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On February 15, 2003, hundreds of thousands of Germans joined the rest of Europe in protesting the imminent US invasion of Iraq. In Berlin, half a million demonstrators congregated around Alexanderplatz, surged westward down Unter den Linden, passed through the Brandenburg Gate, and marched along the Strasse des 17 Juni to the Victory Column at the center of the Tiergarten. There they merged with demonstrators pouring in from other parts of the city.

The protesters included everyone from Bundestag president Wolfgang Thierse to popular television personalities. There were Turks, Africans, members of other ethnic minorities, members of diverse political factions, and a substantial number of gay men and lesbians. All were fiercely opposed to current US government policies. The occasion was not, however, an anti-American revel.

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In 2004, Germany welcomes American travelers warmly but not obsequiously. German rage inspired by America's misadventure in Iraq still targets the Bush Administration, not American tourists, business travelers, or resident expatriates. Home of the largest gay community in Europe, site of a lively, American-influenced queer political scene, Germany is keenly hospitable to gay American visitors. In the presence of Americans, gay or straight, Germans exercise tact, seldom making political comments except when asked, but then speaking frankly.

"That's what friends do," says Armin Gaspers, who co-owns a popular, gay-friendly bed and breakfast in Berlin. "They criticize. They tell you the truth. People who are not your friends will only tell you what you want to hear."

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's critical stance on the Iraq war barely differs from that of French President Jacques Chirac; both have staunchly opposed the invasion and ensuing occupation, and refused participation in Bush's Orwellian "Coalition of the Willing." Polls show that in both Germany and France, 85 percent of the population condemns the US-instigated military action in the Middle East and supports their countries' noninvolvement.

"But we know you are not your government," Jens Wieseke, a customer service representative for a Berlin-based telecommunications firm, tells his American friends. At German antiwar marches, placards with messages like "USA=FRIENDS, BUSH=ROGUE" are not unusual.

Reciprocally, in the US, Germans have been spared the xenophobic invective some Americans have hurled at the French. American chauvinists seem not to mind biting into hamburgers or frankfurters between mouthfuls of "freedom fries."

Ordinary US citizens communicate with ordinary Germans more easily than with French people. Americans respond to German openness and lack of pretension. Germans have long been used to a large American presence within their borders, beginning with the US role in the Allied occupation following World War II. Now, under the auspices of NATO, 73,000 American troops remain stationed in Germany. In centers of international commerce such as Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt-am-Main, American business traffic comes and goes without interruption. Contemporary Germans know how to handle Americans.

Germany and the United States have cultural traits in common. Emancipatory and authoritarian impulses coexist in both national psyches, sometimes falling into equilibrium, sometimes bursting into conflict, always generating internal tension.

Counterbalancing the Germans' repressive bent is a disposition toward freedom, tolerance, acceptance of sexual diversity, and appreciation of the human body as an instrument of pleasure and well-being. German lifestyle options include sunbathing naked in public, drinking beer on the subway, and dropping into clubs for sex the way Americans might stop for coffee. Germans have a sane regard for the safety of children, but resist American-style protective excesses. In Berlin's U-Bahn, condom and candy machines are planted side by side. In major cities, gay visibility is commonplace.

"Homosexuality is not taboo in Germany, because it is seen inside the spectrum of sexuality," the late gay filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder told interviewer Boze Hadleigh in 1978.

Deep roots in Teutonic soil

Homosexuality is also seen as a pattern in the tapestry of German history. Sex between men was routine among Germanic tribes of the Roman era. In Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, John Boswell observes that in surviving law codes of Germanic peoples, homosexual relations are not proscribed. At the time of the first Christian millennium, the Bishop of Worms confined penance for homosexual acts to adulterous married men. Homosexuality was then known to be widespread among priests.

In 1120, mindful that Christian Crusaders were intrigued by relaxed Palestinian attitudes toward sodomy, the Church Council of Nablus decreed that men who committed homosexual acts should be burned at the stake. But in medieval Germany, law codes continued to sidestep unambiguous criminalization of homosexuality. Boswell points out that since German Church authorities knew that homosexual practices were common, and were aware of "anti-gay intellectual currents," their silence might be attributed in part to "an unwillingness to enforce conformity in private matters."

That silence spanned much of the existence of the Holy Roman Empire, a shrinking aggregate of principalities and miscellaneous fiefdoms whose territories receded into what is now Germany. By the 18th century, Prussia, to the east, had assumed a dominant role among the German states. Ruled by the Hohenzollern family of Brandenburg, militaristic Prussia was the Sparta of Europe. During the Enlightenment, Friedrich II, known as Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, introduced Athenian elements of intellect and artistry.

