The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Faculty Spotlight: Nazism is Not the Past — Hannah Leffingwell on Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism, and Why Donald Trump is Not Camp

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

Herzog's key claim is that the Nazi regime was not anti-sex, but selectively erotic for "racially fit" people.

1. The Podcast for Social Research episode centers on Hannah Leffingwell and Dagmar Herzog's Sex After Fascism. 2. Hannah Leffingwell is an associate faculty member, a historian of queer and gender history, and a writer, musician, and amateur photographer. 3. The episode asks what Sex After Fascism is for: how sexuality, memory, and political history can be read together. 4. Hannah describes entering history through French, English, and Russian literature before taking a master's in French studies. 5. Her dissertation, Becoming Lesbian: The Making and Unmaking of the International Lesbian Movement, 1972 to 1998, focuses on lesbian movement history. 6. She says her project moved from a national study of France to transnational networks across Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, South America, and Latin America. 7. Hannah emphasizes archival research, oral history interviews, and close reading of letters such as one sent to the International Lesbian Information Service in 1984. 8. She explains that Foucault helped her move away from a positivist model of history and toward stories, interpretation, and retelling. 9. Lauren Wolfe connects that method to Herzog's historical writing and says Herzog historicizes theory rather than treating it as sacred. 10. Hannah agrees that Herzog reads figures like Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, and Foucault in context rather than as timeless authorities. 11. The discussion turns to Sex After Fascism and its opening question about "sexual morality and mass murder and its aftermath." 12. Hannah says the book changed her view of the history of sexuality by showing it as central rather than marginal. 13. She explains that Herzog began with the New Left in West Germany and noticed repeated claims that Nazis were sexually repressed. 14. Hannah says Herzog challenges the idea that Nazis were simply homosexual, gender-bending, or sexually frustrated. 15. She summarizes Herzog's account of 1933 to 1945 as a shift from early church placation toward more explicit celebration of premarital and extramarital sex for "racially fit" people. 16. She notes that this period also included forced sterilizations, forced abortions, and medical experimentation on Jewish, Romani, and queer people. 17. Hannah argues that post-fascist Germany was shaped by churches and Allied occupiers who normalized continued criminalization of non-normative sex. 18. She says Nazism is "not the past" and points to Elon Musk's Nazi salute and the retention of paragraph 175 as evidence of continuity. 19. The interview is brisk and conversational, with Wolfe and Mark DeLucas pressing Hannah through long historical comparisons and clarifications. 20. Listeners interested in queer history, fascism, and theory will get the most out of it; listeners wanting a light celebrity chat may skip it.

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