This chapter explores those transformations in intimate lives that have been collectively shorthanded with the term “sexual revolution.” Whether thought of as a gradually evolving process spanning the 1950s to the 1990s or rather understood as referring to the briefer era of heightened incitement and excitement around sex that reached its heyday in the 1960s-1970s, the story of sexual developments in the second half of the twentieth century has long been written in a linear, teleological fashion. Scholars emphasize the rise of reproductive freedom, women”s equality, rights for sexual minorities, and a more general attitude of sex-positivism. However, by reconceiving the story of the sexual revolution as a global one, inextricable from tectonic geopolitical shifts in both East-West and North-South relations – from the Cold War to decolonization and development projects and obsession with the purported dangers of “overpopulation” in the global South, and from the eventual collapse of Communism to the rise of a neoliberal economic order – this chapter challenges the “liberalization paradigm” and instead explores the sexual revolution as a multi-form, multi-sited, but also profoundly ambivalent process, met with recurrent backlashes as well as marred by its own intrinsic complexities.

PUBLISHED IN 1983, Ernst Klee's magnum opus, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (“Euthanasia” in the National Socialist State: The “Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Life”), was a foundational text in the literature of postwar German “working- through” of the Nazi past. It was an early and distinctive exemplar of the genre that would come to be known as “the history of everyday life.” It was also a transformative work in the historical understanding of Nazi perpetrators. In addition, in its time, it altered the German public's understanding of the role of the churches under Nazism and especially of the perpetrators’ would-be adversaries, the directors of church-run charity institutions whose residents were targeted for deportation to killing sites. And albeit with a bit of time lag, but then with considerable force, “Euthanasie” reconfigured the public's grasp of the myriad interrelationships between the murders of people with disabilities and the Holocaust of European Jewry. Although the particulars and the convolutions of the connections between the killings of people deemed cognitively deficient by the Nazis, on the one hand, and the Holocaust of European Jewry, on the other, remain subjects of ongoing scholarly discussion, the mass murders of people with disabilities have come, in substantial part due to Klee's interventions, to be internationally recognized as constituting Nazism's first genocide.

In sum, Klee (1942–2013), played an indispensable role in West and then united Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, in helping to recenter political and cultural attention on the systematic Nazi mass murder program which is now estimated to have claimed the lives of close to 300,000 individuals—above all those with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric conditions—within the Reich and the occupied territories of the Eastern front between 1939 and 1945. Klee's success in getting the German public, after close to forty years of dismissiveness and disinterest, to take the killings of people with disabilities seriously as the crimes that they were came against the background of more than a decade of engaged participant-observer journalism and his own deep practical involvement in disability rights activism in concert with militants from the nationally insurgent radical “cripple movement.”