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

In the Galante monthlies, Sittengeschichten , sex encyclopedias, and private pornographic serials, one visual theme dominated and seemed to appeal to all sectors of Berlin’s Algolagnic community. This was artistic enactment of a sadistic teacher administering a bare-buttocks punishment to a hapless student. The standard instruments of discipline could be as simple as a cane or whipping crop but more inventive fantasies involved flagellation machines and paddles with cutout numerals in the center, which left an outline of the number of whacks on the child’s reddened derrière.

The forced application of an enema to the recalcitrant pupil was still another ubiquitous image. The characters and settings for these schoolroom whippings and anal torments were drawn or photographed in infinite permutations and weird variations: a shocked principal watches from the hallway as a comely Gymnasium instructor canes a cross-dressed boy while his classmates secure the boy’s naked rump to a desktop; a loving schoolmistress inserts an enema into the rectum of a hysterical 15-year-old girl as a grotesquely ugly nurse kisses the teenager’s contorted face; an excited schoolboy, no more than eight, is taught to wield a cat-o’-nine-tails on the elevated posterior of his naughty little friend; and so forth.

Why fecal and buttocks fetishism prevailed in Weimar Germany is a question that was weakly addressed in the literature of the time. Some apologists wrote that spanking stimulated the blood flow to the constricted muscles of the gluteus maximus and outward to the sensation-deadened genitals. Ernst Schertel, a prolific pornographer from Munich and historian of the erotic, expounded on ritual flagellation as an ancient ecstatic technique and possibly the origin of religious experience. Others claimed the centrality of the anus as the source of infantile eroticism.

But not answered in these perverse treatises was the geographical issue. Scatological scenes and exposed lower torsos abounded in Central Europe’s straight, gay, lesbian, transvestite, and Nacktkultur publications. They appeared in non-German erotica but with maybe a fifth or a tenth the regularity. Presumably the heavy use of colonic irrigation to fight childhood diseases, specific pedagogical forms of punishment, and unexplored cultural symbolism shaped the strange fixation.

Other sexual fetishes in Weimar Berlin were shared obsessions of the Jazz Age. Heinz Schmeidler in The Moral History of the Present (Berlin, 1932) listed what he thought were the most prevalent objects of sexual compulsion in the city: Nose Fetishism, Mouth Fetishism, Ear Fetishism, Hand Fetishism, Leg Fetishism, Shoe and Stocking Fetishism, Breast Fetishism, Buttocks Fetishism, Hair Fetishism, Purse Fetishism, Music Fetishism, Clothes Fetishism, Underwear Fetishism, Bed Fetishism, Fabric Fetishism, and Flower Fetishism. To these, Losa in Sexual Derangements added Cold Fetishism and Voice Fetishism. (Cold fetishists found their jollies at ice rinks and in the back of speeding cabooses.)

Rumpelstilzchen felt the subject of sexual fetishes was of paramount interest to his provincial readers. Fashion among Berlin’s Beinls was always related to fetishistic novelty. They needed to offer or emphasize some item or body part not readily available at home. Between 1919 and 1924, Rumpelstilzchen provided detailed descriptions of exotic hosiery styles and high-heeled shoes, largely French imports. His gaze moved upward after that to powdered necks, shoulder lines, earlobes, hairbobs, glossy eyeshadow, revealing blouses, men’s leather ties, perfume, and, in 1929, to iridescent lipstick shades, to which he devoted four weekly columns.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Rumpelstilzchen again focused on street fashion. Hitler, who preferred the wholesome scrubbed peasant look, detested facial makeup on women. The Kontroll-Girls of Berlin responded accordingly. They appeared in the Friedrichstadt wearing long leather coats, opaque stockings, mannish hats, and freshly washed faces. Rumpelstilzchen waxed enthusiastic over that season’s whore fashion. During the same April month, he also assured his readership that Berlin was more welcoming and less crowded now that the Jews were vacating their apartments for extended holidays in Paris and Vienna.