In his original and informative study of the inner life of German soldiers in the First World War, Jason Crouthamel both complicates and deconstructs clichés such as these, throwing an important new light on questions of gender and sexuality in the German military. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. It was the room of a man who had a fashion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things.
There had never been a woman’s hand in that place. At first sight you would have said it was a woman’s drawing-room.īut it wasn’t. A thick grey carpet covered the floor, and the chairs were low and soft and upholstered like a lady’s boudoir.
That room took my breath away, it was so unexpected. Stumm locked the door behind him and laid the key on a table. We went up a staircase to a room at the end of a long corridor. In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay’s first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces: