
A great interpreter of modernity such as Michel Foucault once asked, "How is it possible that the Nazis, who were represented by pitiful, squalid Puritans, have now, all over the world, in France, Germany, the United States, become the absolute reference of eroticism?".
What is the sense of putting sex in a story of human beings who are shaved, tattooed, whipped, gassed, cremated corpses, tangled, bruised, raining down from the suddenly opened doors of the gas chamber?The first film maker who explained the Holocaust through lust was Liliana Cavani. Her "Night Porter" was a work of furious gloom, a kind of Grand Guignol sublimated by Freudian eroticism. In a hotel in Wien, in 1957, there is an American conductor and his young wife Lucy, an Austrian Jew (in the film she has the face of Charlotte Rampling), who recognizes the hotel's night porter as the SS officer Max (Dirk Bogart in the film), who had tortured her as a teenager in a concentration camp. They enjoy sexual promiscuity once again.
Put in a bit of voyeurism, fetishism, decadence, a heavy dose of sentimentality, a pinch of theological reflection on the silence of God and that's it. Especially lots of sex, in its most perverse forms.
What is the sense of putting sex in a story of human beings who are shaved, tattooed, whipped, gassed, cremated corpses, tangled, bruised, raining down from the suddenly opened doors of the gas chamber?
Schmùstuck, they were called, "pieces of trash". Not objects of sexual desire.
It is also the case in William Styron's novel "Sophie's Choice", which Alan Pakula made into a movie. A Southern White Protestant virgin protagonist, Stingo, sexually desires a Polish Catholic woman who survived the camps and whose father was a fierce anti-Semite.
Martin Waltzer wrote of Kunkel as a "virtuoso of crap" and a "seraph of obscenity." "Ein Buch für den Papierkorb", a book good for trash, was the judgement of the Neue Deutschland, while the Tagesspiegel spoke of a "verbosity without limits in impressive trash."
Even more sarcastic was the literary critic who wrote: "Thor Kunkel rewrites the history of the Third Reich. Nazism does not smell of gas, but of sperm."
Another movie of this kind was "The Reader", inspired by Bernard Shlink's novel. It is the story of the Nasi Hanna, who burned 300 Jews and then begin a sexual relation with a student, Michael.
"Annexed", the recent novel of British author Sharon Dogar, reached the moral paralysis of the sexualization of Anne Frank, portrayed in her romance with Peter van Pels, a fellow of her imprisonment in the famous Amsterdam house. The novel is full of sex scenes between the two thirteen-year-olds. A trivializing operation of postmodern criticism.