Stasi's official pornography department finally exposed
Friday, March 28, 2008
Western pornography was banned under communism, but the armed forces of the
former East Germany made their own sex films featuring bare-breasted female
soldiers that were enjoyed by senior officers and outwardly prudish
hard-line politicians.
Evidence of the former communist state's secret porn industry surfaced
yesterday in a documentary made by eastern Germany's MDR television channel.
It showed original film clips of nude subalterns kissing, and female army
privates in helmets posing semi-naked on parade.
The programme, Pornography made in the German Democratic Republic, revealed
that the East German army, which at the time was one of the most feared in
the Warsaw Pact, ran a 160-man film unit which had a secret amateur circle
of 12 porn enthusiasts.
Dietmar Schürtz, 57, a former sound technician and actor in the porn film
circle, who works in the reunited German army's media department, said in an
interview that the unit was set up in 1982. It managed to make a total of 12
erotic films before the collapse of communism in 1989.
"All of the films were made in secret but partly with the permission of
senior officers," he said, adding that the premieres were an event not to be
missed by the country's ruling elite: "All the bosses came to these showings
– either because they were just inquisitive or simply out of pure lust," he
said.
Mr Schürtz said the movies were shot on 16mm film cameras and that a
military hospital was used as a studio. Most of the apparently sex-hungry
women who starred in the films were civilian employees of the army. "We
asked them whether they wanted a role and nearly all of them said yes
immediately," he said.
The style of the erotic film clips shown in the documentary was reminiscent
of early Scandinavian pornographic cinema. Perhaps surprisingly for a former
front-line Warsaw Pact state, the films were not without humorous jabs at
the failures of communism.
One scene depicted a male worker in a medical consulting room waiting to be
seen by a female doctor. She enters and orders the man to strip to the
waist. "But I am your mechanic!" insists the male worker. The doctor
immediately unbuttons her white coat and offers the worker instant sex
because she is so grateful to have found somebody to repair her car in a
country almost devoid of mechanics.
The secret clips included "Carry On" film-style shots of a female army
private in a helmet exposing herself on a parade ground to the command
"Breasts Out !" The scenes are in marked contrast to the atmosphere of
public prudery that prevailed in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin
Wall.
Although nudism and naked bathing were permitted, the regime banned Western
sex films and visitors to the country who dared to try to import erotic
magazines from the West would have the publication confiscated by border
guards and risked being denied entry.
After 1989, one of the first addresses for the millions of East Germans who
were suddenly able to visit the West was an erotic-film cinema or a sex shop.
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