The essays collected this volume propose new approaches to the study of masculinities in the cultural history of the Germanspeaking countries. In doing this, they engage with debates in which scholars have begun to think through the relevance for German Studies of theoretical approaches to masculinity that have been initiated and formulated in an English-language, Anglo-American context. Questions are being asked about the sometimes tense relationship between overarching theories of the production and representation of gender identities — for example, in psychoanalytical or poststructuralist approaches — and the perhaps more traditional virtues of careful historical and sociological contextualization.

The essays collected in this volume provide a wide historical context. It is all too easy for scholars working on masculinities to assume that the concerns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are universally applicable; the essays by Cordula Politis and Theresia Heimerl on medieval masculinities, and by Antje Roeben on the “fragile” hero of eighteenth-century novels, provide an important corrective as well as open out new fields of research. A number of the essays provide accounts from contrasting disciplinary perspectives of the conflicted discourses of masculinity in Imperial Germany: while Stephanie Catani and Michael Gratzke, writing on Musil, Döblin, and Fontane, explore the production and representation of masculinities in literary texts, a different angle is given by Bryan Ganaway in his study of German toy manufacture for boys. Martin Lücke provides a fresh view of the language of Sexualwissenschaft, which is a vital source for our understanding of the gender discourse of the period. Moving into the 1920s, three essays explore the interaction of modernity and masculinity in the Weimar Republic. Elisabeth Krimmer assesses the changing representation of military masculinities in literary texts, while David James Prickett and Katie Sutton address visual representations: the anxieties around “androgynous” masculine fashions (Sutton) and the questions of power, vision, and subjectivity raised by the new medium of photography (Prickett). Franz Bokel's essay on women's images of “moving men” addresses women's role in the creation of ideological images of masculinity in the Nazi period.

The “Cold War” masculinities of the postwar period in the FRG and GDR are under consideration when Clare Bielby exposes the gendered assumptions behind the West German media's portrayal of male terrorists in the 1970s, and Ingrid Sharp explores a fascinating subgenre of East German science fiction: the gender swap story.