Seduction of Youth : Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic

Vendrell, Javier Samper

ISBN 10: 1487525036 / ISBN 13: 9781487525033

Published by University of Toronto Press, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 38690463-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Seduction of Youth : Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1487525036
• ISBN 13: 9781487525033
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A simple man from the provinces, Friedrich Radszuweit merged popular culture, consumerism, and politics as the leader of the League for Human Rights, Germany’s first mass homosexual organization. The Seduction of Youth is the first study to focus on the League and its leader, using his position at the centre of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement.

By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Javier Samper Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.

About the Author

Javier Samper Vendrell is an assistant professor of German Studies at Grinnell College.