Against anticipation, or, camp reading as reparative to the trans feminine past: A microhistory in Nazi‐Era Vienna

Whether trans people – especially trans women – were persecuted by the Nazi regime remains a contested yet under‐researched topic. But the wider political backdrop (including the culture wars and Holocaust memorialisation practices) steers this historical question with a monolithic value: victimisation. This hyper‐focus on victimisation is underpinned by a ‘paranoia’ that pre‐empts tragic historical narratives. Trans histories that do not neatly map onto tragic narration are therefore deemed unthinkable and remain absent from the nascent literature. In a move against paranoid anticipation, this article puts forward an argument for a ‘Camp reading’ practice that embraces ‘insincere’ and ironic material to recalibrate which trans stories are deigned to be given a history. The microhistory of Bella P. in Nazi‐era Vienna acts as a case study in divesting from the politics of victimhood, that challenges the historian's anticipatory impulses, offering the trans feminine past under National Socialism a ‘reparative’ entry into the historical canon on its own terms.

P. was wearing leather trousers, as confirmed by the witness, Richter.As is well known, leather trousers do not have a fly.Therefore, as per the claim in the report of 25 May 1948 that both [of the accused] had their trouser flies open, this indicates a reduced possibility of credibility on the part of the witness. 3ch an anecdote seems out of place in the context of recent academic and political appeals to memorialise trans victims of the Nazi regime in Vienna -first because it is dated after the fall of fascism, second for its minutiae and seemingly whimsical relevance and last (but not least) because this whimsicality lacks the solemnity expected of a victim of National Socialism. 4P.'s previous sentence under Section 129 landed her in a concentration camp in 1943.She survived, but not unscathed.Yet this zany response to the Viennese post-war authorities -inflected with what we might call a 'Camp' political sensibility, captured in microscale -was not simply a post-fascist phenomenon. 5In fact, it was a direct continuation of the audacious behaviour P. had exhibited under Nazism.
While P. was interned in a concentration camp in 1943, she wriggled her way out of serving earlier sentences charged under Section 129 in 1936 and 1941.She would also, eventually, be cleared of all previous charges against Section 129 in 1950 due to a diagnosis of 'hermaphrodism'.But in each of these cases, P. toed the thin line between farcical and striking (and therefore noteworthy and persuasive) argumentation in her interactions with police and legal officials, riskily flipping the script on the men involved in these cases (men who occupied more protected positions within the Nazi social order) and executing these plot twists in bemusing fashion.P.'s microhistory thus comes as a surprise to the historian of trans life during fascism, especially when aspects -such as the leather trouser anecdote -spill directly into the dizzying realms of Camp.When I tell people that I research everyday trans life in the Third Reich, the response tends towards an anticipation that (a) these lives inevitably followed a tragic narrative arc and (b) this work must be emotionally taxing, because it relationally combines two forms of 'difficult' history -the trans past and (that kind of) life under fascism.Furrowed brows, a concerned gaze, low-timbred inflections.Ah, that must be a dark topic/They surely suffered/Gosh, how do you look at that material every day?The expectation -for both the curious and expert interlocutor -is that the archive of trans life under Nazism (especially medico-legal sources) will contain knowledge of tragedy, violence, human horrors, and -at best -survival.What is not anticipated from this history?Irony.
I was not immune to this anticipation and entered the archive with a trepidation becoming the gravitas of my area of study.Yet, while researching, I was met with affects that I thought were alien or antithetical to the subject of trans feminine life under fascism: frivolity and farce.Emotional whiplash ensued, as I cycled through surprise, mirth, then guilt and shame at lightning speed.What do we do when we encounter irony in the archive of anticipated devastation?And (where) does material of a supposedly insincere nature fit within a sensitive historical topic that has such potent affective currency?
Rather than offering a universal answer, this article acts as a bilateral and contingent case study.First, this is a self-reflexive exercise in checking what narratives and affects are anticipated from certain pasts.To counter anticipation, we may have to humble our own epistemologies to allow the past to speak in ways that might seem strange to our sensibilities -not (simply) because of anachronism, nor because we can aim for 'objectivity', but because we ought to be more comfortable with surprise, the unknown, and discomfort itself. 6eyond tempering the impulse to pre-empt what trans feminine life was like under Nazism by projecting abstracted victimhood onto trans women as their core historical characteristic, this article puts forward a new analytical framework: Camp reading. 7Camp reading offers a political recalibration of which stories are deigned to be given a history, that works against the solemn and sincere expectation placed on trans subjects and embraces 'bad trans objects' that do not 'fit within the aesthetic system being agreed upon to represent reality'. 8The telling of P.'s microhistory as a form of 'Camp affectivity' is therefore a case study in 'reparative' reading that does not slide into tropes of martyrdom at the expense of the historical actor's own humanity and complexity. 9Together, this two-pronged approach (re)centres the affectivity and subjectivity of -and relation between -the trans past and the historian, without recourse to anticipation.
In 2019, Andrea Long Chu levied a polemic charge that trans studies was 'over' precisely because it had inherited queer studies' 'narrative problem', which she and Emmett Hardin Drager diagnosed as always 'telling a story of our victimhood (tragedy) or a story of our resistance (romance)'. 10Tragedy and romance: the two (queer) genders.Chu and Drager are not the first to critique the pitfalls of romanticisation, especially within queer studies, and the polemical declaration that trans studies is 'over' should be taken with a grain of salt. 11However, within the context of trans histories of National Socialism, their caution to this chronic (and fatal) bifurcated narrative anticipation is particularly prescient.
