Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970s

A Golden Age for Queers?

Janin Afken, Benedikt Wolf, Janin Afken, Benedikt Wolf

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030274269
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030274276
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of LGBT culture in the two German states in the 1970s. Starting from the common view of the decade between the moderation of the German anti-sodomy law in 1968 (East) and 1969 (West) and the first documented case of AIDS (1982) as a 'golden age' for queer politics and culture, this edited collection traces the way this impression has been shaped by cultural production. The chapters ask: What exactly made the 1970s a 'legendary decade'? What was its revolutionary potential and what were its path-breaking political and aesthetic strategies? Which elements, movements and memories had to be marginalized in order to facilitate the historical construction of the 'legendary decade'? Exploring the complex picture of gay, lesbian and – to a lesser extent – trans cultures from this time, the volume provides fascinating insights into both canonized and marginalized texts and films from and about the decade.

Part IThe Legendary Time and Space of the Queer 1970s in Germany

© The Author(s) 2019

J. Afken, B. Wolf (eds.)Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970sGenders and Sexualities in Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27427-6_3

Begin Abstract

‘We Were so Turned On’: Reflections on Queer(ing) Past and Memory

Susanne Hochreiter¹

(1)

Institut für Germanistik, Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria

Susanne Hochreiter

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

We were so turned on

By your lack of conclusions. (Bowie, 1971)

The Bewlay Brothers: Narration and Queer Temporality

The title of this paper is a quote from the refrain of David Bowie’s song The Bewlay Brothers. This last track on the album Hunky Dory was not amongst Germany’s number one hits in the 1970s. It certainly does not represent the sound of the 1970s that we might associate with chartbusters by The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks or Peter Maffay and Daliah Lavi. However, it is exactly this title that, for me, hits a ‘key note’ for the ideas I would like to introduce in this paper. My initial consideration is that this song could represent a model for the interweaving of past and future, for a retrospective on the 1970s. At the same time, to me it symbolizes a queer process of recounting the interactions and shifts of time and location. Then writing and reading as intertwined procedures of remembering are focused in this song.

There are three themes that I connect with this song, this text, the music, the voices and sounds in regard to the question of the 1970s as the ‘Golden Age of Queer Sexual Politics’: melancholia, time and narration, and memory and transformation.

The fact that I chose this particular title, ‘We were so turned on’, has to do with what first came to mind when I thought about 1970 in the context of political upheaval and social movements, and that is connected to emotions or to imaginations of emotions like joy, passion, desire. I myself was born in 1970 and did not have many insights into politics that whole decade—only what I glimpsed from my family, school, TV and radio. I learned to read, write, do math, ride a bike and swim. The realm of politics was outside of the world of my experiences. I remember my mother’s green platform shoes, and the summer trips I went on with crocheted pants, but I was clueless about women’s liberation demonstrations in Vienna, had no idea about abortion or reforms of criminal law, and had never heard about old Nazis still in government. I like to think of the 1970s—they are so far away, so vague, but also warm and feature a view of a good, a better, future. To understand myself as a child of the 1970s is false and true at the same time. My personal 1970s began in 1983 when I discovered Ziggy Stardust and the words androgyny, bisexuality, homosexuality, glitter and glam rock—opening new perspectives in my life. They began, a second time, in the 1990s, when I studied in Berlin and started to read feminist theory and the texts of Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Reinig, Verena Stefan, Marlene Stenten, Margot Schroeder and Anja Meulenbelt.

‘We were so turned on’ is affectively linked not only to happy songs and images of people in motion, to statements by powerful women who, above all, wanted to break out of their narrow lives, who fought for their rights, who were sick and tired of male domination, sexism, and bourgeois hypocrisy: they were loud, rebellious, courageous, ready to take their lives into their own hands, here and now! ‘We were so turned on’ is tied to my own awakenings, to discoveries and insights that were revolutionary to me. These images of dynamic vitality are staged in the film La Belle Saison/Summertime (Catherine Corsini, France/Belgium 2015), which came to the cinemas in 2015—a movie very different from Yony Leyser’s docu-fiction from the same year Desire will Set you Free (Germany 2015), an independent underground production in and about the Berlin underground scene. Both movies are again different from movies of the 1970s though Leyser was of course inspired by Rosa von Praunheims groundbreaking film It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives (Germany 1971). I am thinking of course of Ulrike Ottinger’s work and of the films Helke Sander made from the late 1960s.

