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#Holocaust historian @ankahajkova studies sexual barter & #queer practices. Now a survivor's daughter sued, claiming Hájková's interpretation of her mother's relationship as lesbian is wrong & would destroy her mother’s „lifelong image & accomplishments“ https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/lesbische-beziehungen-im-kz-zu-intim-fuer-die-forschung-a-74df1056-ec60-44f9-a2b4-5697493d7a3f
For non-German speakers, here's what it is about: The case centers around the relationship between a female prisoner & a female guard. Hájková depicted the case in essays & lectures as evidence of #homophobia in the #concentrationcamps & as an example of queer Holocaust history.
The prisoner's daughter, however, wanted to prevent her mother's name from being mentioned in this context. The Frankfurt Court had to decide which weighed more: #academicfreedom, which Hájková invoked, or the protection of "post-mortem personal rights" demanded by the plaintiff.
In April 2020, the court ruled Hájková must not use the woman’s real name or photo in connection to the conclusion that she had a lesbian relationship. Hajkova therefore tried to replace the woman's name with a pseudonym in publications & announcements.
When she did not succeed to delete the name in all existing texts, the plaintiff filed a 2nd case. In Nov 2020, the court ruled that Hájková must pay a fine of 4000 EUR for violating the initial court order. The plaintiff, however, had to pay most of the costs of the proceedings.
To understand the complexity of the legal proceedings, Solveig Grothe's article @derspiegel is helpful. She also stresses the difficulty of working with historical sources on queer sexual encounters:
"Same-sex experiences with love, intimacy or sexual bartering in captivity would mostly be kept quiet by the survivors - presumably because they already meant a #stigma during imprisonment. (...) Fellow prisoners had called people who sought same-sex intimacy 'deviant monsters.'"
Moreover, in the extreme situation of the Holocaust, sexual encounters often seem to have generated ambivalent feelings - in a gray zone between barter and desire, between consensual and non-consensual, violent and non-violent contacts.
Indeed, historians working in this field know how difficult it is to interpret silences (and exaggerations) in the historical record. To gain a better understanding who had sexual contacts with whom, how, when & why, dense descriptions & #interdisciplinary approaches are crucial.
Ultimately, we will never know what exactly happened in each case, neither as historians nor as friends or descendants of survivors. Still, it is vital to study sexual practices in the Holocaust - queer & heteronormative, violent and non-violent, commercial and non-commercial.
For a long time, #sexuality has been considered a private matter that had no relevance to #WWII & the #Holocaust. But recent research has shown: To understand how people live and survive in situations of extreme violence, sexual practices and desires are crucial. #twitterstorians
To get a better idea of the subject, I recommend reading Anna Hájková's work, for example "Queere Geschichte und der Holocaust" via @bpb_de: https://www.bpb.de/apuz/275892/queere-geschichte-und-der-holocaust?p=all
More literature can also be found here: https://sexualityandholocaust.com/blog/bibliography/
And if you want to search for literature on #sexualviolence during the Holocaust as well as WWII in Europe and Asia, check out the Selected Bibliography @warandgender:
https://warandgender.net/bibliography/
https://warandgender.net/bibliography/