Holocaust studies have recently seen a much-needed queer turn, but trans' specific position within the literature remains nascent and fraught. 12There are too few historical studies to say there is a field we can yet call 'trans Holocaust studies'. 13But the scant extant literature (and its contemporary uptake) operate within a wider Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) and Opferkonkurrenz (competition for recognition) whose axis is the 'politics of victimhood': an orientation on which all subsequent analyses pivot. 14ndeed, there is a heated and pressing discourse surrounding the question of 'whether trans people were victims of Nazism' which has stakes in the contemporary culture wars. 15This debate has (some) roots in longer-standing debates around Holocaust memorialisation, building on previous divisions amongst scholars and activists over recognising lesbians as victims of fascism. 16It is also simply a weaponisation of history with nefarious transphobic aims. 17Nevertheless, because of the gravitas attached to this topic, the history of trans life under Nazism has become synonymous with the forgone conclusion -amongst non-transphobic scholars -that trans people suffered, and have (too) long been absent from the list of Holocaust victims.The politics of victimhood has created its own gravitational field, so much so that any discourse caught in its orbit cannot escape its pull.It has become near unthinkable to deviate from the topic of victimhood; and frankly, it seems to be the only reason many people are (currently) invested in a history of trans life under Nazism.
What follows is not a complete rejection of these conclusions (nor their importance), but rather a challenge to the elisions underpinning their anticipatory logic.Far from arguing that trans women were not victims of fascism, I am interested in what gets omitted when we flatten their pasts into onedimensional renditions of victimhood: surprising, unorthodox, frivolous and confounding knowledge.Memorialisation is a serious matter, but this sincerity has a chokehold on what can and cannot be encompassed in histories of people marked by victimhood.
The fate of the queer/trans victim is to be consecrated as authentic, idealised and sincere by history.Her suffering is weighty and solemn, her bravery earnest and virtuous.She shoulders obligatory martyrdom as well as the responsibility of always being a 'good' victim.The politics of victimhood precludes personal narratives that are insincere, unexceptional, perhaps even 'inappropriate' in their lack of political correctness, their hypersexuality or their tongue-in-cheek behaviour, because they fail to fit the serious romantic/tragic brief.We have therefore neglected writing about the less-than-savoury queers (the 'bad gays' and 'bad trans objects'), or the ridiculous, bizarre, comical and indeed 'queer' trans past. 18This over-attachment to the serious renders many histories unacceptable, asynchronous and ultimately dangerous (lest they devalue the gravity of the situation) to projects of recovery and memorialisation.But this means we sanitise 'difficult' histories to the point of scrubbing them of everything that makes them human: fallibility, behaviours that make us uncomfortable, and politically unsatisfying life arcs.
But -as Chu and Drager make clear -this attachment to the serious is not confined to histories of trans life under Nazism; it is symptomatic of queer and trans studies Writ Large.Underlying the tragic/romantic narrative is a logic of paranoid anticipation, which -whilst intelligible -is so 'strong' that it can explain all macro phenomena, and with that explanation, pre-empts a universal epistemological negativity that cramps out stories that might surprise us or cause us to think beyond a solemn victim narrative. 19ccording to Silvan Tomkins' schema of affects, 'startle', or surprise, is a neutral affect. 20When we are surprised, our feelings may depart from this affect in a wide variety of directions.Therefore, the experience of surprise is often confused with the emotion that immediately follows it.For the curious, this can be a delight; for the fearful, a source of anxiety.Fear of the unknown can manifest into a desire to control the startle response into non-existence via negative anticipation.This creates a Catch-22: by pre-empting what is fundamentally unknowable to the present, anticipation becomes the broken record of known traumas, closing the door to curious delight(s).Anticipation thus stifles the possibility to be met with surprise -a hazard for those of us doing research, which is the domain of the unknown made knowable (though not always known).
Eve K. Sedgwick called this 'paranoid reading', which she defined as a hermeneutics of suspicion that always already knows the worse-case scenario, a pre-emptive epistemological negativity, which anticipates oppression (systemic homophobia is her example) as a defence mechanism against being 'surprised' by distressing news. 21Similar to Chu and Drager's critique, Sedgwick tapped into a paranoid anticipation -that doubles as a confirmation bias -underlying so much queer theory.There is nothing before homophobia/patriarchy/the gender order, it is always already there, under the surface, waiting to be found. 22Paranoia thus anticipates a universal degree of suffering on the part of the non-normative subject in ahistorical ways.
In the context of the Third Reich, the paranoid anticipation is that trans life was uniformly targeted and persecuted as the ultimate gender transgression.One reason for this is because transphobia is often twinned with homophobia, and queer persecution under Nazism is now indisputable (although heterogeneously nuanced). 23Homophobia is also historically wed to gender non-conformity, thus positioning transphobia not (only) as a natural outgrowth of homophobia, but its ontological predecessor and signifier (if taxonomically sequential). 24If sexual deviants were persecuted, the expectation is that trans people were too (if not worse).And their experiences must have been defined by suffering.
Here we have a compounding of paranoid anticipations: the world is inherently homophobic, famously -and most violently -under Nazism, and transphobia is an exacerbation of 'otherness' in regards to non-normative ontology; thus, trans people likely suffered in a similar fashion in the Third Reich, and their stories are tragic and require recuperation; if their lives were tragic, trans people's emotions, behaviours and dispositions must have been defined by pain, fear, anger, oppression and repression.
