Bubis Behind Bars: Seeing Queer Histories in Postwar Germany Through the Prison

Abstract

Analyzing oral history testimony as well as prisoner files from the 1960s Berlin women’s prisons, this article explores prisons as queer spaces and as entry points into queer lifeworlds. Focusing on the gendered embodiment of inmates, it argues that the gendered practices of self-fashioning were key to preserving queer dignity, not just under the conditions of imprisonment, but also more generally during the intensely homophobic 1950s and 1960s in West and East Germany. Close readings of prisoner files demonstrate that inmates engaged in erotic relationships which at times lasted beyond incarceration, and that they were skillful negotiators in pushing the limits of personal expression in prison. At the same time, prison rules enforced normative genders and sexualities. Prisoner files also allow historians to study working-class queer lives which are often less represented in LGBT movement archives.  They bring to the fore gendered erotic subcultures that were rejected by the respectability politics of homophile activists as well as the radical politics of gay and lesbian liberation, such as the butch-fem subculture of the mid-20th century. The article employs a critical genealogy to reconstruct historical understandings of queer subjectivities that often fall between contemporary identity categories. By centering inmates of women's prisons, it intervenes into and complicates discussions in queer German history presently focused on the persecution of gay men. While only male homosexuality was prohibited by law, prisons are, paradoxically, crucial sites for lesbian and trans histories, too.