Benno Gammerl delivers the 4th Goldsmiths Queer History Annual Lecture on 23rd March 2021, 7.00pm GMT

This year’s annual lecture also gives us the opportunity to celebrate the publication of Dr Gammerl’s book Anders Fühlen: Schwules und lesbisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik. Eine Emotionsgeschichte and his appointment as chair for the history of gender and sexuality at the European University Institute in Florence.

Good times – and also very bad ones: Queer history in modern Germany

How can one write the queer history of twentieth-century Germany with its pioneering advances and its catastrophic backlashes? The talk traces the intricate temporalities linking queer pasts in Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, East, West and re-united Germany. This will also help us to better understand the at times conflictual simultaneity of stigmatizing, emancipatory and normalizing dynamics. What do these insights imply for contemporary activism?