ABSTRACT
In a thoughtful exploration of how homosexual prostitution was policed in Berlin in the years after World War II, Jennifer Evans explains not only the complex laws governing homosexual acts, sex with minors, and male prostitution in a divided city and country but also the police procedures developed to enforce those laws. Although male hustlers had long plied their trade in and around Berlin’s train stations, after the end of the war, the problems of male prostitution and intergenerational sex became intensely politicized. Newly available police and court documents suggest that a defiant homosexual subculture survived Hitler and was restored to public view by the postwar disorder personified by the call boys who worked in the burned-out city. They were initially viewed as victims of postwar instability as well as contributors to it, and they were considered dangerous because they undermined “productive citizenship.” Although both East and West Germany upheld the Nazi variant of the Weimar-era law known as Paragraph 175a, enacted to protect vulnerable young men from the perils of seduction, court cases suggest that by the late 1940s, the police came to regard the call boys less as victims than as blackmailers and thieves. From both progressives advancing the protection of homosexuals and conservatives advocating the protection of society at large, call boys received little sympathy and much contempt.
