This series features Samuel Huneke, assistant professor of history at George Mason University, and discusses his book States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany. “Queer Germany” Reading List Episode 1 This first episode lays the groundwork in the era of German unification, i.e. the mid-late 19th century, discussing the contemporary scholarship on sexuality, German liberalism and the rights available to homosexuals in Germanic states, the influence of the Enlightenment and French Revolution on proto-German laws, conservative ennobling of homoerotic bonding, and more until the WWI.