Special journal issue: Crime Stories

I am very pleased to be able to announce that a special issue of Media History edited by myself and Paul Knepper -- "Criminality, Policing and the Press in Inter-war European and Transatlantic Perspectives" -- has now left the printers (which I can confirm since I received my copy today).

The four main articles (access to which will require an institutional subscription, probably through a university) consider a variety of topics:

In "Rogues of the Racecourse: Racing Men and the Press in Interwar Britain", Heather Shore (Leeds Metropolitan) considers the often dramatic (and sometimes violent) world of racecourse gangs and their presentation in both the serious and sensationalist newspaper press. (Among those gangs considered in the article are then then-infamous Sabinis, who have featured recently in fictional form in the hit British television show Peaky Blinders.)

In "Two Suspicious Persons: Norwegian Narratives and Images of a Police Murder Case, 1926-1950", Per Jørgen Ystehede (University of Oslo) takes a cross-media look at a case of police murder that, although legendary within Norway, has yet to be given the attention it deserves outside of that national context. Featuring stills from the 1949 feature film based on the case (which was banned in 1952 and not shown again until 2007), the article locates the Norwegian discourse around the case both within national and broader European trends involving perceptions of crime.

My own article, "The Constables and the 'Garage Girl': The Police, the Press, and the Case of Helene Adele", considers the controversy that arose when two London Metropolitan Police constables arrested a young woman for alleged disorder in the summer of 1928. She accused the constables of attempting to sexually assault her and use false charges to discredit her story, leading to a trial (and the eventual conviction) of the two men. Placed within the context of the period's sensationalist press and a long series of police scandals, the case has much to say about the complexities of "human interest" journalism in the 1920s.

Paul Knepper (University of Sheffield), in "International Criminals: The League of Nations, the Traffic in Women and the Press", explores one of the lesser known aspects of the League's activities in the inter-war period: the campaign against the traffic in women (previously known as "white slavery"). An important stage in the evolution of the modern language of "human trafficking", the League's investigations and reports were not only given widespread coverage but served as an important justification for the international organisation's existence.

In addition, Paul and I present an introductory essay (access to this is FREE) that explores some European and transatlantic contexts of recent crime-and-media historiography, which has--certainly for the inter-war period--become a very active field in recent years.

The special issue had its origins in a session of the 2012 European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow that I organised, though there have been a few twists and turns since its origins.

It has been a great experience to work with such talented colleagues who are, truly, not only engaged in some fascinating research but also capable of framing their work in clear and vivid language.

Furthermore, it was a very positive experience working with Media History, and we are all quite happy with the result.

Should anyone be interested in a copy of these essays but not have access to them through their institution, please do contact me. (Drafts of the introductory essay and my own article are available via my academia.edu page).

[Cross-posted at The Most Remarkable Woman in England]

News you can't use

My friend Andrew brings to my attention an article by Rolf Dobelli, who raises various doubts about the value of avidly following the news.

One of Dobelli's reasons for being sceptical:

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new. The relevant versus the new is the fundamental battle of the current age. Media organisations want you to believe that news offers you some sort of a competitive advantage. Many fall for that. We get anxious when we're cut off from the flow of news. In reality, news consumption is a competitive disadvantage. The less news you consume, the bigger the advantage you have.

I have to say that, although I've been a pretty compulsive news reader for a long time now, I see the point of what Dobelli's on about here, and I have recently felt a pretty strong urge to withdraw from the day-to-day information overload and try to focus on things that are more important to me.

I did a pretty good job toward the beginning of the year in filtering things out and trying just to focus on the half-dozen or so information sources that I really do find valuable. 

Dobelli has inspired me to perhaps redouble my efforts.

This is the end of childhood

I grew up during the decades of creative synergy between the Federal Republic of Germany and Czechoslovakia. Oh, did those Czechs make beautiful weapons TV programmes for children! Luzie, der Schrecken der Straße, Die Märchenbraut - and above all, Drei Nüsse für Aschenbrödel, which today enjoys a cult-following amongst nostalgic German thirty-somethings. This was a very happy time indeed.

For years all I wanted to do is learn Czech and say "ahoi" to my friends behind the iron curtain (Czechoslovakia never seemed very iron-curtainy to us because of those programmes - only like a mildly more grimy and old-fashioned Germany). Prague was like a far off wonderland where plasticine figures played pranks on neighbourhood bullies and Breughel paintings would come to life to jingling Mark Mothersbaugh-style soundtracks. People looked shoddy but were clearly happy - more open, witty and creative than us mollycoddled capitalists with our digital watches.

