ABSTRACT
This chapter expands on the ascendant critical revision regarding the impact National Socialism had on sexuality by examining the issue through the dimension of the popular media. The National Socialists’ “healthy sensuality” was followed by America’s influence. The chapter focuses on textual and discursive practices and on related social practices, as well as on visual media representations of sexuality and their social and cultural contexts. Measures taken selectively either to support or to prevent expressions of sexuality included the “Mother’s Cross” as well as forced sterilizations, the founding of Lebensborn homes for unmarried mothers, and the terrorization of men with an attraction to their own gender. The postwar years in Austria and Germany were characterized by a fundamental crisis of heterosexual, matrimony-focused sex life. The National Socialist regime was far from being as hostile to sexual issues as historians of sexuality tended to present it in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution.