In 1730, Friedrich's father, Friedrich Wilhelm I, forced the 18-year-old crown prince to watch the beheading of his lover, Hans Hermann Katte. When Friedrich Wilhelm died, the young king took his revenge, waging war and eclipsing his father in martial prowess while advancing "feminine" interests his father loathed, like poetry and music.

In Potsdam's Park Sanssouci, the gay king's predilections are still apparent. At the Neue Palais, a 580-meter ceiling painting commissioned by Friedrich II depicts the investiture of Ganymede, a Trojan boy beloved of Jupiter, as cup-bearer of the gods. A collector of homoerotic antiquities, Friedrich purchased the prized Greek bronze Youth Praying, the figure of a nude young man with arms outstretched, and installed it outside his study to enhance the view.

At Sanssouci Palace, his summer residence and retreat, Friedrich lived surrounded by male friends and attended by an all-male staff. The monarch managed to survive the circulation of printed broadsides claiming to expose his daily regimen of sex with cadets, pages, and lackeys. Homosexual activity was by this time illegal in Prussia.

Frederick the Great helped set the stage for the German unification that began in the 1830s and became complete in 1871 with Kaiser Wilhelm I's coronation. As unification loomed, so did adoption of the Prussian criminal code by the rest of Germany.

In the mid-19th century, homosexuality received unprecedented scientific scrutiny across Europe. In Germany, activists including Hannover lawyer Karl Ulrichs used medical evidence to fight for tolerance of "Urnings"-- persons attracted to others of their own sex. The word homosexual was coined in 1869 by Austro-Hungarian physician Karoly Maria Kertbeny, in a letter protesting the proscription of gay sex.

Despite the efforts of Kertbeny and others, Germany adopted Prussia's anti-gay Section 143, soon to become Paragraph 175. This meant that within the new nation, homosexual acts were punishable by one to four years' imprisonment. There had been no such provision within recent memory in Saxony, Oldenburg, Thuringia, Hannover, Wurttemberg, Braunschweig, or Bavaria before their absorption into the German state.

For many Germans, Paragraph 175 was a call to action, but the modern gay movement gathered momentum slowly. In 1896, Berliner Adolf Brand began publishing Der Eigene (One's Own), the first gay magazine. In 1897, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, publisher Max Spohr, and others created the world's first gay-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee).

"In other countries of Europe and North America, where gay organizations remained much more limited," writes sociologist Barry Adam in The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, "the German movement offered a lifeline for isolated but aware lesbians and gay men."

The nature-versus-nurture argument simmered in German gay liberation circles from the beginning. Hirschfeld, whose Institute for Sexual Studies fostered groundbreaking research, believed homosexuals were born, not made. Brand, a married bisexual steeped in influences ranging from anarchism to the sexual protocols of ancient Greece, maintained that being queer was a matter of choice. The two pioneers worked together only briefly.

Estranged from Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Brand founded his own gay-rights group, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of Their Own), in 1903. Philosophically irreconcilable, both factions pursued common goals. Repeal of Paragraph 175 was their first priority. They also sought to educate the public about homosexuality, and to arm gay men with the means of defending their own civil rights.

Gute Freunde

The movement grew out of a homosocial German mainstream culture that idealized same-sex friendship and fetishized the male body. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many German artists-- painter Hans von Marées, photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, and others-- specialized in male nudes. In the 1890s, the naturist movement was founded in Germany; in 1903, Freilichtpark (Free Light Park), a nudist colony prototype, opened near Hamburg.

Among the groups that shaped the German mystique of health and the body were organizations-- the Wandervogel youth league for one-- that fostered myths of Teutonic ascendancy that helped spark World War I. During the Great War, German gay activists suspended or curtailed most of their activities in the face of repressive wartime laws. But as hostilities ended, the German gay movement surfaced again, reinvigorated.

In 1919, when the constitution of the newly democratized Germany was ratified, the seat of government was moved from Berlin to Weimar, a town associated with Goethe and the German Enlightenment. The Weimar era was a time of high inflation and social malaise. But by the late 1920s, Unter den Linden outglittered the Champs Elysées. Germans attained a giddy level of freedom that engendered a resurgence of music, literature, theater, and the visual arts-- including the fledgling art of cinema.

Some of Germany's finest early film directors, notably F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), were gay. As part of a new campaign to abolish Paragraph 175 (then rarely enforced, but still on the books), Magnus Hirschfeld sponsored the first gay feature film, Anders als die Anderen (1919). Other productions featured gay characters. With the advent of sound, the sexually ambiguous Marlene Dietrich rose to stardom.

The English-speaking world's defining impression of Weimar Germany came from gay British author Christopher Isherwood, who lived and worked in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. His collection Goodbye to Berlin (1939) was adapted for the stage twice-- in 1951 as I Am a Camera, and in 1966 as the musical Cabaret, which later reached popular consciousness through Bob Fosse's film. Isherwood's boarding house at 17 Nollendorfstrasse survived the war and remains a private residence.

