Published to great acclaim in French and now available for the first time in English, Elissa Mailänder’s groundbreaking book explores how the Nazi regime used sexuality to promote political loyalty, conformity, and cohesion among “ordinary” Germans. Beginning before the collapse of the Weimar Republic and continuing through the postwar American occupation of Germany, Mailänder’s study highlights the complex and conflicted ways that sexual “liberation,” repression, and violence were used and experienced in the everyday lives of citizens of the Reich. Her analysis draws on a vast array of sources, from legal dossiers to private photographs and letters, as well as public archives, magazines, and movies. Mailänder’s findings are often uncomfortable; she demonstrates, for example, that a significant number of women who were not persecuted by the regime saw shifts in gender and sexual norms as positive developments—ones that some felt were lost under the American occupation, with its own routines of military sexual exploitation. What emerges is a portrait of a regime that was less interested in repressing sexuality than in reinventing it according to a racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.

Elissa Mailänder is a professor of contemporary history at Sciences Po Paris. She specializes in the history of violence, gender and sexuality, material culture, and the history of the everyday. Her first book was translated into English as Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944.

Darcie Fontaine is a writer, translator, and historian of the modern French empire. She is the author of Modern France and the World and Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria.

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: A Liberated Sexuality?

Part I: A New Society (1930–1938)
Chapter 1 The New Mother: Shaping Motherhood in Nazi Germany
Chapter 2 To Have and to Hold? Divorce Austrian Style

Part II: The Happy War (1939–1945)
Chapter 3 Good Times, Good Friends, and a Bright Future: Four Austrian Women Under Nazism
Chapter 4 Love Is in the Air! Women, War, and Aviators in Nazi Cinema
Chapter 5 Soldiers, Conquerors, Colonizers: Excavating a “Rape-Joke” Photograph from the Eastern Front

Part III: A Return to Normal? (1945–1951)
Chapter 6 A Foreign Affair: Administering Sexuality in US-Occupied Bavaria
Chapter 7 Whining and Winning: Male Narratives of Love, Marriage, and Divorce in the Shadow of the Third Reich

Conclusion: What Remains of Nazism

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index