While this article is primarily concerned with the latter two anticipations, they are conclusions reached via the first, which warrants brief inspection.While gender and sexuality are far more historically conflated than our contemporary divergence of queer and trans identities might reflect, sexual deviancy was criminalised in Germany from 1871, and in Austria from 1852, whereas transness lacked the same concrete referent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 25This did not mean trans people did not exist, or that they were not persecuted under Nazism.Rather, it meant that trans cases of a legal nature had heterogeneous -rather than universal -outcomes.I have described this elsewhere as 'trans liminality', where transness operated between, underneath or beside other, more concrete categories (such as race, sexuality and labour value). 26hile the first paranoid anticipation (of universal trans persecution) is complicated here, the latter two are not.But this complication -this 'surprise' in the archive -does give us pause for thought, to check our anticipatory impulses.What if the latter two anticipations also pre-empt our histories, especially in an affective register?What if there are different experiences occurring in (at least) three registers: at the level of the outer 'world' under study (the regime, epoch, milieu), the story (individual and/or collective) and the 'inner' worlds of the people that make up these stories, where that one register does not pre-determine the other(s)?In relation to the final register, even when suffering and persecution is present, people, especially on a personal level, might respond differently to their circumstances.After all, 'people are different from each other'. 27We might therefore caution against anticipating everything from how the world works in a given context, to how individuals navigated that world, to how they felt while doing so.
The primary fallout of paranoid anticipation is that the script (of this history) is already set.Tragedy and oppression may readily be present, but the paranoid reader's script is resistant to a wider scope of interpretations.So, when unanticipated information grates against the smooth flow of corroborating material of the pre-ordained narrative, it is shelved or binned as superfluous.Paranoia becomes the monolith, but also the total scope of interpretation.It offers the trans (and queer) past two limited fates: suffering or boldly resisting suffering.
As an antidote to paranoia, Sedgwick offered 'reparative' reading.This is not to be confused with historical recovery (which goes to task with romantic/tragic bifocals on).Rather, reparative reading deviates from the hypervigilance of anxious anticipation, and is open to possibility, to excess.Reparative reading does not reject that which is additive and accretive to an analysis, it does not throw out 'junk' material that does not fit the narrow confines of the pre-written script.It invokes a 'campness' manifested in the 'over' attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover ephemera. 28s we have seen, the nexus of trans and Holocaust history is especially prone to falling into the anticipation trap.But, as my own whiplash-emotional experiences in the archive attest, we might have to make room for a history of trans life under Nazism that does not put a full-stop after 'tragedy', but adds an accretive 'and, and … ' to this conclusion.Whilst initially uncomfortable, that 'and' might be followed by 'satire': tragedy's opposite, but also (perhaps) its antidote.
Writing about queer and trans victims of National Socialism through satire might seem in poor taste to some, but making light relief out of dire situations has long been a queer art of survival that sidesteps the ultra-serious.Chu calls for us to write trans stories that are not (only) politically satisfactory; trans stories that embrace the satire of the mundane, quotidian weight of the 'minutia of experience', the elements of trans life that are 'disappointing' or even 'boring'. 29While she does not define it as such, I find Chu's call to satire particularly resonant with Campness in the context of P.'s life, precisely because it is a sensibility which 'converts the serious into the frivolous'. 30Camp is not merely a sensibility, either; it is 'both political and critical', as per Moe Meyer's staunch reclamation of the function of Camp as the 'production of queer social visibility'. 31Camp shares important historical overlaps with effeminate queer and trans feminine identity and history, but it is also an interpretative style with political ends, as argued by Ari Brostoff and Jules Gill-Peterson, where a Camp reading practice can alleviate the need for trans (and queer) subjects to be fundamentally, and sincerely, 'good'. 32hus, Camp reading is simultaneously an examination of historical actors' behaviours and their 'queer social visibility', and an analysis that is critical of the requirement for 'acceptable' and 'anticipated' trans historical narratives.Instead, Camp reading may attend to what sits uncomfortably with that which is deemed admissible and sanitised.It is therefore political, but its politics are not concerned with 'objectivity' or a value system that tallies worth with the currency of death and suffering. 33amp reading -which combines Chu's call to satire and Sedgwick's reparative reading -operates as an open-palmed hand, cupping an assortment of 'surplus' information that, when given space to unfurl, might bemuse us.This contrasts with a closed fist that suffocates all but one 'paranoid' reading of the nominally 'non-normative' trans past: a history that is always already marked by sincere suffering before we even reach (out to) her.Camp reading leaves the door open to curious delights.It has no use for -and therefore works against -anticipation, which only recycles known traumas.It is by leaving that door ajar that we can allow histories such as P.'s -histories of the (yet) unknown -to enter the picture.To her story we now turn.
P. was born as Alexander in Vienna 8 July 1917.Aged 6, P. was brought to Litschau, a small northern town near the Czech border, to live with a foster mother.P. never knew her father, and since the beginning of the 1930s, she had not heard from her biological mother.P. returned to Vienna to attend elementary and secondary school, and later continued at a vocational school in tailoring.
P. was tried three times under Section 129 in her life: during Austro-Fascism in 1936, National Socialism in 1942 and Allied-occupied Austria in 1949.Section 129 of the Austrian penal code persecuted homosexual men and women between 1852 until 1971.It differed from the equivalent Section 175 in the German code by including women in its definition, something that was distinct from almost all other penal codes in Europe at this time.There was no anti-crossdressing penal code in Austria (although technically neither in Germany, with Section 183 levied against cases of 'crossdressing' as a form of Unfug, or gross mischief). 341920s Austria did not see the proliferation of the Transvestitenschein (a police-issued certificate for people who 'cross-dressed'), contrasted to cities such as Hamburg and Berlin, with requests for the Schein to be implemented in Vienna being denied on the basis that no permission was needed. 35This had ramifications for post-Anschluss Vienna, since Section 129 was not replaced by Section 175, nor was Section 183 implemented, after Austria was annexed into the Third Reich on 12 March 1938. 36In contrast to other areas of the Third Reich, 'gender non-conformity' was not treated as direct evidence of homosexuality under National Socialism in Vienna.This significantly altered the ways in which P. could interact with the state, namely in manipulating legal loopholes to evade sentencing or harsher conviction where she sometimes conceded to gendered but not sexual transgression.P.'s story is rich in its provision of material for analysing the complex interplays between legal (mis)interpretations of gendered and sexual transgression in modern Europe.However, we (ironically) miss the forest for the trees if we only focus on the 'big' takeaways from her story at the expense of the micro and bizarre elements that not only contribute to understanding the ways in which her zaniness impacted her sentencing, but also complicate any universal and one-dimensional victim narratives under Nazism.Adopting a Camp reading practice and attending to her subjectivity allows us to embrace the more facetious elements of P.'s trans feminine past, without reducing her narrative to the tragic/romantic binary.We begin with her narrowly escaping imprisonment when she was only twenty years old.
