An Intimate History of the Front

Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War

J. Crouthamel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137376923
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This eye-opening study gives a nuanced, provocative account of how German soldiers in the Great War experienced and enacted masculinity. Drawing on an array of relevant narratives and media, it explores the ways that both heterosexual and homosexual soldiers expressed emotion, understood romantic ideals, and approached intimacy and sexuality.

Chapter 1

The Ideal Man Goes to War

Ideals of masculinity became increasingly militarized in imperial Germany. Middle-class social organizations coordinated efforts with military, medical, and political elites to carefully construct a hegemonic masculine ideal based on the warrior image. While subsequent chapters will analyze ordinary soldiers’ reactions to this hegemonic ideal and the behaviors and emotions they explored to cope with the stress of warfare, this chapter focuses on the dominant masculine ideal that was disseminated in imperial German culture before and during the war. It investigates three interrelated themes: the popular image of the “good comrade,” idealized emotional and sexual relations between front soldiers and women at home, and military and civilian efforts to control male sexual behavior.

The nation’s survival allegedly depended on the ability of every soldier to embrace the dominant ideal of the “good comrade,” which required them to control their emotions, remain loyal to women at home, and suspend their sexual desires until the war was over. Prewar fears of “degenerate” threats to the male ideal, including homosexuality, heterosexual promiscuity, and lack of emotional self-control, strongly shaped how middle-class conservative critics perceived men at war. Many saw the war, which was expected to last a few months at most, as an opportunity to resuscitate decadent masculinity. The war provided a framework for clearly defining “good comrades” and loyal women on the home front versus degenerate “types.” Men and women were imagined to be locked in a symbiotic, spiritually sustaining relationship, bound by mutual loyalty and dedication to the fatherland. This spiritual relationship, civilians hoped, was so powerful that it replaced men’s sexual needs and desires at the front. Utilizing soldiers’ mass media (in particular, army newspapers), civilian morality organizations, which included doctors, political leaders, and pastors, tried to win over the hearts and minds of ordinary soldiers by convincing them to adhere to the ideal of a “good comrade” fixated on self-sacrifice and self-restraint, thus ensuring the survival of the nation.1

This chapter argues that the perception of front soldiers as heroic comrades changed in the wake of perceived sexual immorality. Civilian morality organizations accused men of capitulating to their selfish instincts, and the image of the abstinent, selfless front soldier deteriorated into fears that the war produced morally and sexually damaged men. Medical and religious authorities feared they were losing control as men succumbed to sexual promiscuity away from home, especially as the venereal disease crisis unfolded and the military began to regulate brothels just behind the lines. Soldiers’ masculinity was largely defined and imposed by civilian authorities, who grew increasingly desperate to enforce the image even when they suspected that front soldiers had lost faith in the prescribed masculine ideal. Paranoia on the home front intensified, and anxious civilians organized greater pressure on military authorities to monitor sexual hedonism. To the home front, the venereal disease crisis signified more than just a threat to the nation’s fighting strength; it also reflected home-front perceptions that infected men betrayed the nation’s expectations for manliness and threatened to corrupt the German Heimat.

Hegemonic Masculinity in Imperial Germany

In nineteenth-century Germany, the concept of “masculinity” became increasingly aligned with a militarized notion of the “heroic ideal,” which dictated personal sacrifice and absolute loyalty to the fatherland.2 This prevailing model of masculinity, reinforced by conservative teachers in Germany’s school system, required men to be fierce and aggressive soldiers, yet also capable of controlling their emotions in an effort to stay focused on making sacrifices for the nation. Emotions like love and compassion, especially when concerned with personal needs and desires, were considered unmanly, ultimately a threat to the heroic ideal.3

The idealized masculine image was defined against demonized countertypes. The image of the effeminate dandy became a lightning rod for social critics who argued that German men had become completely self-absorbed, indulging in sexually “deviant” behaviors without a care for bourgeois standards of self-control and devotion to the nation.4 Emancipated women, neurotic men, Jews, and homosexuals were seen as the enemies of middle-class standards of discipline and chastity. Allegedly working-class tendencies toward promiscuity, homosexuality, and sexual violence threatened to spread like a contagion, according to conservatives who hoped to counteract this sexual plague with the image of a warrior male who transcended sexual needs and replaced them with complete devotion to the fatherland.5

