“Many of the things that Sam found are surprising to the way most people typically think of West versus East during the Cold War,” said Daughton, who is one of Huneke’s advisers. Samuel Clowes Huneke made some surprising finds when he investigated German history during the Cold War. Daughton, associate professor of modern European history in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. But little work has been done on the post-war period, said J.P. Previous historical research has investigated how gay people fared in Germany during the Weimar period, the interwar years that ran roughly from 1918 to 1933, and during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship. Gay rights activism there was surprisingly successful.” Different approaches “But it actually had a lot to do with what was happening in East Germany, which was ruled by a communist dictatorship. “There is an assumption that the state of gay rights in Germany today is something that’s mostly due to events in democratic West Germany, which had a more vibrant gay culture and a more visible gay rights movement during the 1970s,” Huneke said. As a result, East Germany contributed significantly to Germany’s pro-gay turn once the country unified in 1990, in some regards more than West Germany did. Huneke found that during the Cold War era, communist East Germany had more lenient sodomy laws and accepted gay activists’ demands more quickly than its democratic twin. “And that explanation is not an obvious one.” “I started this work with one big question: How does a country go from the Nazi dictatorship to becoming the standard bearer of gay rights that it is today?” said Huneke, who pursued the research as part of his doctoral dissertation. That stark cultural and political change intrigued Stanford researcher Samuel Clowes Huneke, a doctoral candidate in history, who began investigating how East and West Germany dealt with homosexuality from 1945 to 1990.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Private Archives of Peter Rausch) Several of East Germany’s gay activists, including well-known transgender woman Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, center, pose for a photo in the 1970s.