The undergraduate thesis attempts to chronologically present the social and cultural conditions that contributed to the rise and fall of homosexual culture in the Weimar Republic (1918 - 1933). The shifts in the (de)criminalisation of homosexuality in Germany, from the mid-19th century to the first half of the 20th century, almost led to the complete abolition of the law that criminalised male homosexuality – Paragraph 175. This landmark achievement was mainly due to the homosexual emancipation movements of the time, which were able to operate almost unhindered under the new democratic order of the Weimar Republic. Not only were such movements not repressed by the authorities during the Weimar period, some of the leading political parties even publicly supported them (especially the Social Democratic Party of Germany – SPD) The future for the homosexual community was bright at the end of the 1930s. Homosexual culture, such as homosexual bars and cabarets, homosexual publications and newspapers, efforts to better understand homosexuality on the basis of scientific evidence, pointed to a greater acceptance of the community in the wider society of the Weimar Republic. Instead of this bright future, however, the homosexual community was confronted with two new obstacles – the world economic crisis of 1929, which radically changed the Reichstag's agenda and sidelined the struggle for decriminalisation, and the rise of the NSDAP – the National Socialist German Workers' Party, more commonly known simply as the Nazis, who were outspoken in their homophobia. In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Weimar Republic was officially replaced by the Third Reich. The Nazi takeover marked the end of the liberalism and democracy of the Weimar Republic, which had enabled the rise of homosexual culture. Homosexuals now faced harsh systematic persecution, most often ending in internment in one of the concentration camps, where they ended up at the very bottom of the stratification ladder.
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