In the decade just before the war, “manliness” was also becoming increasingly medicalized, as doctors took it on themselves to prescribe a bulwark against male degeneration. Leading psychiatrists in imperial Germany’s universities and medical clinics warned that modern industrial society bred degenerate psychological drives and behaviors, including sexual perversion. Establishment doctors targeted socialism and “racial enemies” for allegedly spreading sexually deviant behaviors that eroded the German family and national life.6 Most psychiatrists believed that the boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” sex could easily be contained. Though they warned of the threats of modernity, doctors were confident that middle-class culture could keep its effects under control. In his classic 1892 work, Degeneration (Entartung), Max Nordau argued that while the machine age “ruined the nervous system,” men with strong nerves and work ethic could preserve their manliness.7 Influential Berlin sexologist Iwan Bloch, in his 1906 work Sexual Life in Our Times, wrote that “a properly functioning soul” with “strong willpower” could resist the corrupting effects of city life, cabarets, and temptation toward promiscuity and sexual licentiousness. Masturbators, perverts, homosexuals, and other “male hysterics,” he warned, were a danger to the national community but easily recognizable and thus easily controlled.8

Fears about the spread of homosexuality dominated medical and popular debates about an alleged crisis in male sexual behavior. While some doctors warned that this homosexual “epidemic” came from below, as working-class “degeneration” expanded with the onslaught of urban life, there were also anxieties that the spread of homosexuality came from above, a symptom of aristocratic decadence. In the wake of the 1907 Eulenburg scandal, in which the Kaiser’s confidante was exposed as a homosexual, middle-class critics questioned whether or not the aristocracy had lost control of the officer corps as a pillar of masculine virtue. Further cases of officers allegedly seducing their recruits led to Reichstag speeches calling for public inquiries into homosexuality in the Prussian officer corps.9 The image of the Prussian officer, traditionally the central image of German masculinity, came under fire as the sexual behavior and secret lives of these aristocrats in uniform seemed to contradict their claims to be the defenders of German manhood.10

Germany’s middle class asserted a carefully defined notion of the male sexual ideal. Under pressure in the wake of the Prussian officer corps scandals, the military underwent reforms that eroded the power of allegedly decadent aristocrats in favor of a more technocratic, industrialized military that emphasized “toughness” over aesthetics.11 Right-wing critics, especially in the mostly middle-class German Navy League and Pan-German League, called for the old aristocratic leadership to be replaced by “real men” whose credentials were a “hardened masculinity” and middle-class values based on work ethic, merit, and productivity rather than court connections. The bourgeois male was imagined to be a pillar of rational sexual control who resisted the temptations of “irrational” instincts. Male sexuality was idealized as rational and ordered, characterized by a strong will that maintained sexual restraint. In a larger Victorian context, the middle-class imagination cherished an image of stoic emotional self-control in which men could not only resist sexual temptation but also restrain themselves from complaining or reflecting on personal needs.12 Through practiced restraint, men could protect themselves from the irrational, “feminine” passions that threatened to erode their naturally rational selves.

Fully developed “manliness” and heterosexual stability, conservative critics argued, could only be achieved within the context of the bourgeoisie’s carefully defined universe of socially appropriate marriage. As Bärbel Kuhn has demonstrated in her study of single men and women in Wilhelmian Germany, greater pressure was put on men to marry in order to fit the middle-class ideal, as it was believed that married men focused their energy more intensely on social duties like work rather than the emotional stress of sexual competition.13 Men were constructed as morally fragile before they married, as they became dependent on lower-class women, in particular prostitutes, for sexual gratification, which undermined their ability to remain rational and focused on their more utilitarian pursuits in the economic sphere.14 Without proper discipline, “antisocial” behavior could spiral out of control. Men who delayed marriage were more susceptible to developing “sexual abnormalities,” including homosexual tendencies. The stereotypical homosexual was seen as effeminate and symbolized male arrested development, immorality, and uselessness.15

Sexual restraint was a cornerstone of bourgeois masculinity. In 1908, F. W. Foerster, an advocate for Germany’s Purity Leagues, argued that sexual restraint bolstered manly virtues like courage and discipline, while masturbation and promiscuity eroded strength of will and capacity for self-sacrifice.16 On the brink of the war, Germany’s middle class increasingly idealized a vision of militarized male sexuality, in which spiritual devotion and physical exertion for the nation could help men control their temptations toward degenerate sexual behaviors.17 This self-control was essential to maintaining not only bourgeois values but also the needs of the national community as defined by medical and military authorities.18 Germany’s doctors, religious elite, and conservative critics eagerly sought a transformative event that could regenerate decaying masculinity and resuscitate traditional values threatened by rapid social, political, and economic change.