I shed secret tears when the beautiful Dana Vavrova died two years ago of cancer, an actress whose career began in the Czech fairy tale TV circuit and who later on became well-known in Germany.

And I was deeply saddened to read today about the death of Zdenek Miler, another marvellously creative Czech, and father of the little mole beloved by generations of German children.



I remember watching these films in 8-mil versions in school.

Rest in peace, Zdenek Miler - you made so many of us very, very happy!

Hot content

Finally, after nearly five years, I realise that I've been doing this whole blogging thing wrong.

Unlike, as I learn via the New York Times, one Heather Armstrong:

Her site brings in an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 a month or more — and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. She won’t confirm her income (“We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials”). But the sales rep for Federated Media, the agency that sells ads for Dooce, calls Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” then notes a few beats later in our conversation that “our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

Wow, outstanding, how do they manage that?

By talking about poop and spit up. And stomach viruses and washing-machine repairs. And home design, and high-strung dogs, and reality television, and sewer-line disasters, and chiropractor visits. And countless other banalities of one mother’s eclectic life that, for some reason, hundreds of thousands of strangers tune in, regularly, to read.

This suggests that, should we want to be more successful with this whole new media thingy, we should, as Oprah might put it, 'share a bit more of ourselves'.

Of course, there's a definite shortage of 'poop and spit up' in our four walls about which to opine.

Though, I have to say, keeping things that way definitely seems worth 30-40 grand a month.

Possibly more.

The Third Degree

I've just been informed today that an article of mine has made an appearance in an 'advance access' online version. It derives from a project I've been working on about the media and concerns about police powers in 1920s Britain. I'm quite pleased with it (for a change...) and it's been very enjoyable to research and write.

As it will be, I hope, for you to read.

The abstract:

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase ‘the third degree’—imported from America—came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The wartime growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the ‘liberty of the subject’, and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring ‘third-degree’ interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough of an outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928–29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police, which receded and did not reach a similar level until the late 1950s.

The article: full-text; PDF. 

(For those of you interested in such things: when the published, paginated version appears, the links will, I am informed, be updated.)

All the news that fits

And while we're on the topic of the press: a few comments on the Daily Herald's move in the 1920s away from featuring only serious news toward a certain 'frivolity':

On 20 December 1929, it might have been expected to lead on rural council attacks on Neville Chamberlain’s poor law policy. Instead the main headline was ‘Hunchback shot dead in billiard saloon’; undoubtedly the closest the Herald ever came to the New York Post’s immortal ‘Headless man in topless bar’.

Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus: The Daily Herald and the Left (London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 133.

A quick check shows that the Post's headline was actually 'Headless Body in Topless Bar' (15 April 1983).

Either way, it's a classic.

[UPDATE]: Looking through the World's Pictorial News -- a paper that definitely focused on the sensational and bizarre -- it also appears that the hunchback-in-the-billiard-hall case occurred in October 1928 rather than December 1929. (Unless, of course, there was another hunchback killed in another billiard hall. But that seems a bit unlikely.)

The story in brief: 'Entering a Manchester billiards hall, a bookmaker's clerk shot a man dead and wounded another. Then dashing out of the saloon he made his escape in a motor-car. He was traced to his home by two detectives, whom he held up with two revolvers and then shot himself dead in his own bedroom.'

Man: drama.

The WPN, in any case, definitely had nothing to say about Chamberlain's poor law policy. Whenever that was released...

Friday horror

Loyal (and sympathetic) readers out there might have been wondering why a person like myself me would be so acerbic angry, bitter and enraged, when clearly I ought to be happy as Larry?

It's Zolaesque aesthetics of my early media training in the 1970s, stupid!

The disturbing evidence:



Die Sendung mit der Maus (German children's programme), 1972. No joking - this was shown on a Sunday morning on TV.

For children.

Small wonder that the more sensitive of our students find me a tad sarcastic. This is the kind of realist fodder that forever makes you immune to Prinzessin Lillifee and adolescent Vampire kitsch.

Meat.

Bone meal.

Absurdity of the day

I spent a good part of my working day today at the dentist's. Bloody inlay my old quack apparently fucked up needs replacing - and a vicious, painful and time-consuming business this is.