It was 4am on 2 December 1935 when police officer Johann Hofbauer heard a noise behind a building hut on Aspangstraße, and so he went to investigate.The officer thought he saw a man and woman behaving inappropriately, and, as he approached, he noticed that the woman had her coat soiled with semen while 'taking care of [the man's] exposed member'.Affronted, Hofbauer demanded to see both individuals' identification, which the man, Josef Hronek, obliged without incident.Upon scanning the woman's documents, Hofbauer learnt that she was named Alexander P., with her documents stating that she was 'male'.Hofbauer's original assessment of having witnessed a man and a woman engaged in sexual activity switched to having witnessed 'unnatural fornication'.Accordingly, he swiftly arrested and brought them both to the Bezirks Polizeikommissariat in the Landstraße. 37hen questioned the following day, P. said she had met Hronek at the Rudolf hospital where he was being treated for syphilis, and that evening they went out drinking together, before ending up behind the hut.P. said Hronek had then suddenly pressed his 'member' into her palm, before ejaculating.This had apparently come as a 'shock' to her.I wager this statement has raised the eyebrows of the reader, as it did mine, because of its flagrant, and thinly-veiled false innocence.P. continued to deflect during the interrogation, stating she had not known Hronek to be homosexual, but then recalled how Hronek told her at the hospital that when he had previously been in prison, he frequently met men who had sex with other men.
This pastiche of ignorance would not be the first time P. would attempt to wriggle her way out of police trouble, not least by pinning the blame on her sexual partners.P. knowingly and strongly implicated Hronek as the sexual perpetrator in the situation, despite there being a witness to their mutual sexual contact.The audacity of this move invites more of a chuckle than the context should allow.Not only is this behaviour very Camp, but it is also in line with a Camp reading practice that sees P. as self-interested, if comically so, rather than heroic or virtuous.When brought to trial for charges against Section 129, P. continued in the same vein.She insinuated that officer Hofbauer had elicited the initial comments about sexual contact with Hronek from her: I do not admit to having rubbed Hronek's member.The policeman who questioned me said he could imagine how it had happened, saying 'it would have been like this and like that' […].The officer said to me 'he must have kissed you'. 38. added that she was 'normally oriented' (meaning heterosexual), having had sex with a handful of women.In the time that had passed between December and March, P. had carefully revised her statement to implicate both Hronek and Hofbauer, in a bid to evade imprisonment.Miraculously, she succeeded.When the judge closed the hearing, P. was sentenced to only six weeks of 'strict arrest', a minor conviction in comparison with Hronek, who received 2.5 months' imprisonment in a labour camp.This was then mitigated due to P.'s lack of a criminal record and her youth.This meant that the execution of the sentence was provisionally postponed as long as P. remained of good character.The probationary period was set until 17 March 1939, and the final remission of the sentence was initiated 1 April 1939. 39In essence, P. did not serve prison time for this first offence.Nor at any stage did her gender presentation factor into the decisions made by the court, despite both Hronek and Hofbauer stating P. had convincingly passed as a woman.Here we also see how a reading of P. as discretely trans or sexually queer fails to recognise how P. played both categories off each other.It is partially the contrast of P.'s youth with Hronek's incriminating maturity that shifted the culpability on him, the implications of age difference being a key analytic to queer history. 40P. hereby took advantage of her youth and her femininity, both qualities attributed to innocence, without incriminating her gender non-conformity with homosexuality.
Having narrowly evaded imprisonment and successfully reaching the end of her probation period in 1939, P. was in trouble with the law again in 1941.On the evening of 8 March 1941, lieutenant Hans Kühne was off duty and in civilian clothing at Café Excelsior.There he made the acquaintance of two women, one of whom was called Bella -this was P. -and the other Paula.According to Kühne, after drinking with and courting the women, the three of them retired to Bella's flat, but Paula soon left.Once Kühne and Bella were alone, Bella began to undress, which Kühne said he found 'suspicious' later in the police report.Kühne claimed that it was at this point that he realised that Bella was wearing a wig and women's clothing to 'deceive' him.Reacting in shock, Kühne slapped P. across the face, drawing his pistol and demanding to see her identification.He then went straight to the police station -at 5.30 am -where he deposited the wig and high heels from the flat as evidence. 41hen called for interrogation on 12 March, P. testified that she and Paula had dressed up as a 'carnival joke' [Fasching].P. had borrowed a black dress, leopard coat and silver dancing shoes from Paula, and they made Kühne's acquaintance at Café Excelsior.According to P., 'while still in the bar the man said to me, "you are a boy, right?", to which I answered in the affirmative and lifted my wig a little'. 42After coming back to her flat, P. went to the bathroom and on her return found Kühne lying on the bed having 'already ejaculated'.She added in her report (drolly, I like to imagine) that he 'had probably been masturbating'.P. therefore depicted Kühne as the sexual deviant, and herself as the innocent bystander.Her friend Paula corroborated, confirming that Kühne was indeed aware of P.'s 'identity' (read: male) prior to entering her home. 43Here, P. yet again played on her ambiguity, emphasising being read as a man in order to deflect blame from herself, as well as any claims to deceit.P.'s actions here chafe all the expectations of a romantic/tragic narrative because she failed to conform to acceptable (trans)femininity.Heroes of the trans past are authentically themselves, whereas P. slipped between identities like quicksilver in order to survive.
