Júlia Garraio1 Porn, Rape and the Fall of the Third Reich: On Thor Kunkel’s Novel Endstufe Both the image of the Third Reich as a sexually repressive and conservative society and its counterpart (Hitler’s Germany as a highly eroticized country) are part of a long tradition of using sexuality to understand Nazism. Most of such approaches tend to establish an association between moral rottenness, pathological sexual- ity and National Socialism, i.e., they assume that ‘abnormal’ sexuality is a key to explaining abnormal politics. Andrea Slane links the diverse efforts to approach Nazism through sexuality to the ‘20 th century’s liberal humanist preoccupation with sexual explanations for human behavior’ as well as to a ‘mostly conservative tendency toward reading acts of immorality willy-nilly across different moral reg- isters’ (Slane 1997: 148). Such readings therefore take many forms and are present in the most diverse genres and political and ideological landscapes, as can be inferred from the following indiscriminate examples: Gunter Grass’s introduction of what some critics perceived as pornographic elements into his Danzig Trilogy (Die Blechtrommel, 1959; Katz und Maus, 1961; Hundejahre, 1963), the use of por- nography in Israeli Stalag’s fiction2, the depiction of sexual abuse and sadomas- ochism in the movie Il Portieri di Notte (Liliana Cavani, Italy, 1974) and Jonathan Littell’s use of incest and homosexuality in Les Bienveillantes (2006). According to Dagmar Herzog, five main strands can be observed in the context of the literature, film, journalism, and popular culture that ‘emphasize Nazism’s purported sexual perversity’: (1) ‘morbid decadence and sadomasochism as hallmarks of fascism’, (2) ‘fascism as intrinsically homoerotic’, (3) ‘fascism as femininity gone awry’ (which explains Nazism’s grasp of power through Hitler’s attraction to women ), (4) ‘Hitler’s own gender-bending as the key to his ability to seduce the nation’ and (5) ‘fascism (and even the Holocaust itself) as the titillating backdrop for hard- core pornographic fantasies’. Not surprisingly many of the works conveying such readings were the target of heated controversy. As Herzog claims, although such approaches may lend attention to certain issues that have not been privileged by 1 Research funded by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia: Project ‘The Representation of Violence and the Violence of Representation’ (POCTI /ELT / 61579 / 2004), Centro de Estudos Sociais / Universidade de Coimbra. 2 The Stalag fiction is a short-lived genre of Israeli fiction that flourished in the early 1960s. It consisted of pornographic accounts of imprisonment, generally of Allied soldiers, sexual brutalization by SS female guards and the prisoner’s eventual revenge (usually rape and murder).