Germany
Early German cinema gave birth to the horror film which flourished during the excesses of the short-lived Weimar Republic of the 1920s. It was replaced by censorious and totalitarian Nazism, and then after WWII, by liberal democracy.Nazism abhored explicit sexual expression. National Socialism viewed pornography as the speech of "bestial Jews" who used Weimar permissiveness to turn Berlin into "the national sewer." (Joachim C. Fest. Hitler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1973. p. 94)
Passed November 12, 1918, Article 118 of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic abolished all censorship. This atmosphere of sexual freedom, combined with inflation, led many into such marginal industries as pornography, and porn exploded in storefronts. (Joseph Slade, "Nazi Imagery in Contemporary Culture," Dimensions, V. 11, No. 2, pp. 9-15)
The public protested and on May 29, 1920, the Reichstag passed the Reich Film Act, re-establishing censorship for movies. In 1926, Germany made all forms of porn criminal. Jewish intellectual Kurt Tucholvsky said the law truly aimed at allowing the government to curb all independent expression.
Tucholsky at one time edited the Berlin weekly Die Weltbuhne, whose staff was mainly composed of Jewish radicals. (Dennis Prager. Why the Jews. p. 64)
The magazine indiscriminately attacked Germany. Tucholsky wrote: "This country which I am allegedly betraying is not my country; this state is not my state; this legal system is not my legal system."
Ordinary Germans reacted with fury to these nihilistic attacks, electing the Nazis in 1932 to bring order. On May 6, 1933, Nazi sympathizers raided the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the creation of Jewish physican Magnus Hirschfield (1868-1935). Dr. Hirschfield fought for rights for homosexuals and for open sexual discussion. He authored the two-volume Sexual History of the World War and the five-colume Encyclopedia of Sexology; "both mapped uncharted terrains of human sexuality." (Slade)
A month before the raid, Dr. Hirschfield shipped boxes of scholarly and pornographic material to Argentina which eventually found its way to the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Reproduction, and Gender at Indiana University.
The Nazis campaign against sexual expression ranged from common porn to high art. The Nazis hated such artistic movements as Dad, Expressionism, and Futurism, which overflowed with erotic themes.
Imprisoning pornographers as "asocials," the Nazis held public trials which may've been greeted by public approval. Porners were identified in concentration camps with black stars.
The Nazis used pornography, however, when it suited them. Hitler's lieutenant Julius Streicher, who bragged about his porn collection, edited the tabloid Der Sturmer which showed drawings and fiction of Jews raping Aryan women. "Those of a psychoanalytic bent could make much of the fact that a number of German fascists demonized Jews by using the language and lore of pornography - while castigating Jews for immorally wielding pornographic material against the German nation in order to corrupt its youth." (Slade)
A bureaucrat in Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, said that when pornography goes public, it produces "a truly pagan Kulturpolitik." When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they flooded bookstores with pornography. In 1940, Josef Goebbels proposed a plan to turn the French against the English by faking a "pornographic diary" of an English prisoner of war, "with a detailed and salacious account of his bedroom adventures in Paris with their wives, sisters and sweethearts of French soldiers at the front." (The Jewish Presence)
During World War II, Allied troops told each other dirty jokes about the Fuhrer's supposed "missing testicle." Writes Dr. Slade: "It is a classic example of the political function of pornography; a demotic - perhaps even democratic - attempt to reduce the mighty by rooting their motives within the mechanisms of basic bodily functions."
Americans after the War took revenge on their enemies by caricaturing the Nazis in pornographic stories and images. Eventually Nazism became sexy.
The Mitchell Brothers released Never a Tender Moment in 1979, featuring Marilyn Chambers, Tanya Robertson and Carol Christy in a series of vignettes. The film lives up to its title, particularly in its second story "Hot Nazis." First you see two naked women doing each other until Nazi guards, both men and women, arrive and brutally rape the women.
The world's most powerful pornographer may be Beate Uhse, a German woman.
Shortly after Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, Uhse flew out of Berlin's Gatow airport, just ahead of Red Army advanced units, to the only part of Germany not yet in the hands of Allied forces, Flensburg, 250 miles north west of Berlin.
Beate's husband had been killed on a night-fighter mission towards the end of the war. Her parents had died at the hands of the Russians advancing into East Prussia where she'd grown up.
At 25 years of age, Beate had a two-year old boy to look after and 200 Reichsmarks to her name.
"There were a great many refugees there, women alone, with and without children. A village of 300 people was trying to cope with thousands. And when the war finally ended the men began to turn up, men who had survived the war and had gradually been released from prisoner-of-war camps. In those first days there was enormous joy, then after six weeks - tears and misery because they were having a baby. In Germany at that time there was no bread and butter, no cooking pots, no flannels and towels - nothing; and no contraceptives. So they were stuck there. They had lost their homes, the man had no job, he'd been a soldier for five years, and now there was a baby on the way. It was a total catastrophe."
Nazism had discouraged contraception and sex education. But Beate knew about that stuff from her mother - one of the first five women in Germany to qualify as a doctor. She'd told Beate about the rhythym method, a way of calculating a woman's fertility days in her menstrual cycle. Uhse printed up several thousand copies of a book on the subject which she sold for two Reichsmarks. Business boomed and soon she sold other books, contraceptives and sex aids.
In 1962, Uhse opened the world's first sex shop, named Sex Institute for Marital Hygiene in Flensburg. Within a decade every major German city had one. Income from them allowed Beate to pay for a new company premises in Flensburg which the Mayor opened in 1969, saying that "People can work here with pleasure and love for the business of pleasure and love."
In 1975 West Germany legalized hardcore, but it could only be bought in shops, not through the mail. So Beate began stocking fully explicit magazines and films, many of them from Scandinavia. She then opened movie theaters where she played X-rated features.
"And there was also the feeling, very much current at the time, of a need to educate the new generation and clear the guilt of the past; sex was as good a place to start as any." (Immoral Tales, p. 45)
Since 1949, Germany has had law guaranteeing free expression, but the motion picture industry developed a board that classified films with an age limit. Porno films, when explicitly legalized in 1974, are restricted to places where alcohol is sold.
By the 1980s, all three of Uhse's sons worked in the family business. One of them, Uli Rotermund, tried to establish a chain of retail porn in the US. David Friedman remembers. "Beate Uhse tried to set up business in the USA. She was about as welcome here as a case of hives.'
None of the established US chains would sell Beate's movies. "Someone called Uli and pointed out how unfortunate it would be for business if he kept finding bodies in his auditoriums," says one source. Uhse eventually pulled out of the US after losing $500,000. (Porn Gold)
Started in 1974, ZBF Vertrieb is the acronym for a leading German porn distributor. A limited liability company, it was run through the late '80s by general manager Georg Schmitt and his four sons, Peter, Dieter, Lothar and Gunther. "There were three groups of people in the business before legalization in Germany," a veteran told the authors of Porn Gold. "Horst Peter and his partner Wolf Waterschild, Charlie Brown and myself. Georg Schmidt started late. Officially he didn't start until the law was changed [1975] but he and his sons did take some risks between 1973 and 1975. Everyone knew it was going to be legalized in the end."
ZBF negotiates distribution deals with many of the big magazine and video producers. About 70% of their product, as of 1987, was distributed through an exclusive deal.
Turnover amounted to about $50 million in 1987.