Hegemonic masculinity in Nazi Germany, as well as in many militarized societies around the globe, meant physical, emotional, and moral “hardness.” The ideal man, embodied by the soldier, was tough and aggressive, in control of his body, mind, and psyche. He did not hesitate to sacrifice life and limb on behalf of the Fatherland, or to subordinate his individuality under the command of a conformist group of comrades. Whereas many scholars have already stressed these features of hegemonic masculinity, this article argues that the act of soldiering provided men with a male identity that was ultimately not defined by the repudiation, but rather integration, of what was (and is) often coded as feminine. In the social practice of male interaction, diversity and flexibility were needed, thus allowing for the display of femininely coded behavior like affection, tenderness, empathy, caring, and tolerance toward emotional breakdowns and moments of weakness in their midst. Thanks to its inclusive nature, such “protean” masculinity enabled different types of soldier-men to establish male identities; it also allowed them to switch among different emotional and moral states without losing their manliness. Yet, this was true only if the predominance of hardness was respected. Eventually, protean masculinity integrated diverse men and diverse emotional and moral conditions into a fighting unit, and, in the case of the Third Reich, into a genocidal society.

In their 1991 monograph on Nazi Germany, The Racial State, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann asked why it was “acceptable to use anthropological categories in the case of youth or women, and apparently unacceptable to employ them in the case of men?” The expansive historiography of Nazism, they complained, offered nothing “beyond an isolated venture into the realm of male fantasies, or a few studies of homosexuals.” The answer, in fact, had a lot more to do with scholarly motivation than acceptability. Put starkly, there was no intellectual frisson in recovering the history of “men” as a social category in Nazi Germany. Influential as The Racial State proved to be in driving the research agenda for historians of National Socialism, the authors’ ensuing chapter, “Men in the Third Reich,” merely confirmed as much. It presented a dry, empirical overview of Nazi racial and economic policies, excised of those specifically directed at women and children. The terms gender, masculine, or masculinity do not appear once in thirty-six dense pages of text. To be sure, this reflected the wider state of knowledge in the academy. Now, almost three decades later, historians can draw on a sociology of gender relations that was still in its infancy when Burleigh and Wippermann were writing. They study “men” to decode historical configurations of power. They no longer conceive of women, children, and men as discrete actor groups, but as protagonists in systems of gender relations. A sophisticated interdisciplinary literature has rendered men legible as gendered subjects, rather than as an unmarked norm. This scholarship stresses the plurality of masculine identities. It advises that a racial state, like all known states, will be a patriarchal institution, and that the gendering of oppressed ethnic minorities plays a key role in the construction of majority femininities and masculinities. By pondering the relationship between racial and social identities in Nazi Germany, Burleigh and Wippermann nevertheless raised questions with which historians continue to grapple. Each of the contributors to this special issue of Central European History focuses productively on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and power in the “racial state.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, nearly ninety thousand German-speaking Jews found refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine. While scholars have stressed the so-called Yekkes’ intellectual and cultural contribution to the making of the Jewish nation, their social and gendered lifeworlds still need to be explored. This article, which is centered on the generation of those born between 1910 and 1925, explores an ongoing interest in German-Jewish multiple masculinities. It is based on personal narratives, including some 150 oral history interviews conducted in the early 1990s with German-speaking men and women in Israel. By focusing on gender and masculinities, it sheds new light on social, generational, and racial issues in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The article presents an investigation of the lives, experiences, and gendered identities of young emigrants from Nazi Europe who had partly been socialized in Europe, and were then forced to adjust to a different sociey and culture after migration. This involved adopting new forms of sociability, learning new body postures and gestures, as well as incorporating new habits—which, together, formed a cultural repertoire for how to behave as a “New Hebrew.”

During the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of violence and atrocity by the men of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Schutzstaffel (SS), and the police. Scholars have extensively documented its use and abuse on the part of the perpetrators. For the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that not only bound the perpetrators together, but also became a facilitator of acts of “performative masculinity”—a type of masculinity expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. In many respects, the relationship among alcohol, masculinity, sex, and violence permeated all aspects of the Nazi killing process in the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, such practices were increasingly radicalized, with drinking and celebratory rituals becoming key elements for these closed male communities of perpetrators, who used them to prepare for acts of mass killing and, ultimately, genocide.

This article examines the impact of Nazi persecution on the gender identity of German-Jewish veterans of World War I. National Socialism threatened to erase everything these Jewish men had achieved and sacrificed. It sought to destroy the identity they had constructed as soldiers in the service of the Fatherland, as well as the high status they had earned as Frontkämpfer (front-line fighters) in the Great War, upon which their sense of masculinity identity rested. Although diminished and disempowered by Nazi terror, Jewish veterans were able to orient themselves toward hegemonic ideals of martial masculinity, which elevated military values as the highest expression of manhood, giving them a space to assert themselves and defy the Nazi classification Jew. For the Jewish men who fought in World War I, the Nazi years became a battle to reclaim their status and masculine honor. They believed that the manner in which they handled themselves under the Nazis was a reflection of their character: as men who had been tried and tested in the trenches, their responses to persecution communicated their identity as soldiers, as Jews, and as Germans.

