More on Stalags.

You have today and tomorrow at Film Forum in New York to see Stalags, the Israeli documentary that explores a phenomenon of the early 1960s that was all over Israeli news kiosks at the time, but is little-known today - a genre of pulp-porn "memoirs," called "Stalags," in which female Nazi SS officers preyed with whips and other instruments of sadomasochistic torture on Allied prisoners of war in concentration camps, and pretty Jewish female prisoners were forced to provide sexual services for the Wehrmacht soldiers and other members of the Master Race who were trucked into the camps for just that purpose. In the horror of industrialized killing, was there also industrialized sex?

According to the doc by the Israeli filmmaker and journalist Ari Libsker, at least one generation of Israeli youth grew up thinking so.

Updated through 4/26.

The books were presented to the public as translations from English of the "real-life" accounts of pilots who were shot down and found themselves in the clutches of insatiable female Nazis. Men who were young back in the early 60s read excerpts mockingly and remember that the "Stalags" had a role to play in their own sexual initiation. Holocaust survivors deplore the exploitation genre.

It turned out that the novels were written under pseudonyms in Hebrew by Israelis, who adapted easily to the formulaic narratives and the purple prose. Men who wrote "Stalags" talk about the experience - there was a demand for the porn war stories in the austere Israel of that time, they say, and it was a way to make a shekel.

The genre got a boost from testimony at the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, a pivotal event when Israel took it upon herself to punish those responsible for crimes against Jews. Testimony before the court from an author of his own Auschwitz memoirs - Yehiel Feiner De-Nur, who wrote under the nom de plume, K-Tzetnik, or concentration camp prisoner - recalled sexual abuse in the camps, which fueled a new rash of "Stalags." K-Tzetnik's books were received by many at the time as a new benchmark of truth-telling about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Literary critics in the documentary raise doubts about the accuracy of K-Tzetnik's stories - whether he invented them or just exaggerated is still a matter of debate - but the Eichmann trial witness still stands accused of violating the memory of the Shoah. Israelis still read K-Tzetrnik's books and, as the documentary shows, details from his accounts of camp life are repeated by guides today to students who tour Auschwitz.

In fact, back in the early 60s, the publishers of "Stalags" such as I Was Colonel Schultz's Private Bitch were prosecuted for disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda. Eventually the "Stalags" were overtaken by other trends and by real legal pornography. Who knows? Maybe all this exposure will get the virulent neo-Nazi net to exhume it. They're not averse to digging up Nazi bodies.

Libsker's seductive tale is nothing if not a glimpse at forgotten forbidden fruit, even if the "Stalags" phenomenon is barely a titillating footnote in Israeli pop culture. Bear in mind that it didn't take much for filmmakers from Luchino Visconti to Mel Brooks to find rich material in the sexual peccadilloes of the Nazis. [And let's not forget Lina Wertmüller - Ed.]

Few young Israelis knew about these books, although now they certainly do, and it's hard to identify any influence that they had on Israeli society, other than aiding young boys in finding pleasure in solitary sex. Yet there are gaps in Ari Libsker's story that keep you wondering how these books fit into the official or dominant Israeli mythologies that are still works in progress today. Let's hope that more information comes out of the door that Libsker opened to help unravel the strands of memory, history and myth.

Update, 4/26: On the Media.

Posted by dwhudson at April 21, 2008 9:58 AM