By tipping her wig to ensure Kühne knew she was wearing one, P. was enacting what Sontag called 'Being-As-Roleplaying': a play, a scheme, a dupe to evade sentencing by securing evidence of Kühne's 'same-sex desire'. 44But she equally twisted her own femininity into a false 'Being-As-Roleplaying' where she presented her womanhood as simply a farce -a carnival joke.P. was careful to omit any suggestion of sexual contact on her part (which would have incriminated her) but felt no need to hide her 'cross-dressing', despite comparable cases of 'effeminacy' landing 'men who had sex with men' in concentration camps in Berlin. 45We must remember that one of the reasons P. could play up her gendered differences (which allowed her to flip the script on her masculine sexual partners) was precisely because of the ambiguities in legal interpretations of homosexuality in Austria (even) after the Anschluss, not just her canny (and Camp) behaviour.But this equally speaks to how attuned she was to those ambiguities.
Beyond implicating Kühne as sexually deviant, P. also said he was violent; that he had smashed a glass cabinet in her flat and gouged her face on his way out.She thus layered her implication with further gendered differences: Kühne acted violently, hitting her and breaking her property, while she remained helpless and subject to his aggression.
One feature of this accusation reads as quintessentially Camp.P. went into some detail when describing not only the glass cabinet, but also the value of its contents, specifically 'three small, valuable sheep figurines from the Biedermeier period' which she claimed cost 200 Reichsmark. 46Not only are these items incredibly kitsch (and kitsch is rather Camp) but their inclusion in her claim 'theatricalizes' the experience.The destruction of property and bodily harm were serious offences, which alone paint Kühne as in the wrong.The inclusion of the figurines is almost facetious.Meyer says that Camp, in its broadest sense, 'refers to strategies and tactics of queer parody'. 47Here, Camp bears a more complex relation to the serious, where 'one can be serious about the frivolous, and frivolous about the serious', with P. utilising Camp as an affective -and effective -strategy to confound the biases of Austrian state officials. 48hilst toying with frivolous elements in her account, P.'s accusation was taken seriously.The crime report that was filed on 31 March 1941 stated that a case had 'arisen against' Kühne, containing within it a significant cache of evidence material, including a 'character assessment' of Kühne. 49P. had turned the case around and now Kühne was on trial.This was the second time P. had successfully diverted culpability away from herself and onto her sexual partners, which, when we remember they were all servicemen, was daring.In comparative cases where one defendant was protected under a state apparatus or deemed more socially normative, and another was not, the latter almost always got the short straw.P.'s two successive successes in court seem anomalous, but they are indicative of how P.'s zany behaviour impacted on legal practice. 50Whilst seemingly whimsical, a micro element to be discarded, the Camp antics in her case helped her, at least initially, evade victimhood.Before the Kühne case came to trial, however, another complaint was filed against P., and she was arrested for a new charge, again under Section 129.
On the night of 21 February 1942, Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police) officers Josef Ratschinger and Adolf Bischof had been drinking in Café Ostmark in the Rotenturmstraße, where they saw a 'boy with painted lips and pink fingernails standing in front of the mirror as he powdered his face [sic]'.This 'boy' [Burschen] was P. 51 The officers approached P., enquiring about the insignia on her shirt.P. claimed it was a Gestapo insignia, piquing the officers' interest further and prompted them to sit with P. Either because she felt confident, or because she wished to create an elaborate story, P. began fabricating a tale where her father was a Gestapo officer, and her uncle a Wehrmacht (armed forces) soldier.These close connections were P.'s explanation for why she had not been enlisted in the army.At this point in the Second World War, all able-bodied men of the Reich were enlisted into the Wehrmacht, so it was suspect that P. had not been.It is also telling that this was a topic of conversation because it clarifies that the Gestapo officers read P. as male from their first interaction with her.During the telling of this story, P. allegedly touched the thighs of the two officers and tried to reach their trouser zippers with her hand.P. then told the officers she would like to give them a 'nice evening' at her home -suggesting that P. did sex work.
At this, the Gestapo officers broke their act, requested to see P.'s identification and called her 'queer' (warmer, or warmer Brüder, a slang term for homosexual men), prompting P. to flee the bar.A scuffle ensued in the street, with P. shouting 'Piefkes' (a derogatory term used for Germans in Austria at this time), and, most brazenly, that 'Germany will never win the war', causing a passing police officer and Wehrmacht soldier to gladly help in roughly dragging P. to the nearest Kripo (Kriminalpolizei, or criminal police) office. 52. was repeatedly questioned on 26 and 27 February.While there is no information about what happened between the transcripts, it is likely P. received intensive interrogation, as her case involved Gestapo officers.On 26 February, P. had described herself as 'normally orientated', but admitted to wearing women's clothing at the bar.This mirrored her previous criminal testimonies, where confessing to 'cross-dressing' had not landed her in prison, and so she perhaps hoped for similar outcomes in this instance.On 27 February, however, she suddenly confessed to a chronology of 'samesex' behaviours.This was a distinct change from her previous criminal testimonies.P. described a formative abusive sexual experience, the first in a string of encounters with men, many of which were voluntary, some non-consensual, a few paid. 53The intimate details of such a confession were the sort that would make for easy sentencing in accordance with Section 129.P. therefore said that she wanted an operation to be 'freed from my affliction'. 54This was not-so-subtle code for a castration. 55It is likely P. was coerced into the confession, and that she was told that through admission to such 'samesex' activities and by requesting a castration, she might be exempt from serving time at a concentration camp.P.'s main hearing took place 13 March 1942 and conjoined the criminal proceedings from 1941 and 1942.The defence lawyer appealed for a lenient sentence so that P. could join the military, 'in order to bring about an improvement in his [sic] tendency through discipline', but to no avail. 56In light of the Café Ostmark incident, the court found P. guilty of unnatural fornication with Kühne, because of 'the manner of the accused's presentation and appearance'.However, P.'s passing as a woman was also cited as a mitigating factor because 'no one [at the Café] knew that the alleged Bella was a man'. 57This demonstrates that with German -that is, Nazi -influence over legal matters and personnel, P.'s treatment by the state differed from pre-Anschluss times, but not completely. 58While P.'s femininity was eventually seen as a factor in her 'sexual deviancy', her passing exempted her of being charged with public nuisance and a harsher sentence.Passing also exculpated not only P., but anyone she touched or had relations with from accusations of homosexuality, because they could be forgiven for having made a 'mistake'.However, P.'s imprisonment lasted much longer than the sentence of ten months, resulting in internment at Natzweiler concentration camp (located in Alsace) in 1943.She was then transferred to Mittelbau-Dora and Peenemünde, sub-camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, respectively, where she stayed until 1945. 59. survived her incarcerations between 1942 and 1945.But she was once again charged with Section 129 in 1948 under Allied Occupation.This final case in P.'s story demonstrates the continued effectiveness of her Camp antics beyond the fall of fascism, but also the societal fragility at stake in shoring up the stability of the sex/gender binary in post-war Europe.It also provides us with retroactive insight into what may or may not have transpired while she was incarcerated, the dynamism and granularity that can be found in the sources that make up a court case contrasting sharply with clinical concentration camp records.