All these three film makers started their artistic careers in the late 1960s protest milieu that eventually led to the students’ rebellion we are used to link to the iconic year 1968. Helke Sander was one of the co-founders of the Action Committee for the Liberation of Woman (Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frau) and delivered, as a representative of this committee, a famous speech at a 1968 meeting in Frankfurt of the Socialist German Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, SDS), the leading organization of the so-called extra-parliamentary opposition. When the all-male board of the meeting did not want to discuss Sander’s speech, Sigrid Rüger, a student of Romance studies, threw a tomato on the board. This event has come to be viewed as a starting point of second-wave feminism in West Germany. The public screenings of Praunheim’s film all over West Germany virtually triggered the founding of many of the first gay liberation action groups, including the most important of these, the Homosexual Action West Berlin (Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin, HAW).¹

Sander’s contributions as an activist of the women’s movement and as a film-maker were very influential. She also founded the feminist journal Frauen und Film (‘Women and Film’) in 1974. In her work, she addresses challenging themes with a new, experimental filmic language. She started filming friends in their kitchens and connected political issues to aesthetic questions. This work is also a refusal of normative affects: women are no longer represented as good housewives and mothers, but as individuals struggling with contradictory demands. The four minutes short Subjectitude/Subjektitüde (Germany 1966)² is one of her first films and initiated discussions about gender roles and sexism. Sander dissects a typical urban scene at a bus stop by introducing a ‘subjective’ camera style. That way she simulates the viewpoints of different individuals, whose inner thoughts are voiced over the soundtrack. Her minimalist and almost abstract style of filming an attempt to explore the medium of film for her political agenda. In Sander’s films, the 1970s are definitely not golden. They are in black and white and full of anger.

So, yes, maybe a golden age took place, maybe even two or three different ones. People took many risks and fought for a lot. Not only did they hope for change, but they also brought it about, dared to put it to the test. Compared to prior years—it was an outcry, a fresh breath of air. Maybe compared to our present, where everything seems to run in very rigid paths of tremendously fast movement, right-wing and anti-LGBTI movements are gaining support in Europe and elsewhere, and Donald Trump is the president of the United States? Where and what are the queer 1970s—now that we are looking for them?

The ‘Bewlay Brothers’ do not make it easy on us: ‘We were so turned on’ is just one line of many and what may sound happy or enthusiastic, here ends with the next verse—‘by your lack of conclusions’ (Bowie, 1971). When Bowie’s song was released in 1971, it already sounded like a melancholy reminiscence of the times that were just about to begin. An outmoded or premature period—a notion of passing and forgetting in experiencing?

‘We Were so Turned On’: Melancholy

What is so effective about this song is, at first, not the puzzling message of the text, but a narration staged as remembering, tied to a kind of music that seems to express melancholy and a resigned triumph in the refrain—as if this swan’s song was an attempt to bring back to life, envision, for a moment, something long gone—the eulogy of a lost time. The motif of loss (‘the solid book we wrote cannot be found today’, Bowie, 1971) and the melancholy have a specific link to queerness as many scholars have shown. Heather Love has pointed out the mood of melancholy in modern queer texts, and the particular pain that comes with the impossible love of queer desire (Love, 2007). Heidi Schlipphacke assumes a metonymical relationship between queerness and melancholy: ‘Queer love is, by definition, melancholy, for the relationship to the object is always shrouded in ambivalence in contemporary western cultures that do not recognize these relationships as equal’ (Schlipphacke, 2010, p. 236).

According to Sigmund Freud, melancholia is a displaced form of mourning, a mourning that never ends because the loss of the object remains in the realm of the unconscious and cannot become conscious. Thus, the melancholic person does not even know consciously what has been lost (Freud, 1957). It is

a loss that remains undefined, by ambivalent fee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Chronology 1968–1982
• Introduction: Constructing and Revisiting the Golden Age of Queer Sexual Culture in Germany
• Part I. The Legendary Time and Space of the Queer 1970s in Germany
• Part II. The Canonized Queer 1970s
• Part III. The Queer 1970s Against the Grain
• Part IV. Retrospections
• Back Matter