of indeter-
minate sex as a ‘Zwitter’ or hermaphrodite.28 But these cases were
vanishingly rare and in any case at some point a permanent assignment of
a sex and a name had to be made, however ambiguous the evidence, since
the civil code knew only two sexes.29 The Berlin city administration had
My thanks to the History Faculty of the University of Oxford for supporting the research on
which this essay is based; and to Jutta Braun, Christiane Kuller, Jan Lambertz, Marti Lybeck,
178 History Workshop Journal
Katie Sutton and Laurie Marhoefer as well as editors of History Workshop Journal for
invaluable suggestions and references.
1 Clifford Kirkpatrick, Woman in Nazi Germany, London, 1939.
2 Tim Mason, ‘Women in Germany 1925-1940: Family, Welfare and Work’, Part 1,
History Workshop Journal 1, spring 1976, Part 2, History Workshop Journal 2, autumn 1976;
Richard J. Evans, ‘The Women’s Movement in Germany 1890-1919’, DPhil. dissertation,
Oxford, 1972; Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany, London, 1975; for Germany, see
Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography, ed. Karen Hagemann and
Jean Quataert, London and New York, 2007; among important early US publications,
When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal,
Atina Grossman and Marion Kaplan, New York, 1984.
3 Letter from Tim Mason to Jane Caplan, 14 Sept. 1975 (author’s possession).
4 Among the earliest works see Claudia Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik
und weibliche Homosexualität, Pfaffenweiler, 1991; Günter Grau (with Claudia Schoppmann),
Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung, Frankfurt am
30 For the status of the civil registrars in Nazi Germany, see Siegfried Maruhn,
Staatsdiener im Unrechtsstaat. Die deutschen Standesbeamten und ihr Verband unter
dem Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt/Berlin, 2002; and Jane Caplan, ‘Registering the
Volksgemeinschaft. Civil Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939’, in A Nazi ‘Volksgemeinschaft’?
German Society in the Third Reich, ed. Bernhard Gotto and Martina Steber, Oxford, 2012,
forthcoming.