In Isherwood's time there were about 40 gay pubs, cafes, and nightclubs around nearby Nollendorfplatz. Today the district, Schöneberg, retains a strong gay ambiance. When Berlin approved a plaque commemorating gay victims of the Holocaust, the outer wall of the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station seemed the most natural site.

Backlash in brown shirts

As freedom swept Germany during the 1920s, a movement arose to stamp it out. Freighted with folklore and religion, the moral rearmament effort was sustained by reactionaries bent on curbing Marxism and license. Teachers and government officials encouraged students to denounce improper literature. Years before the Nazis came to power, book-burning was a familiar event.

Gay and lesbian publications from crude erotica to serious nonfiction were easily characterized as Schmutz und Schund-- "smut and trash"-- and became fair game. In December 1926, an Act for the Protection of Youth Against Smutty and Trashy Literature was passed by the German parliament, the Reichstag, with strong support from Catholics and nationalists. Observers from the United States, where purity crusades erupted regularly, gave rising German censorship their approval.

The National Socialist (Nazi) Party seized power in January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. On February 27, the Berlin edifice housing the Reichstag was destroyed by fire. The National Socialists, whose very name was calculated to link political polarities together in unthinking harmony, used the resulting uproar as an opportunity to arouse the German people against enemies of patriotism and family values. Reinhold Schnzel's film Viktor und Viktoria (1933), a gay-tinged, gender-bending farce, could not have been made a few months later, when cultural cleansing began.

On May 6, 1933, Nazi students barged into Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sex Research, destroying 12,000 books, 35,000 pictures, and countless manuscripts. This was a prelude to mass book-burning on May 10, 1933, when books with homosexual content joined Jewish, socialist, anarchist, and otherwise tainted publications in bonfires nationwide.

Hitler believed in clean, high-minded male bonding, but not in gay sex-- or, apparently, sex of any kind. (The Nazi Party itself included a powerful contingent of gay men led by Ernst Röhm, head of Hitler's Storm Troopers, but only until Hitler had them massacred on June 30, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives.) Because communal nakedness among men was thought to encourage homosexuality, the Nazis banned nudism. Body worship endured, superficially purged of any sexual dimension. Leni Riefenstahl's documentary account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympiad, portrays the male body in chaste, classical terms.

"Public life must be freed from the stifling perfume of our modern eroticism," wrote Hitler, stressing that racial preservation trumped personal freedom. Propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels condemned "degenerate art," including all gay expression. In 1933, gay organizations were banned; gay bars and cabarets were closed. By 1935, under the terms of a fortified Paragraph 175, any hint of homosexual behavior merited arrest. Hitler's stated goal in incarcerating gay Germans was "extinction of abnormal life."

The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was established at Oranienburg, a Berlin suburb, in 1936. It remained open until the arrival of the Russian army in 1945. Thousands of internees-- Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals-- died there of hunger and disease, were executed, or were worked to death at the nearby Klinkerwerk brick factory. It was here that many of the gay men rounded up in Berlin were interned, sometimes pending shipment elsewhere. These "175ers," marked by pink cloth triangles sewn to their blouses, were among the less populous groups of prisoners in the camps, but had the highest death rate.

Discretion and willingness to collaborate spared some gay men in the arts, like Wagnerian Heldentenor Max Lorenz. Meanwhile, as the war raged on, resourceful non-collaborators kept gay culture alive. Gerhard Beck, a gay Jew, survived the war in Berlin along with others involved in precariously contrived invisible networks.

Light in the dark

The Third Reich could never wipe out underground gay expression. Even in German military circles, men quietly circulated picture books by "Jean Vincent," a popular artist whose specialty was male group sex in classical settings. "Hildebrand's" explicit drawings spanned the Hitler regime and kept appearing into the occupation. On display at Beate Uhse's Erotik Museum in Berlin is a 1945 Hildebrand drawing of a naked, erect, bemused-looking Aryan lad being lewdly liberated by two American soldiers, at least one of whom is black.

By the summer of 1945, the Nazis had been crushed, German cities were in ruins, and the country was occupied by American, British, French, and Soviet troops. In 1949, the Cold War split Germany in two. One element the communist German Democratic Republic and the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany still held in common, however, was Paragraph 175. Some gay men were liberated from Nazi concentration camps only to wind up in postwar German prisons. East Germany retained the Nazi version of the anti-gay statute until 1967, when a milder version was adopted; West Germany did not follow suit until 1969.

West German gay activism was jump-started by filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim's Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation in der er lebt (It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Situation in Which He Lives), a smart, impudent look at the American gay liberation movement. First screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1971, the documentary rallied German liberationists who soon formed the Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft (Homosexual Interest Group).

East Germany's seizure of private businesses (including gay bars), belligerent posturing, and construction of the Berlin Wall enabled propagandists in the West to cast the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as West Germany's evil twin. But in key areas, the GDR, which had full employment and universal health care, was more progressive than West Germany.

Through government management, overt and covert, gay activism was muted in the East. A central figure in East Berlin's gay scene was the transgendered eccentric and sometime police informant Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Gay men and lesbians gathered at von Mahlsdorf's home, or met informally at changing locations in weekly "Sunday clubs." In 1982, a gay workshop sponsored by a Lutheran student group in Leipzig seeded similar programs elsewhere. Finally, in 1988, the GDR abolished its toned-down incarnation of Paragraph 175.

In 1989, when Carsten Ludwig, an unhappy 20-year-old conscript in the East German Army, wrote to his superiors informing them of his sexual orientation and requesting early discharge, he was ordered to report to his division's doctor. "Homosexuality is not a reason to terminate military service," the physician told Ludwig. "We need you." (An American soldier would have been told to start packing.) Ludwig's military career was abridged instead by the collapse of communism.

The Wall was breached on November 9, 1989. The first gay-themed East German film, Heiner Carow's Coming Out, premiered that night as crowds pushed through checkpoints. In the East, gay people felt an empowering euphoria. "My coming out was at the time the Wall came down," recalls Jens Wieseke, then a 25-year-old, closeted resident of East Berlin. "It was my own revolution, a revolution of emotion for me."

Soon after the collapse of communism, as borders between East and West Germany melted away, Guide correspondent Tom Reeves revisited Berlin, Dresden, and Leipzig, and found them "freer and more stimulating than any US city." For gay East Germans, reunification was marred, however, by the reinstatement of Paragraph 175, which West Germans had never repealed. Reunified Germany did not administer the coup de grâce to Paragraph 175 until 1994.

In the decade since Paragraph 175's demise, gay American tourism to Germany has increased. (For a detailed rundown on Germany's gay scene, see Matt Mathrani's report in this issue.) Part of the attraction is sex. From Hamburg's teeming Reeperbahn to Leipzig's Stargate Sauna to Stuttgart's Blue Box, Germany is a gay male playground. Sex clubs and darkrooms abound. Foreign visitors also encounter a lively cruising scene. In Berlin, men loiter on and near the Tiergarten's Lion Bridge, in the Volkspark Friedrichshain, around some of the octagonal pissoirs that dot the city, and elsewhere.

Prudery makes occasional appearances, especially in the West, where right-wing sentiments lie closest to the surface. In parts of the East now freely visited by West Germans, naked bathers at lakes and Baltic beaches report sporadic harassment by clothed bluenoses. Tom Reeves notes that by 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR was sexually freer than West Germany, which in addition to its retention of Paragraph 175, had a higher age of consent, more restrictive abortion laws, and weaker anti-discrimination measures. Today East Germans expand the number of progressive voices in a unified government.

Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit, Berlin's gay mayor, presides over a city still in transition after reunification. But gay life on both sides of the ghostly border between East and West is flourishing. Much gay activism is centered in the East, the principal home of the Green Party which in 2001 helped legalize same-sex civil unions bordering on marriage. Because the German gay movement is less about consumerism and assimilation than its US counterpart, the rainbow flags that hang in windows near Nollendorfplatz somehow lack the kitschy aura of American rainbow paraphernalia.

The scope of German gay life is documented by the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin's bohemian working-class Kreuzberg district. German lesbians and gay men share with their countrymen a historical perspective encompassing glory and shame. As a formerly persecuted class, gay Germans understand the value of not allowing certain wounds to heal fully. Today Sachsenhausen, like Dachau, Buchenwald, and other Holocaust sites, is a state-run museum dedicated to reminding Germans of an era not to be repeated.

Racial and cultural tensions linger in Germany, often involving the Turkish immigrant minority. Scattered urban fringe areas harbor racist and homophobic skinhead activity; a few clandestine cells of the American-bred Ku Klux Klan convene illegally. (The give-and-take between American and German reactionaries dates back to the Weimar Republic.) In the 1970s, uncloseted celebrities like Fassbinder received death threats from the extreme right, but homophobia is not a critical problem in contemporary Germany. Right-wing politics now poses more of a threat in the USA.

"We Germans in particular have a duty to do everything to ensure that war, above all a war of aggression, never again becomes a legitimate means of policy," said Lutheran pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer at Berlin's protest rally prior to America's invasion of Iraq.

As Germans witness US pursuit of a pretotalitarian program echoing their own greatest folly-- a nexus of censorship, family-values propaganda, patriotic pageantry, truculent xenophobia, hyped-up nationalism, military conquest, and international bullying-- many perceive the United States as incontestably likelier than Germany to relive German mistakes.