"For conservative and nationalist discourses, these marginalized Others were frequently objects of fascination and revulsion. Yet the horror provoked by Jews, homosexuals, and, in some areas, Gypsies cannot be explained simply by reference to the marginal; it was the way those at the margins of society made the bordelines of gender and nationality blur and shift that threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the patriarchal nation-state as it had been constituted. This threat was perhaps especially acute in Germany, whose identity as a unified nation was so tenuous."

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