Since the early nineteenth century, German popular media had celebrated the warrior ideal as the foundation of masculinity and the basis for national regeneration.19 During the Wars of Liberation, songs and poems sanctified “camaraderie” as a masculine characteristic and national value. The “Vaterlandslied” (“Song of the Fatherland”), written by historian Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1812, expressed the idea that God wanted brave men, loyal to the fatherland, to join their brothers in the fight to the death against the hated enemy.20 Writers of a wide range of newspapers, literary publications, songs, and poems promoting national ideals described German manhood in contrast to that of the enemy, in particular France, which was seen as lacking the loyalty, honor, and other traits that defined male identity.21 Popular media thus became an important instrument for constructing and disseminating notions of militarized, martial masculinity.

Popular culture portrayed Germany as a nation of comrades. After the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War and German unification, the national community imagined through war memorials, religious commemorations for the dead, and the historical narrative built around Germany’s war experience sanctified the idea that one could only become a loyal subject and member of the Volk through soldierly prowess. Self-sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty became part of the cult of militarism used to promote patriarchy, antidemocratic politics, and traditional social hierarchies.22 War was seen as a testing ground for manliness, and it provided the opportunity for men to demonstrate their individual worth within the collective act of defending the nation. As Karen Hagemann argues, men sought new values in response to the dramatic social and cultural insecurities brought about by industrialization and political fragmentation, which tended to subsume men into a mass, collective culture that many found disorienting.23 Through war, men could demonstrate their commitment to newly defined concepts of “manly valor” and “national sacrifice” that German poets and cultural elite enshrined as essentially “German” male characteristics.

Notions of military camaraderie in the nineteenth century, which culminated in notions of “comradeship” during the age of total war, gave men a sense of meaning and self-actualization. The idea of a Männerbund, which provided belonging and emotional support outside traditional social structures while at the same time being worshiped by those same social institutions for protecting “traditional” life, appealed to millions of German men. Male camaraderie in battle allowed men to transcend the confines of bourgeois life through the extraordinary experience of war while simultaneously achieving middle-class values of status, respectability, and moral purity.24

Although they were imagined to be morally pure, common soldiers also had a bad reputation in the decades before 1914. They were known for their lewd songs and licentious humor, especially when they were in groups, where men expected each other to engage in ribald behavior. In the late nineteenth century, men were expected to gain sexual experience when they joined the army, which turned them from innocent boys into “men.”25 Besides straining relations with civilians, who often criticized soldiers for being too aggressive and out of control, soldiers’ sexual behavior also became a medical problem. By the 1880s, 35 out of 1,000 soldiers in the German army were being treated by army doctors for venereal diseases. Garrison commanders tried to control their soldiers’ sexual adventures by prohibiting them from frequenting inns where they could find prostitutes. The military tried to deflect responsibility for this problem by pointing to soldiers’ prearmy moral shortcomings or excusing soldiers by saying that it was their “nature” to let loose while away from the confines of home.26

Civilian-organized morality leagues would not accept the idea that it was natural for soldiers to escape, even temporarily, restrictions that had been placed on them at home.27 To maintain the image of the morally pure soldier that civilians idealized, and to prevent the spread of venereal disease, men were expected to remain sexually abstinent while they were away from wives and girlfriends.28 Moral crusaders in imperial Germany put considerable effort into monitoring soldiers’ behavior, even while they were on the other side of the world. Protestant Christian missionaries, for example, created the Deutsche Seemannsmission (German Sailors’ Mission, or DSM) to both educate and control German seamen. The DSM used the term “prodigal son” to describe merchant and imperial navy seamen who they saw as in a precarious moral situation where they were constantly tempted by the sexual possibilities available in ports in Buenos Aires, New York, and other foreign shores.29 The DSM’s efforts were based on a carefully constructed image of masculinity in which sailors were naïve but essentially good individuals who were taken advantage of by immoral, foreign influences—namely, prostitutes. In this model of masculinity, men were victims of predatory prostitutes or even, especially in the case of homosexual relationships that sprouted during lengthy voyages, boredom. Missionaries surmised that once they were given care by the DSM, which provided cultural activities and community to help them stay connected to their fatherland, sai...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Ideal Man Goes to War
• 2. Masculinity in Crisis: Sexual Crime, Dislocation, and Deprivation
• 3. “Don’t Think I’m Soft”: The Masculine Image Presented to the Home Front in Soldiers’ Letters
• 4. “I Wish I Were a Girl!”: Escaping the Masculine Ideal in Front Newspapers
• 5. “We Need Real Men”: The Impact of the Front Experience on Homosexual Front Soldiers
• 6. Coming Home: Postwar Sexual Chaos, Disillusionment, and Battles over Masculinity
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography