Sexual Enlightenment: Are Nazis against sex?

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In Poland, a few days ago, thousands of people protested against a bill designed to criminalize sex education in schools: teachers would face up to three years in prison if they sexually enlightened pupils. Although the bill was provisionally stopped by Poland's Supreme Court, the members of the ruling PiS party voted in favor of continuing to work on the project.

So far, so little wonder. Poland is a divided country. On the one hand, there are those who fight for human rights, freedom of expression and the press, for Europe: those who are happy about the Nobel Prize for Olga Tokarczuk. And, on the other hand, ultra-conservative, nationalist, anti-minority forces, who are now on the upswing, after the PiS party's victory in the parliamentary elections, declaring the Tokarczuk "anti-Polin" when it talks about crime , which were committed by their compatriots.

"Sexual" education is not just about sex as an act

Before those who write to me again and again, I should "first take care of Poland" before I criticize anything about Germany, it should be said that there are similar attempts to combat sexual education, in Germany more and more often. Right-wingers and conservatives like to use - besides "gender mania" - the term "early sexualization": a concept of struggle, behind which is the strange fear that children or adolescents who find out that there is homosexuality or that babies are not brought by the stork, would fall over one another in a mobile way. This not only speaks of a considerable mistrust of one's supposedly tight heterosexuality, but above all the desire to contain sexual diversity and freedom - and health and safety. "Sexual" education does not just mean teaching young people about sex as an act, but also about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases, sexualized violence.

In Poland, there is a subject called "parenting education", which is taught among others by priests. You can almost imagine how much you learn there. Polish model Anja Rubik has written a scout book and said in the SPIEGEL interview that teenagers told her what they had learned about sexuality: "that they will burn in hell if they touch themselves, that they have their days, because the womb is crying because no baby is growing up in it. " She was also among the demonstrators before the Sejm. "I will not stop fighting for sexual education," she said.

Confusion is nothing right at first

Now there is the stereotype that rights are anyway prudish and jammed. That Nazis are "afraid of being stroked" as Doctors sang in "Cry for Love". And, well, sometimes you get the impression that they are just begging to be seen that way. As recently as the scientist Madita Oeming announced on Twitter to teach a college seminar, it comes to porn, began a Shitstorm, which was, inter alia, by AfD politician Beatrix von Storch on Twitter fired ("The Chinese are hundreds of millions of engineers and Programmers from and at German universities you watch porn "). Ironically, Storch, whose method of contraception is "Protect yourself by being abstemious".

And it is true that right-wing ideologies always have a problem with free sexuality. Klaus Theweleit has described in "Men's fantasies" how fascist men try to fend off their "body armor" against everything that seems too dirty, too restrained - and too feminine ("love for women and love for the fatherland are opposites").

But it's also true that being stuck in the first place is not right - and that rights are not "against sex" in every way. In her book "The Politicization of Lust", historian Dagmar Herzog describes how narratives about sexuality serve to create the self - conception of societies and at the same time formulate and manipulate memories of other times: it was common among the 68ers, the time of the National Socialism and the subsequent two decades as sexually repressive time to interpret. The SPIEGEL subtitled a photo of Adolf Hitler in a 1966 issue with the words "sex critic Hitler".

Nazis are very good for certain types of reproduction

Only Nazis are not in principle against sex, but they want to direct sexuality in very specific paths that correspond to their political ideas. Dagmar Herzog writes that one can describe the "Third Reich [...] as a huge undertaking to control reproduction": Heterosexual Aryans without disabilities should multiply, all others not. What right and right-wing extremists still want to ward off today is not sexuality as a whole, but free, self-determined sexuality - everything queer and everything that does not directly serve the reproduction.

It is therefore no wonder that the Polish campaign to "Protect Children and Adolescents from Sexual Corruption" was initiated by an alliance of anti-abortion activists: Whoever wants to urge women to carry out any pregnancy that has come about under such bad conditions logically also has one Interest in the fact that young people have as little idea of ​​sexual self-determination as possible - and preferably likes to pretend that there is nothing but heterosexuality. In Poland there are actions to declare entire areas to be "strefa wolna od LGBT" - "LGBT-free zones".

Who spreads the stereotype of the generally sex-hostile Nazi, doing right-wing and right-wing extremists unfortunately ultimately a favor: not only can they easily defend themselves by explaining that they are very well for certain species of reproduction, but it also makes those invisible who are mainly suffering from right-wing sexual politics: girls, women, queer people.