The male homosexual appears in many guises in postwar West German literature: whether he is a
sexually predatory soldier corrupt teacher decadent artist purveyor of kitsch or powerful
industrialist he appears almost always as an insider of the social and political system.
Writers such as Heinrich Böll Wolfgang Koeppen and Alfred Andersch utilized images of
homosexuality in order to examine the Nazi past and to critique the Federal Republic of
Germany. Their literary depictions are informed by discourses that circulated in the early
twentieth century including the scientism of Magnus Hirschfeld the masculinism of the German
youth movement and the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the literary irony of Thomas Mann.
Pre-Nazi images of homosexuality reappear in postwar West German literature in a new
sociohistorical context in which the meaning of the Nazi past and its relationship to the new
Federal Republic is debated on many levels. The Nazi Abduction of Ganymede traces the
development of a postwar West German literary tradition that participated in parallel
developments in philosophy psychoanalysis and popular culture all of which continued to find
new ways to link homosexuality with fascism.
