- "Germany doesn't have a Gestapo anymore. Instead,
it has a thought police, which is ironically called self control."
-
- BERLIN -- A novel about Nazi
pornography, sex, corruption and romance that promised to be a German bestseller
has been abruptly withdrawn by the book's publisher after it accused its
author of being a "Right-wing thug".
-
- The plot of Endstufe, or "Final Stage", intended
to be a humorous novel by the prizewinning writer Thor Kunkel, centres
on a fictitious SS biologist who oversees the Nazis' clandestine operation
to produce erotic films.
-
- The book is based on Kunkel's research into a series
of erotic works known as the Sachsenwald films, which were shot secretly
in 1941.
-
- Films such as The Trapper and Desire in the Woods, depicting
lesbian sex scenes and footage of naked women tied to trees, were produced
and screened for the Nazi elite despite an official ban on pornography.
-
- The novel also includes controversial, graphic details
about the mass rape of German women by the invading Soviet army in 1945,
which Kunkel, 40, describes as "the biggest sex crime in world history".
-
- In the book, he attacks present day German society for
its political correctness over the Nazi era. "Germany doesn't have
a Gestapo anymore," he wrote. "Instead, it has a thought police,
which is ironically called self control."
-
- Just weeks before publication, alarm bells began to ring
at Germany's Rowohlt publishing house, which had initially described Endstufe
as "brilliant". The novel was removed from its list of titles.
-
- "I should have withdrawn the book from our catalogue
after reading it for the first time," said Alexander Fest, the head
of Rowohlt. Kunkel was an author with a "twisted view of history"
who was peddling Right-wing propaganda, he said. "The book is cheap
agit-prop."
-
- Kunkel, who worked in London for five years as an advertising
copywriter before becoming a novelist, insisted that an American or British
publisher would not have reacted in such an extreme way. "I am an
Anglophile German," he said.
-
- "The problem is that a lot of my writing exhibits
humour, and Mr Fest does not appear to share my sense of humour."
-
- His book has now been snapped up by a rival house, Eichborn,
which plans to publish it next month. Endstufe, according to Eichborn,
is a "Tarantino-esque novel about sex and science during the Third
Reich, which provides a completely new literary approach to the subject
matter."
-
- The row has divided German public opinion. Although the
Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper had called for Kunkel's novel to be rated
as a "book of the season", Der Spiegel magazine lambasted it
for glamorising the Third Reich, and for failing to mention the Holocaust.
-
- In a letter to Der Spiegel, an outraged Kunkel - whose
first novel won him the Ernst-Willner prize in 2000 - accused the magazine
of trying to "murder" his reputation.
-
- "Like any half-sensible person I condemn the horrors
of the Nazi era," he said. "It is not that I am trying to ignore
the Holocaust, it's merely that it's totally passe as a theme."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/14/wporn
14.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/03/14/ixnewstop.html
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