This article looks at the experiences and perspectives of homosexual men in Nazi Germany—in particular, at homosexual veterans of World War I. How did homosexual men perceive “hegemonic masculinity” and ideals of comradeship during the Third Reich? The central argument is that the Nazi regime's emphasis on heterosexuality as an essential masculine trait was contested by homosexual veterans, who attempted to exert agency by actively defining notions of “masculinity,” the nature of their homosexuality, as well as their status in the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community). The ways in which homosexual men perceived homosexuality in relation to hegemonic masculine norms were diverse: whereas some tried to argue for the compatibility of homosexuality and martial masculinity, those who were arrested often distanced themselves from their homosexual identity. The testimonies of veterans, available in Gestapo police interrogation records, suggest how subjective constructions of sexual identity both undermined and reinforced hegemonic masculine ideals.

This article contributes to the expanding body of scholarship investigating the problematic correlations between racism, the legacy of colonialism, and configurations of national and cultural identity in post-war Italy. It does so through a yet unexplored perspective: that of the attitude of Italian publishing towards literature from former colonies. More specifically, it examines the reception of anglophone Caribbean novels written by ‘Windrush writers’ in the 1950s and 1960s. The article provides evidence of how Italian agents and publishers – belonging to the country’s intellectual elite, and many of whom publicly espoused anticolonial positions – not only proved to be more interested in the exotic, picturesque contents of Caribbean literature than in its historical, ideological, and political significance, but sometimes actively opposed the circulation of texts containing anticolonial or pro-Black identity claims. Some of their comments demonstrate the persistence of racist and derogatory assumptions of an imagined black and colonial Other, and a negation of their identity as both political subjects and cultural producers, if they failed to conform to dominant expectations. The expectations and the evaluation criteria active in the reception of Caribbean novels allow for an assessment of the ambiguous attitude of Italian publishing agents towards colonialism, race, and alterity.

This essay explores attitudes towards home-grown anti-black racism in Italy from the 1960s to the early1980s by focusing on the reception of Giovanni Vento’s Il Nero, a 1965 film that depicts the everyday lives of two biracial Italians born at the end of the Second World War from encounters between Italian women and non-white Allied soldiers, and of Antonio Campobasso’s Nero di Puglia, a partly autobiographical book by one of these biracial Italians, published in 1980. Campobasso’s powerful text, which denounced the hypocrisies of the Republic, received some acknowledgement in the intellectual community, but the lenses that the cultural critics used to interpret the text impeded a foregrounding of the racism that the book denounced. Giovanni Vento’s innovative film, on the other hand, did not even reach the commercial circuit and was also interpreted in leftist circles through a political and aesthetic paradigm that downplayed the specificity of anti-black racism. The article invites a reflection on the legacy that these attitudes have had in shaping the limited sensitivity to racism in contemporary Italy.

United Kingdom Supreme Court Justice Robert Carnwath has urged the judiciary to develop ‘common laws of the environment’, which can operate within different legal frameworks, tailored where necessary towards specific constitutions or statutory codes. One such mechanism with the potential for repositioning environmental discourse in both common law and civil law jurisdictions is the doctrine of the public trust. Basing their arguments upon a heritage of civil law and common law, supporters of the public trust doctrine are currently testing its scope in United States federal courts via groundbreaking litigation aimed at forcing the federal government to uphold its duty to protect the atmosphere. This article considers whether common law judicial resourcefulness can transform a transatlantic hybrid of uncertain parentage into a powerful tool of environmental protection.

Recent approaches to multilingualism, such as translanguaging, emphasize the porous, fluid, and hybrid nature of language use. This article intends to show, through an example of a local language debating competition in Central Java, that culturally emblematic performances tend to create monolanguaging spaces, due to their monolingual focusing on certain language varieties that are iconic to local ethnolinguistic identity. Monolanguaging spaces are language ideological spaces in which speakers project an idealized performance of their ethnolinguistic identity. Ethnographic observation shows that the performance of monolanguaging spaces involves the erasure of speakers’ multilingual repertoires and translanguaging practices, in accordance to the language ideology surrounding the hegemonic prestigious language variety and in accordance to the local norms of status or power-based social interaction. Attending to monolanguaging spaces reveal it as a performance accomplished through discursive work and power relations, involving the misrecognition of its connection and dissonance to multilingual repertoires and practices. (Language ideology, erasure, translanguaging, monolanguaging space, performance, ethnolinguistic identity, Javanese)*