Returning to the scene that opened this article, P. was arrested on 31 January 1948 along with Hörmann for 'pleasuring each other' at the urinals in Schmerlingplatz.Upon questioning, P. stated this could not have been the case, as she had become 'completely sexless' due to castration. 60The public prosecutor's office in Vienna confirmed on 2 February that both accused were to be tried under Section 129, which was still in effect.Akin to P.'s entanglements with the law in 1941-42, she was arrested again before her trial on 25 May, this time with an old friend, Georg Krickl.The two were seen sitting on a park bench with their trouser flies open by a security guard, who arrested them.When questioned, P. reiterated how she was 'completely sexually insensitive', and therefore claimed it was impossible that any sexual activity had taken place with Krickl. 61he proceedings against P., Krickl and Hörmann were to be conducted in a joint trial from 5 March 1948, but due to P.'s health there was a delay to the start of the trial.On 15 October 1948, Hörmann was arrested for having oral sex in City Hall Park, and then found guilty separately from the case with P., resulting in two months' imprisonment.
After several (unexplained) stays in hospital, P. finally appeared at the main hearing with Krickl on 31 October 1949.To prevent conviction, P.'s lawyer, Skofic, requested a forensic medical examination to prove P.'s lack of sexual sensations.However, the judge refused to include such an examination in the case, and both P. and Krickl were found guilty.P. and Skofic immediately appealed this verdict with a letter.This was the same letter that contained the argument that because leather trousers famously do not operate with a fly, P. could not have been found with her trouser fly open. 62n addition to this whimsical argument, P. and Skofic reiterated the importance of 'establishing the effects of the sterilisation carried out on [P.]'.The letter concluded that, 'the expert opinion would be the most important piece of evidence that would make it possible to fully clarify these criminal proceedings'. 63P. and Skofic also implicated Hörmann as a prostitute, once again following the pattern of redirecting accusations of sexual misconduct away from P. and onto her partners. 64While the leather trouser detail might seem incredulous given the context, the letter was legitimate enough for the court to grant P. a new hearing, and her requested medical examination.While certainly not the isolated reason for the new hearing, this was a continuation of P.'s 'enactments of frivolity as the embodiment of an alternative politics', which continued -at least in part -to work in her favour. 65n the 27 April 1950, P. was examined by Dr Walter Schwarzacher.The consistently clinical tone and absence of any Camp manifestations in Dr Schwarzacher's report following his assessment of P. sits in contrast with her previous testimonies.Perhaps P. abstained from inflecting the report with anything other than factual details because the report might, if played by the book, help her evade imprisonment once more.The medical report began by detailing how P. had been sent to the Julius Wagner-Jauregg Hospital aged thirteen.Apparently, it was during her time at the Wagner-Jauregg that P.'s physical 'sexual abnormality' was first noted.The hospital was a psychiatric institution in Vienna, named after Nobel prize-winning physician and eugenicist Julius Wagner-Jauregg. 66Wagner-Jauregg succeeded famous sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing at the Neuro-Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Graz in 1889, and worked in the psychiatric wards of the General Hospital in Vienna from 1902 to 1928.In this time, he administered 'spermatogenic' and ovarian preparations to young 'psychotic' patients who had experienced delayed puberty, which led to the development of their secondary sexual characteristics and diminished psychosis.Young male patients who partook in 'excessive masturbation' were forcibly sterilised, which Wagner-Jauregg found to 'improve' their symptoms. 67We learn from the 1950 report that P. was brought to the hospital after being sexually abused by a much older man, a traumatic experience that may have also been attributed with causing excessive masturbation or altered sexual impulses by doctors.
