Attitudes to Homosexuality between World War and World War II

 

I’m at a very dramatic stage of Schellberg 7,  though I haven’t yet got a proper title for it but I’m labelling it ‘Gabriela’, because it’s Gabriela’s’ story. In later chapters it also becomes Anika’s story.

Gabriela is at last told the truth about her birth and is let into the secret that her father has been keeping from her for some time.

There are parallels between her story and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: there is death, and unrequited homosexual love and there is the same contrast between pragmatism and romance. Her own story though also includes two unwanted pregnancies.  

She is about to find out about homosexuals being ‘rehabilitated’. Attitudes to homosexuality will also become even more important as the story progresses through the 1930s and 1940s.

Gabriela is by now comfortable with lesbian love.  Two of her best friends are a lesbian couple and they have been instrumental in introducing her to the Bohemian life she enjoys in Schwabing, the artist part of Munich. This is also a sort of foreshadowing to the Nazi era where lesbianism was better tolerated than homosexuals.

Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, established in 1871, forbade sexual relationships between men. However, although lesbianism was forbidden it wasn’t illegal. No criminal code made is so.  Were the German as puzzled as our own Queen Victoria about how women could have sex? It may also partly be explained by the fact that lesbians seemed less of a threat as women on the whole didn’t hold  high-ranking positions in  society

Life became difficult for men as the Nazi regime took hold: they were expected to admire the strength and physique of other men and away from home and at war what might happen? Both women and men on both sides of the war became closer. There would often be an emotional link that could spill over into sexuality.   

In the 1920 and 1930s both gay men and women had been tolerated despite Paragraph 175. The clamp down on homosexual men was in part a reaction to some of the ‘decadence’ of that period.  This is a decadence in which our protagonist will take part shortly. This will ultimately lead to her niece, Anika, taking part in a satirical cabaret in an underground theatre.           

Find a copy of Death in Venice here.   

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German Weddings

 

Another interesting topic I’ve had to research.  My main character in Schellberg 7 has to attend her sister’s wedding. Gabriela is estranged from her mother and sister but all the same she is there,

There will be quite an explosive scene soon. But at least so far the wedding ceremony has gone smoothly.

The reception is held at the bride’s home and it is called a wedding breakfast. They are served a buffet of cold cuts, breads, salads, Sekt and cake. But there isn’t a wedding cake as we know it. The couple saw a log, light a candle and have a first dance together.

Something that is just becoming popular is the throwing of the bridal bouquet. Edith looks at Gabriela as if she ought to try to catch it. Gabriela wants nothing of this and you’ll understand why when you read the novel.

I’ve set this wedding just after the hyperinflation has been brought under control. It’s also around the time that Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and George VI marry.  The bride is wearing a similar dress to the one the young Elizabeth wore.  There is another similar bride elsewhere in the cycle.

Rings are used differently in Germany. The engagement ring is the wedding ring but it is worn on the left hand and it is moved over to the right hand during the wedding ceremony.

Gabriela’s dress is quite daring. She hasn’t been invited to be a bridesmaid but her sister has asked her to wear blue. It is definitely a very fashionable dress. Will she upstage the bride?

Banned books and antisemitism

 

 

I’ve just finished reading Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books. This is set in the present in day in a fictionalised Troy in Georgia. Lula Dean comes across as a slightly strange character. She organises a group of concerned parents to take books out of the town library This includes The Diary of Anne Frank, a generally well-respected book.  Is it perhaps because it’s the diary of a young girl who is beginning to understand her own sexuality? Lula then builds a ‘little library’ in front of her own home. She fills it with what she considers ‘wholesome’ books.

The daughter of her rival replaces the books; she puts different books inside the dust-covers of the books Lula has chosen.

It seemed to be rather exaggerated but I did read today that To Kill a Mockingbird has been removed from the school curriculum because readers might find it disturbing. Er, isn’t that rather the point?

It turns out  in Lula’s case it wasn’t so much to do with her concern for the welfare of  the local youth but it was all part of a long-standing rivalry with another more reasonable member of the local community.

How often do people seek to rise to power because of some personal issue? Even Hitler had his poor childhood as a motivator.

There are Neo-nazis and anti-Semites in the town and some of the books that Lula wants removed challenge Nazism, anti-Semitinsm, trans and homophobia and support feminism.  The books that replace the banned books are in fact more wholesome.

