Yanara Schmacks

Yanara Schmacks is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Her dissertation, “Reproductive Nation: German Motherhood, Erotics, and Ecology between East and West” reconsiders Germany’s (post-)Cold War history through the lens of the politics of motherhood from the early 1970s to the 2000s. Research drawn from this project was published in Central European History and Psychoanalysis and History.

Udarnitzi (rekordverdächtige Arbeiter:innen) in der Fabrik Krasnaja Zaria. Pavel Filonov, 1931

Background Article

Gender and “the East”

Anticommunism and Antislavic Racism in West Germany

Gender and sexuality are critically important factors in postwar West German anticommunist and antislavic attitudes. Fantasies and fears about a reversed gendered order in ‘the East‘ significantly contributed to anti-‘Eastern‘ resentments in Adenauer-era Germany.