Wagner-Jauregg retired in 1928, and so P. was almost certainly not treated by him circa 1930 at the psychiatric hospital.But his techniques built on wider practices in Viennese medicine and endocrinology that were steeped in eugenicist thought and established traditions which would have influenced doctors examining her.Despite not having yet received the same level of attention as Berlin in queer and trans histories of this period, Vienna had a burgeoning medical scene invested in deciphering sexual difference, including its own Institute for Sexual Research [Institut für Sexualforschung], akin to, but differentiated from, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. 68Austria was also home to Krafft-Ebbing, a key theorist in the creation of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century sexological case study model, and perhaps most notably, Sigmund Freud, whose infamous theories on gender, sex and sexuality were influenced by the work of Hirschfeld and Vienna's own Eugen Steinach. 69teinach was a scientific urologist, whose 'sex change' experiments on rats informed the fastadvancing field of urology and hermaphrodite medicine.Urological (surgical) interventions were more common in cases of 'hermaphrodism' before the advent of synthetic hormones in the 1930s. 70The late nineteenth century had birthed the 'age of the gonads', where medical practitioners defined internal sex glands -ovaries and testes -as the 'true' marker of sex, which governed the 'direction' such interventions took.What this meant was that only cases with ovarian and testicular tissue present were classed as 'true' hermaphrodites, with all others classed as 'pseudo-herms' and the 'true sex' assigned according to the gonadal tissue present: ovaries for women, testes for men. 71However, a slew of idiosyncratic approaches bloomed in the post-1918 world, some of which shifted towards endocrinological explanations for hermaphrodism, leaving little homogeneity in how cases of 'sex abnormality' were treated. 72Steinach's work on 'inner secretions' (a term used to describes hormones in this period) would be integral to this shift away from urology to endocrinology, which in turn would inform Nazi medical experiments on homosexuals. 73hile there is no evidence that P. underwent organotherapy or any other medical interventions, she would have had to undergo an invasive physical examination to be diagnosed as 'sexually abnormal' in childhood.The 'wait-and-see' policy may have been deployed, where children's sexual plasticity was left to its own devices and medical experts waited for 'dominant' sex traits to form prior to intervention. 74However, we do not know how aware P. was of her intersex condition before 1950, which, according to the case files, was the first time she was formally diagnosed.What is telling is that P. was careful to omit any reference to her physical 'sexual abnormality' in all criminal proceedings until this assessment. 75Disclosing such information in 1936 or 1942 (both fascistic regimes) may have invoked a greater phobia than accusations of homosexuality -in that she would have been classed as physically disabled and degenerate -or may have fated P. to experimentation. 76However, despite P.'s claim to have been castrated during her incarceration, Dr Schwarzacher's report stated there was no sign that P. had undergone castration since: an injection treatment, as he [sic] describes it, is not carried out on hermaphrodites according to the current state of medical science.However, there is the possibility that, especially considering the circumstances under which this alleged treatment took place, P. was medically experimented on.In any case, if the treatment was really carried out, it had no significant effect or consequences on his sex drive, since the gonads found during the examination did not show any signs that they were no longer functioning in relation to their internal secretory activity. 77ile Dr Schwarzacher could not medically determine whether P. had been experimented on, he was right to not rule this out, since Nazi doctors infamously experimented on concentration camp inmates.Natzweiler and Buchenwald were sites of mass experimentation.While these eugenicist experiments were often performed on Jews and other 'inferior' persons, and P. was 'Aryan', by 1942 Buchenwald was known to experiment on homosexuals by injecting hormones into their groins.However, Mittelbau-Dora was a sub-camp and located in Göttingen, some distance away from the main concentration camp of Buchenwald.Mass experimentation did not reach the same levels in the subcamps. 78Dr Schwarzacher's wording presumes P. had disclosed that she was intersex, when in fact she likely would have hidden this information and would have been classed as homosexual since she was incarcerated for violating Section 129.Nevertheless, Dr Schwarzacher's observations do highlight the ambiguity of P.'s claim to castration and begs the question of whether P. used knowledge of castration and experimentation on homosexuals to buttress a plausible alibi, or whether she had been sterilised as a child at the Wagner-Jauregg -and therefore hoped the doctor would mistake those interventions as chemical castration.This lengthier explanation of the status of intersex medicine, endocrinology and P.'s claim to castration bears relevance to what came next in the report, namely, that P. stated on record that she 'had always felt like a woman and therefore often dressed as a woman'.Intriguingly, Dr Schwarzacher did not dwell on these remarks, but this may have been precisely because P.'s physical examination revealed her to be a 'true hermaphrodite'.The doctor confidently emphasised that this physiologically explained P.'s sexual orientation towards men, given the presence of 'mixed glandular activity'. 79t the appeal hearing on 27 June 1950, Dr Schwarzacher said that P. could not be constituted as homosexual because she was not male.Dr Schwarzacher concluded that 'from the medical point of view, P. belongs to the rare forms where sex determination is not possible'.While the court questioned him further, the doctor insisted that it was impossible to determine 'whether P. is a man or a woman' because P. presented with 'a mixture of both gonads'. 80This diagnosis aligned with the gonadocentric paradigm of the time, and thus shored up the need to protect the heterosexual binary.
In this way, P. occupied a liminal and confounding position between the sexes, her 'true sex' being 'hermaphroditic' (and thus exposing the fragility in a stable notion of sexual dimorphism). 81Here, a praxiographical reading of medical texts reveals that despite scientific proof that sex was not stable, there was nonetheless a need to forge stability along a sexual axis by the medical authority -even when dealing with the most unstable and liminal cases. 82This concurs with Gill-Peterson's analysis of the 'looming epistemological crisis of sex' around mid-century, where evidence of the mixing of the intersex and inversion models threatened to disrupt the 'very architecture of the sex binary'.Gill-Peterson's work on the history of trans children demonstrates that despite overwhelming scientific evidence, doctors and scientists in the twentieth century tried to 'influence, nudge and contour still largely metaphorical processes that began in natural bisexuality and, according to them, were meant to end in binary form' across the transatlantic West. 83P.'s case proved the malleability and plasticity of sex, and thus provoked an affective and opaque anxiety around the fragility of stable sex, which underpinned notions of binary sexuality.P.'s intersex status could explain (away) her sexual orientation, and with it the transgressive elements of her femininity, because her gonads secreted female hormones.For the medico-legal complex, P.'s intersex status simultaneously absolved her from the deviancy of homosexuality and the absurdity of trans identification.Just as P. had played off her gendered differences in order to strengthen her legal stance in criminal proceedings, so too did the modern medical complex cancel out any and all deviant categories attached to P. in light of her intersex status in order to maintain the notion of a stable sexed binary.
Writing about historical figures such as P. therefore requires mediation between intersex and trans histories, as well as homosexual history, something that historians and contemporary activists alike have often intentionally peeled apart in the past five decades.While acknowledging the differences between these categories, I agree with Gill-Peterson that despite contemporary separation, intersex and trans pasts overlap in ways that can illuminate their histories without ontologically reducing one to the other. 84Hil Malatino reminds us that these are also not mutually exclusive embodiments or categories: people may be both intersex and trans. 85P. was one such person.Not only did she sit at the intersection of these categories, but the state's regulation of both forms of embodiment dictates what Thelma Wang has coined the 'trans-intersex-nexus'.The history of intersex and trans medicalization 'cannot be considered apart from each other', and while trans people have historically sought access to technologies of transition that have been forcibly imposed on intersex people, their pasts are both bound up in biomedical and legal gender regulation and the systematic deprivation of bodily autonomy. 86fter Dr Schwarzacher's assessment, the court overturned the original charge and instead gave P. the lesser charge of Section 516 for having violated public morality.Since the convictions of Hörmann and Krickl were tied to P.'s conviction under Section 129, the Public Prosecutor's Office also reopened their proceedings.Once again, P.'s claim to ambiguous sex and gender embodiment -now medically certified -could exculpate not only her, but her sexual partners too.This speaks to the enduring power of the medical authority in legal matters of sex/sexuality/gender in the modern West, and the simultaneous (and paradoxical) fragility of sexual dimorphism.
In a final bold act, P. filed to have her previous convictions overturned so she could claim reparations for having been a victim of the Nazi state.Because homosexuality was still illegal in 1950, those convicted with Section 129 under fascism could not seek reparations from the state for having been persecuted; they were not seen as victims of National Socialism, only criminals. 87P. argued that since the court had found it impossible to charge her with Section 129 in 1950, it was unlawful for the 1942 conviction to stand: It is not enough that I was driven from concentration camp to concentration camp for three years because of this legal error.I am now denied the benefit of the special provisions of the 1950 amnesty because of the same circumstance […].I therefore request that the contested decision be amended so that my application for the Amnesty Law 1950 is granted. 88 line with the verdict that P. could not be classed as male, and therefore was not homosexual, the Higher Regional Court upheld P.'s complaint in a closed session and overturned the 1942 verdict. 89hile the persecution of queers in Austria post-1945 remains under-researched, statistical research collected in 2011 shows that in the 1950s the number of sentences under Section 129 was greater than the figure from the Nazi period -which itself was twice as high as in pre-Anschluss Austria. 90Sexual deviancy was still firmly clamped down on after 1945, although via less directly violent means.The dual outcomes of P.'s 1950 case therefore seem anomalous in light of this quantitative data.But this is precisely why qualitative methods can highlight why such anomalies occur in the first place, and what this might tell us about the internal (and sometimes incoherent) workings of a system.How and why P. confounded medico-legal institutions across the first half of the twentieth century becomes intangible if we eclipse her gumption and the granular specificity of her context(s) with victimhood and paranoid anticipation.It is by attending to the Camp, politically unsatisfying, and micro elements of her history that allow for (in)coherent threads and unexpected conclusions to be drawn from this bemusing chapter in the trans feminine past.
While it took another half century before any successful push to memorialise trans and homosexual victims of National Socialism, P. achieved this on a microscale in 1950.She was not a passive victim.By overturning the 1942 conviction, P. achieved recognition as a victim of National Socialism.Not only did this give P. a material benefit -by accessing reparations and (yet again) evading imprisonment -through its retelling, P.'s history does not fall into tropes of either victory or tragedy.P. was both victim and trickster, trans and queer, feminine yet wily enough to claim manhood.Above all, she was bold: both to her advantage (implicating others) and detriment (sexually approaching Gestapo officers).P.'s sexual encounters were plentiful and often crude, her resulting testimonies overflowing with frivolous details alongside sassy accusations against her erstwhile partners.Chu and Drager's caution to the twinned fields of queer and trans studies urges us to loosen our hold on binary images of historical figures as either heroes or victims.A Camp reading practice offers one avenue out of this bind.By attending to how the frivolous is made serious, and the serious made frivolous, we can embrace and retell the inappropriate, insincere, thorny and the facetious moments in P.'s history, to create more liveable futures (that equally suffer from the need to be sincerely good, authentic and martyr-like) and write more honest trans (feminine) histories.
The politics of victimhood makes significance not out of life and how people live it, but out of death and suffering.Jennifer Evans pinpoints the nexus of the intersecting debates around queer memory and the Holocaust as a symptom (and limitation) of identarian-focused politics where 'one's place in the world today is secured by a past that confirms how we got here'. 91As such, the need for stable historical identity (not only in relation to gender-sexuality, but in relation to victimhood) builds teleologically towards a politics that scraps all those who fall outside its narrow designation to the wayside.'What is lost as well as gained', Evans asks, 'by recovering histories of queer persecution, accommodation, resistance, and remembrance without a keener appreciation of the intersectionality of identity'? 92As an addendum, I would further the question to ask: what is lost as well as gained when our trans pasts (and present) are defined by suffering and death -as the precursors to victimhoodover a full-bodied embrace of the differentiated lives we live(d)?Perhaps our histories do not need a politics of victimhood, but rather a (renewed) politics of Camp. 93

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
I would like to thank Kate Davison, Dan Healey, Laurie Marhoefer, Ben Miller, Nick Stargardt and the editors of the special issue this article appears in for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this work.I am also indebted to the archivists and researchers based at QWIEN, the centre for queer history in Vienna.This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number: AH/R012709/1).