Reconstruction sites: Sexuality, citizenship, and the limits of national belonging in divided Berlin, 1944--1958 (Germany)

Central to postwar regeneration, enshrined in both country's constitutions, and informing criminal and civil law was the belief that the family deserved special protection as the basic building block of the newly reconstituted, yet divided, Germany. Indeed, the common foil utilized by both major occupation powers and continued in the laws and deeds of the subsequent German governments was an overriding concern for the family as an essential element of political reorientation and democratization. In the shadow of total collapse, I analyze the varied forms of licentiousness that emerged out of the destroyed capital to dominate East and West German political discourse in the urban landscape of Berlin. I argue that the regulation of homosexual sex, prostitution, fraternization, and delinquent youth demonstrates how the postwar German states (albeit in differing ways) continued to pathologize sexual deviants as challenges to the democratic reorientation of the German people.; Through an analysis of case studies from postwar Berlin, I propose that the city's iconic position at war's end allows for a unique analysis of the competing visions of respectability, morality, and citizenship fostered by the postwar governments. In regulating illicit sex, the city's eastern and western police, court, and social services employed contradictory methods and practices. Despite the ideological differences in their rhetoric of reform, however, each side believed that the regulation of aberrant sexuality was central to national renewal and democratization, social stability, and political normalization in a temporarily divided Germany.; Yet the question of gender normalization can only be understood fully when placed in the context of competing visions of normality, traces of which are made visible in an analysis of the state's treatment of the sexual outlaw—the urban asocial, the oversexed German “fraulein,” the delinquent youth, and the prostitute. On the streets of Berlin, I argue that the continued existence of urban sexual criminals thwarted state attempts at protecting and promoting the traditional family as the basis for political membership in the 1950s.