History of German Porn: Gretchen Kraut Collection, Hardcover

Germans are not really famous for their great passions or pleasures. Abroad, people like to watch them falling under the tables at carnival or at the October Fest, drunk and merry. Tacitus seems to have known this side. He tells tales of the ancestors of the Germans, in classical Rome. He found them a hard and wild tribe that loved to roam the wilderness, stark naked. Indestructible even then but not really prepared to enjoy lust and pleasure. For centuries thereafter, there was little more than yodelling beneath the leather pants. Their best-loved object, a tank-like car, still boasts its indestructible quality. Then, nobody believed that the Germans might indeed, have a very intimate relationship with pornography. What is that supposed to be? German pornography? After the war, porn was happily transferred outdoors, to Scandinavia, generously partaking in the nude bathing cult. Or it was banned to the German Democratic Republic, where allegedly, women were more willing than in the West. Dreaming was allowed, beyond the borders. There was however, still something left of the good old German wanderlust, spiced up with a little sado-masochism. Fantasizing in the style of the romantic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm Hansel and Gretel locked up in the witch s house. What did go on in there? Is this typically German? Yes, it is. Only it is hard to see, as the Nazis had turned nude culture, which after all had been Germanic, having been invented in Germany, into erotic machinery. All steel-hard boys and Arian women, always willing to do what they were asked to do. Germany militarised the erotic, which was permitted to remain pornographic abroad. The time had come for Germans, characterized by war-time rape and a greatly reduced male population, to put their past skeletons in the closet. Indeed, the Germans had lost something very important. This book shows what they lost: the legendary roaring twenties, when after World War I they shook off the senselessness of the Age of the Kaiser like a drunken stupor. It was the time when photography commenced its victory march, and dared all, without shame. It was not before the revolutionary sixties that lust was raised its head once more. Until then, 8-mm trash films and mags rotted away in farm barns. German pornography found its subjects close to the bestial, close to the stables.