“Dreamland of the Armistice”: Queer Potentials in the 1919 November Revolution

My contribution concerns what theologist Ernst Troeltsch described afterwards as the “Dreamland of the Armistice" when, “without the conditions and real effects of the impending peace, anyone could imagine the future as fantastic, pessimistic, or heroic.” The German Revolution, which brought about the armistice that ended World War I, itself ends in the summer of 1919 with two oppositely charged events: the punitive Treaty of Versailles in June and the Weimar Constitution’s adoption in August. Troeltsch’s dreamland is what came in between, the spring of 1919.

I focus on a sex education film made during this dreamland, Anders als die Andern [Different from the Others], against the backdrop of deliberations on censorship in the German constitutional convention. The film, made to drum up public opposition to § 175 of the German penal code which forbade sex between men, argued that all variations of sexuality and gender were normal, and that society should treat them as such. It was uniquely possible in this place and moment. One day after the November 1918 armistice, the provisional government lifted all forms of federal censorship as a show of trust in its people. But deliberations on the new German republic’s constitution record how trust was replaced with caution. A new censorship law specifically for films came in May 1920 with support across the political spectrum. The scandalous Anders als die Andern was blamed.

Anders als die Andern manifests the “dreamland of the armistice,” its sense of possibility, and its belief in democracy. More specifically, the film emerges at a moment when politicians grappled with just how far the revolution should go, and how much trust to have in German citizens. My research explores this labile moment, this brief spring in which alternate pathways for Germany’s future opened up, but were not taken.