Encountering Precarious Archives. Methodological Challenges and Approaches in Historical Research on the Lives and Persecution of Homosexual Men
Encountering Precarious Archives. Methodological Challenges and Approaches in Historical Research on the Lives and Persecution of Homosexual Men (1925–1975)

Summary/Abstract: This article confronts methodological challenges, and alternative solutions, to historical research on the cultures and persecution fates of homosexual men between 1925 and 1975 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It delineates historical sources of the persecutorial institutions found in hegemonic archives and outlines their potential for the research on the Lebenswelten (lifeworlds) of homosexual men. In addition, it highlights the benefits of a research framework informed by cultural studies and a praxeological perspective. Furthermore, this article emphasises the work of Public History as a means of creating additional sources and accessing more remote and heterogeneous archival holdings, and, subsequently, as a method of queering the (precarious) archives as we encounter them. The research on the Salon der Hundert (founded in 1969), a club in Tübingen, and the consequential public history discourse enables us to learn about how homosexual men and their community individually and collectively strategised to establish Lebenswelten. Its history gives us insight into the agency of a collective and the importance of spaces and their creation.

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