The Challenges of Including Sexual Violence and Transgressive Love in Historical Writing on World War II and the Holocaust

The inspiration for this special issue rests on the insight that since war's effects on sexual lives are Janus faced, it makes sense to view the various forms of sexual activity that follow in its wake as dimensions of the same phenomenon. Since the stakes were particularly high for the victims of Nazi terror and the Holocaust, I will begin with a discussion of how recent developments in Holocaust scholarship have underlined the necessity to integrate a history of sexuality into the broader narrative of the European experience in World War II. Like historians working on the history of violent conflict elsewhere, historians of the Holocaust had, up untill recently, excluded extended discussions (and sometimes even all mention) of sexual violence from their accounts of experiences of the victims. Even the subject of consensual yet proscribed or otherwise illicit sexual and love realtionships were presenred in ways marginal to the broader narrative of the war.