Stalag Novels
» Fetishes in the News
There are African-Americans who have plantation slave fantasies. Gay men who dream of being abused by fag bashers. And Jews with erotic wishes rooted in the Holocaust. Some of them even act out their dark desires in a consensual context with willing partners who - one hopes - are able to weigh the huge emotional risks of crossing these boundaries.
The great majority of people don’t know this. They don’t want to know about it. The recent revelation about Stalag novels has shocked them deeply.
I was hoping to find something about Ari Libsker’s Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel but responses to the NYT’s article drown out almost everything.
A quick sample:
Debbie Nathan notes that the NYT emended the original article:
Actually, Shik says a little more in the version that appears online today at the Times web site. “There were no Jewish whores in Auschwitz,” she adds there (click to see the onine article).
But that sentence is missing from the paper for sale in New York, and from the archived item available for posterity on Lexis-Nexis.
“No Jewish whores” at the NY Times online, but what about in print?
Susie Bright:
The Stalag pulps were banned in Israel, after selling like hotcakes, but the icons endured. Witness the revealing clip of an Israeli reserve officer talking about these stories as an essential part of his boyhood fantasy life.
Some of the torrid myths of these pulp novels were so influential on the public’s mind that they became part of the public school curriculum— and, with the film’s release, the angst over their veracity and “message” is a hot topic all over again.
The Banality of Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch
From Reason’s Hit & Run blog:
LOL Sex and violence will always be top-sellers among lowbrows, middlebrows, and highbrows—if those distinctions even deserve our attention anymore. The logical conclusion of libertarian political and social thought seems to be that “art” and “entertainment” are interchangeable terms.
The NYT article will eventually fall into the paid archives but this on the Ziopedia should remain available: Israel’s Unexpected Spinoff From a Holocaust Trial.
The cover art reproduced was all familiar to me. I’ve seen all thos paintings and drawings of women beating men before in a book on 1960s American men’s magazines like True. But don’t have a clue as to which came first, the Israeli or American usage.