Porn, rape and the fall of the Third Reich: On Thor Kunkel’s Novel Endstufe

Abstract

Both the image of the Third Reich as a sexually repressive and conservative society and its counterpart (Hitler’s Germany as a highly eroticized country) are part of a long tradition of using sexuality to understand Nazism. Most of such approaches tend to establish an association between moral rottenness, pathological sexuality and National Socialism, i.e., they assume that ‘abnormal’ sexuality is a key to explaining abnormal politics. Andrea Slane links the diverse efforts to approach Nazism through sexuality to the ‘20th century’s liberal humanist preoccupation with sexual explanations for human behavior’ as well as to a ‘mostly conservative tendency toward reading acts of immorality willy-nilly across different moral registers’ (Slane 1997: 148). Such readings therefore take many forms and are present in the most diverse genres and political and ideological landscapes, as can be inferred from the following indiscriminate examples: Gunter Grass’s introduction of what some critics perceived as pornographic elements into his Danzig Trilogy (Die Blechtrommel, 1959; Katz und Maus, 1961; Hundejahre, 1963), the use of pornography in Israeli Stalag’s fiction², the depiction of sexual abuse and sadomasochism in the movie Il Portieri di Notte (Liliana Cavani, Italy, 1974) and Jonathan Littell’s use of incest and homosexuality in Les Bienveillantes (2006).