About the Book
States of Liberation traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of World War II to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin.
In this groundbreaking account of male homosexuality in Cold War Germany, Samuel Clowes Huneke uncovers how the history of gay persecution and liberation continues to shape life in reunified Germany today.
Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men – and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.
About the Author
Samuel Clowes Huneke is an Assistant Professor of Modern German History at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in modern European history from Stanford University in 2019. His first book
States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2022) examines gay persecution and liberation in Germany from the end of World War Two until the end of the Cold War. He has published extensively on queer German history in scholarly journals, including
Central European History,
Journal of Contemporary History, and
New German Critique. He writes frequently for other periodicals, including the
Los Angeles Review of Books,
The Point, and
Boston Review.
Moderated by
Richard Wetzell.
Richard F. Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and editor of the GHI's Bulletin. Trained at Stanford University (PhD), he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland. His recent publications include the volume
Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking the Third Reich (co-edited, Cambridge UP, 2017) and the essay
"Rosa von Praunheim, Martin Dannecker und das Verhältnis der westdeutschen Schwulenbewegung zur homosexuellen Subkultur, 1971–1986. Von Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers … zum Streit in der Aids-Krise," in: Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 23 (2021)
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