Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

The pornography that circulatedin Weimar Berlin was marked by its unusual emphasis on body worship, extreme fetishism, scatology, dark roleplay, and ritualized gender struggle. There was the soft stuff too but the most sought-after girlie mags and sex novels were usually imports or translated editions from Paris or Rome. Local imitations of the same, like Reigen , Der Junggeselle , Lustige Blätter , and Berliner Leben , always started off with perky Gallic charm but succumbed, even in their erotic cartoons and short stories, to menacing visions and S&M fantasies. Berlin Girl-Culture was inextricably mixed with eroticized violence.

Algolagnia (the “Craving of Pain”) was a Latin term coined in 1894 by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, a Berlin physician better remembered for his investigation of the paranormal. Although Algolagnia encompassed what we normally think of as Sadism and Masochism, Schrenck-Notzing also intended it to define a much larger terrain of sexual perversion, especially psychological domination, erotic servitude, forced gratification, bondage and discipline, infantilism, humiliating role-reversal scenes, and “morbid” fetishism. Schrenck-Notzing, Wilhelm Stekel, and Albert Eulenburg each attempted to explain the mysterious aberration that tied sexual pleasure to suffering or to compulsive symbolic play. Like their contemporaries, Richard Krafft-Ebing and Freud, they knew the phenomenon was growing rapidly throughout the German-speaking world.

Hirschfeld noted that physical aggression during puberty and sexual courtship were intercultural universals. Boys naturally fought other males in order to “take” or “possess” their mates; and girls were expected to surrender, accede, “give in” to the most virile male who lusted after them. Aggression and submission in the service of sexual conquest were instinctively short-lived and restrained acts, final steps in the procreative dance. But Algolagnia upset the rules of natural selection. It forced an ongoing recapitulation of excessive violence and pain to achieve sexual excitement and release. People who exhibited these sadomasochist tendencies had consciously contaminated the normal sex drive with the psychic toxins of childhood trauma and the oppressive mementos of adolescent awakening.

Freudians had an elegant elucidation of the Algolagnia complex and its fetishistic components. It was all a symptom of castration anxiety, penile substitution, arrested neurotic development, and repressed homosexuality. Of course. Yet psychoanalysis didn’t adequately explain why Algolagnia, particularly in its twentieth-century manifestation, Metatropism, had gained such a hold in Central Europe and how it affected women.

Metatropism referred to the psychological pairing of female sadists (Dominas) and masculine masochists (Metatropists). While the socially reversed roles of powerful women and passive males who acquiesced to them could be traced to sex cults in prehistoric Asia Minor and India, its incidence, according to Hirschfeld, was relatively uncommon until the end of the nineteenth century. Suddenly, fantasies of female vampires and male supplicants in their thrall jumped from the notepads and canvases of Austrian and German artists into the vast popular imagination. Metatropic sexual displacement, while observable elsewhere in Europe on a diminished scale, seeped into the mainstream of Berlin’s erotic visual life and thinking.

Hirschfeld, who counseled hundreds of male and female Algolagnists, characterized the typology of Metatropism according to four fantasy scenarios of self-debasement: 1) Servilism (reduction of status), submitting to a Domina as her slave, servant, or page; 2) Puerile Masochism (reduction of age), wishing to be punished as an infant or schoolboy by an angry mother, strict governess, or “aunt”; 3) Zoomimic Masochism (transformation into an animal), being treated like a beast of burden by a mistress, who addressed the subject as an animal and then “rode” him, placing a saddle on his back, a bit in his mouth, and finally spurring and cropping him; and 4) Impersonal Masochism (transformation into an inanimate object), used by a stern mistress as an ashtray, footstool, coffee table, or animal-skin rug.