Abstract: "From Perverse to Queer:  A History of Sexuality Through Film" 

Film serves as a particularly apt medium for the reflection of the history of sexuality in the Federal Republic of Germany.  We could trace out a history of 50 years of film controversies and triumphs that would represent for us the complex and changing parameters of the public sphere.  We could begin immediately at the start of the Adenauer era when the genre of "problem films" brought forward two contested and eventually censored films.  Die Sünderin and Anders als du und ich, which took as their themes adultery and homosexuality respectively,  relied on paradigms of liberal tolerance.  These films instead marked the reestablishment of the conservative parameters of the public sphere. 
We could follow our history all the way through to the present and the emergence of the Comedy Wave.  In the 80s in film after film the screw ball antics of hip single women, out to find a man, and funky gay men, also out to find a man, had German audiences laughing up a storm.  We could set these profitable films in the new context of the united Germanies and use it as a means to examine precisely the success of liberalism. 
Given the limits of time and space, this essay will have to focus on two films that can mark for us significant junctures in the sexual history of Germany.  Rosa von Prauenheim's nicht der Homosexuel ist pervers, sondern die Situation in der er lebt (1971) literally marked the start of the modern Gay Liberation movement in Germany.  Monika Treut's Didn't do it for Love (1997) reflects well post-gay, post-feminist controversies as well as the emergence of Queer Theory. 
These films allow us to explore the social philosophical paradigms out of which they emerged.  In their analysis I will move back and forth between content and context.  The representations of the films, from pervert to gay and back to pervert, can be understood as a progression, if not even progress.

Tables: Click on the title below to view these tables.

Tables 1 & 2 "From Perverse to Queer"

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