In The Continuities of German History, Helmut Walser Smith encouraged historians of Germany to examine and observe the ebb and flow of change over the longue durée, and in particular over those events often marked as ruptures in time and knowledge. 1 The monographs of Annette Timm, Julia Roos and Victoria Harris all take up Smith’s challenge by studying the role sexuality and gender played in structuring notions and ideals of citizenship, and even women’s experience itself, during the turbulent twentieth century. In asking such questions these authors point to important issues of periodization that arise when taking into account both how the state regulated subjects, and, perhaps more importantly, how these subjects constituted themselves in an often highly fraught and changing social, cultural and political arena. Taken together, they provide important new syntheses of the changes brought about in health, crime and social welfare policy in no fewer than five different regimes. All three texts force a consideration of how best to measure and gauge the influence of sexuality on modern state formation, whether as elements of state building, social citizenship or everyday life. They do this by rethinking the 1920s as the crucible of German modernity, setting up a series of