Anyway: they have a new trick at my dentist's. Instead of letting me while away the seven minutes or so until the anaesthetic kicks in (and Doc can start wielding his manifold drill bits) with an extended meditation on the "Doors of Tuscany" poster opposite the torture chair (all German dentists have at least one of those posters in their establishments - it's a law), the assistant firmly pressed a remote control in my hand and told me to watch some TV via the computer.

I was verily flummoxed by this act, especially since as far as I am concerned, there is no need for this kind of, er, service. I can spend five minutes totally unentertained and not feel bored. I could have taken Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare out of my bag and read a couple of pages. I could have looked at the cherry tree outside the window or watched the cloud formations drift in over the Hunsrück. I could have contemplated the unnatural sensation of feeling half of your face go numb and explored the accompanying sense of unease and latent fear.

Is it safe?

But you know what the worst thing was? I did as I was told! Patient patient that I am I obediently flicked through the channels - because that was what I was asked to do, right? Though I am proud to say that after one round through 24 or so programmes of extortionate tele-shopping and sanctimonious CNN-style reportage I was bored enough to switch back to the silent screen-saver and returned to the blooming Tuscan doors.

Still, what a weird way to start the weekend ....

Nobody does it better

When it's not warning Britons about the threats to their lives and liberties posed by foreigners, Eurocrats, feminists, and recycling, the Daily Mail is a very enjoyable paper indeed.

Why, just today, you could choose among the following fascinating stories.

'The incredible moment Sky TV presenter Kay Burley grabbed a rival by the throat and pinned her to a wall'

'The bikini-clad Cambridge student arrested for attacking spectator at jelly-wrestling match'

'It's 3.30am and Amanda Holden is still clubbing in her Ascot glad rags'

And the especially mysterious:

'Quirky Cameron Diaz reveals her unusually bumpy elbow'

I, for one, ladies and gentlemen, feel richly entertained.

Media glitch of the day

WW II-infatuated Brits (with a smattering of German) might like this one: During the Monday match between Austria and Germany, Swiss TV subtitled the German national anthem with the words from the wrong stanza.

Well you know which one. The one we don't sing. The one about Adige, Meuse and Neman.

The TV-station is apologetic and blames this faux-pas on two "young colleagues" who had researched the lyrics in the internet and copied the wrong stanza.

They were given a good talking-to.

We are grateful for this piece of effective authoritarianism (running smoothly like a Swiss watch?).

But where the heck have they been spending their lives? Britain?

Feel the Liebe

This week in the 'I wasn't expecting that' file: Germany topped a recent poll as the world's most popular nation.

As reported by Der Spiegel:

According to a new BBC World Service survey of international opinion, Germany is held in higher regard than any other large country when it comes to influencing global politics.

According to the survey which was carried out in 34 countries, the global view of Germany's influence is predominantly positive. On average, 56 percent of people questioned had a positive opinion of Germany, compared to only 18 percent who did not.

A more detailed version of the report itself is available here (pdf) which provides information on the world's perceptions of several countries (including Israel, Russia and the US).

German Joys provides some analysis:

A few longer-term factors come to mind, in no particular order. First, Germany's deeply integrated into the EU and no longer presents any military threat to anyone. Second, Germany gives a pretty significant amount of foreign aid (this explains a lot of Japan's popularity as well). Third, the German diplomats I know personally tend to be smart, well-trained, and well-disciplined. They are actually diplomatic. They keep a low profile and talk about reconciliation, compromise, mutual interests, peaceful means, etc. Fourth, German leaders are routinely seen on the international stage taking responsibility and sincerely apologizing for their country's past misdeeds. Fifth, Germans are renowned for being the least nationalistic large nation there is. Sixth, aside from the beer-swilling package tourists, Germans abroad generally leave a good impression. Some of the phrases I've heard: "diligent", "polite", "speak good English", "diplomatic", "don't ask awkward questions", "seemed interested in our local culture", "ate the local food."

These are all part of it, sure.

But it may be that one powerful factor has been overlooked.

(More info: German/English.)

Atheist Field Day

Ok, ok -- I admit it. I don't really have that much to say, I only wanted to write that title. Well, and draw your attention to some of the issues that us poor Germans are told to worry about by the media. And a nice little basket of eggs it has become.