We find out that Lula hasn’t even read the books but picked them up form a charity shop. We also find out that in her earlier life she hadn’t been averse to reading some quite raunchy texts.

I was a little disappointed with the book though I found its message important. There were just too many characters and too many paragraphs longer than a page, both of which made it difficult to read.

However, we see the townspeople enriched by reading the replacement books and then find the courage and the incentive to get this community back on track.

Lula leaves town and her house is sold but everyone wants to keep her little library now restocked with quality literature.      

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The 1940s Trope

maybe

 

 

 

yes

no

I’m afraid for me it is becoming somewhat much too stylised. We have those covers where the fashions are indeed 1940s but where the wearers look too glamorous and too well fed.  

We read stories that are tinged with romance, red lipstick and dancing the jitterbug. I even saw a cover for a true story of Holocaust survivors where the narrator was walking away from Auschwitz in a fur coat and heels. She and her young daughter both look too well-nourished for people who had been in a concentration camp.  

Well, so yes we live in troubling times at the moment and yet we try to enjoy ourselves. Live one day at a time. ‘Sufficient on to the moment is the evil thereof.’ There is plenty of evil around now. Being mindful is a way of getting though troubled times.  As long as we’re not also putting our head in the sand and pretending the problems don’t exist.   

We keep comparing much of what is happening now to what took place in the 1940s. Well yes, there are parallels.

Many draw comparisons between Trump and Hitler. I also query why our UK parliament was prorogued. Isn’t that something similar to what happened in Germany in 1933 and led to the 1940s being the way they were?

If we are supposed to learn from what happened then surely we must stop romanticising the 1940s?   

There are two horrible wars taking place at the moment and several other volatile situations in the world. It seems we have learned nothing.  We must look again at the horror of the 1940s.   

 

One Child’s War by Audrey Curtain

 

This is an account of what it was like for one young girl and her brother being evacuated three times during World War II. Over seventy years on Audrey Curtain reminisces about those times.  In between the three separate evacuations she and her brother retuned to London and experienced living in an area which had been badly damaged by the Blitz.

For Curtain writing this book helped her to come to terms with her memories of that time.  However the reader thereby doesn’t quite get the experience of the child living through these events; there is too much adult rationalisation going on.

Nevertheless some of the details are extremely interesting.  There is a Labrador that knows when the Doodle Bugs are coming. The two children were treated well enough in their various foster homes but without any real affection. Maye the latter was more noticeable because their parents were particularly affectionate. The household included a couple of uncles living with them. We are reminded that his was quite commonplace then.  

This book is, of course, one of many but does add to the insights that we might gain about this period.     

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Curing homosexuality?

There was a strong urge to ‘cure’ people of being homosexual as far back as the late nineteenth century. Brian surgery, hormone treatment, chemical treatment, conversion therapy and even castration were considered.

It is possible that one my main characters in Schelberg 7 is undergoing a mixture of conversion and chemical treatment and possibly even psychotherapy. Might it even be electric shock treatment though that wasn’t actually generally brought in until the 1960s?  

Downton Abbey also addresses this problem in the characters of Thomas Barrow. We are invited not to like him anyway so we may not be all the sympathetic.  The detail of what Tom does remains a little vague but he does seek to change himself and this involves some chemical manipulation which doesn’t work. There are some suggestions that he may have been using heroin, which accounts for how ill he looks and may only have alleviated the misery in felt in being gay and not being able to find a fulfilling relationship. He possibly obtained it from a quack.  As it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do he may as well embrace his sexuality. This action takes place a few years later         

Our Adlehard Braun will also return to wear his homosexuality proudly acknowledged and will have more to occupy him: the resistance to Hitler and the Nazis.  He will of course become persecuted for his ‘depravity’ in the dark years between 1933 and 1945.

In 1945 Walter Freeman used ice-pick lobotomy on thousands of patient even though he had no formal surgical training. Himmler’s solution was to intern and murder them.    

These days conversion therapy would be regarded as intrusive and as assault.

Homosexuals had to feel unclean and afraid until the present day where we still have some issues. However Adelhard comes to terms with himself long before that. Before the end of the book we shall learn that is not because he remained celibate.