Israel’s Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial

by angryindian | September 6, 2007 at 02:45 pm | 1103 views | add comment

This is not particularly new to me, but I am quite surpirsed that the NYT's would pick this up due to the sensitivites involved. I knew a handful of Jewish Gay men in NYC who had what for lack of a better term be called a "Nazi fetish" with German nationals during the "Eurotrash" era of the NYC Club scene of the mid-1980's. But I had no idea that a subculture of Nazi-themed erotica existed in of all places, Israel.

But than again, I've also wondered why "Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS" could become a cult classic too. Psychologically Franz Fanon indentified this sort of hate/attraction in his writings as did Sartre, Foucault in their studies of victim responses to criminality and domination as it relates to colonialism. Of course there's always the "Stockholm Syndrome" and it could be further employed where it concerns domestic violence and battery. Relating one's inner thoughts and desires through the filters of an intense period or situation of repression can often manifest in astonishing ways. - The Angryindian

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JERUSALEM, Sept. 5 — It was one of Israel’s
dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being
exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust
survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic
pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers
throughout the land.

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Courtesy of Heymann Brothers Films

Hitler made a rare appearance on the cover of a Stalag.

Read under the table by a
generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the
Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which
they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or
British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted
with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists
taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.

“I realized that the first Holocaust pictures I saw, as one who grew up here, were of naked women,” said Ari Libsker, whose documentary film “Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel” had its premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July and is to be broadcast in October and shown in movie theaters. “We were in elementary school,” he noted. “I remember how embarrassed we were.”

Hanna Yablonka, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, says the film highlights what she calls the “yellow aspects of nurturing the memory of the Holocaust.”

“Are we taking it into the realm of semipornography?” she asked. “The answer is, we are.”

The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography. The most famous Stalag, “I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch,” was deemed to have crossed all the lines of acceptability, prompting the police to try to hunt every copy down.

The Stalags went out of print and underground, circulating in specialty secondhand bookstores and among furtive groups of collectors.