There is, first of all, the outcry by German politicians and bishops about the Hollywood blockbusters shown by private TV channels this Easter (Die Hard (1-3, too!), King Kong and Highlander).

Now there's a few people with nothing else to do .... Shouldn't they be in church anyway? Like you, dear visitor???

Second, the prohibition of the sale of condoms in a chemist's in the sleepy (but staunchly Catholic) town of Fulda in Hesse. The snag: the building that houses said chemist is owned by the Catholic church -- and condoms, as we all know, are the devil's work.

Fulda, one must say, has a reputation for harbouring silly ideas.

This is a doddle, however, compared to the most recent British terror: the fear of Nazi racoons. The sun has it's own characteristic view of the matter. I really and truly love that famous British humour ....

Less cuddly but chillingly beautiful are the oversized creatures discovered in the Antarctic. But beware ... giant Nazi starfish out on a slippery blitzkrieg -- and saluting, too. Next step: Polar Bears that look like Hitler.

For the more arty ones amongst you, a nasty review of Thomas Ostermeier's Mark Ravenhill/Martin Crimp double feature at the Berlin Schaubühne. Here's the trailer (yes -- these days theatre goes movie):




I reckon I gave up on "In-Yer-Face-Theater" after voluntarily exposing myself to Irvine Welsh's totally forgettable play You'll Have Had Your Hole in Leeds in 1998. Though I quite liked Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted. Well, it had Ulrich Mühe in it ....

Finally, in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, John R. Searle seems to get evolution completely wrong.

Happy egg-hunting everyone!

History Fortnight

If I weren't a halfway rational person, I would suspect an extraterrestrial conspiracy behind the unusual interest in German historical topics over the past two weeks. This is not to say that Germans are not interested in history -- it's only the Brits who think they need to give us private tuition in WWII by way of a cheap excuse to indulge their own fetish for black leather and heel clicking -- but this has been a particularly fertile period for hobby historians.

At the same time as we are kindly informed by the British press that our view of the French occupation is going to be radically altered thanks to 'Allo 'Allo, last week also saw the release of Dennis Gansel's German film version of Morton Rhue's novel -- based on the notorious behaviourist experiment at an American high school -- The Wave. For an article, in German, see here. Here is the trailer:



The film did not make British headlines (at least none that I came across), which is astounding, given its investigation into Nazi psychology, but then it might be that it is not sexy enough (and the main actor has teeth that would do any NHS-dentist proud).

A sexier brand of heroism is provided by Nikolai Müllerschön's Red Baron biopic which, as Mr Paterson at the Independent points out with unusual perceptiveness, might please the Brits more than the Germans -- most of whom might not even know who von Richthofen was. The trailer is here:



To keep with the topic of flying heroes, it appears that the riddle around Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's death has finally been solved. The wreckage of his plane was discovered in 2004 off the coast of Marseille, and now Horst Rippert, an 88-year old former fighter pilot, admits that it was probably he who shot down Exupéry during a reconnaissance mission. Apparently, Exupéry was his favourite author and personal hero, and Rippert -- who later on became a sports journalist for German TV -- asserts that he would have never shot the plane down had he known who was flying it.

The interesting punchline for Germans of Generation Golf and older: Rippert is the brother of Ivan Rebroff, a talented faux-Russian singer who in the 1970s landed hits with Russian folk classics such as "Kalinka." You want to see?



Rebroff died a few weeks ago. R.I.P. and dasvedanya.

And in the "non-history department" there is a Gazprom-sponsored exhibition about German-Russian relations during the Holy Alliance. Apparently, the organisers take the word "holy" a tad too seriously, forgetting about the injustice committed in the name of this thoroughly calculating bit of Realpolitik.

There's a ray of hope, however: Joachim C. Fest's autobiography is no. 10 in the German paperback charts. Fest, the most prominent German historian of Nazi Germany, came from an upright Catholic family who staunchly resisted being absorbed by Nazi Gleichschaltung.

Maybe we don't need to learn our history through 'Allo 'Allo after all.

Bodies that matter

Since there are people out there who seem to fret about the rapid decline in quality of my reading matter, here a brief missive of reassurance. Fear not -- help is at hand and good times just around the corner (pending NHS decisions)!

Thanks to -- dare I say it? -- The Mail, I know that with the aid of a simple kidney transplant I will be returned to the world of intellectual thought from which I stray so peevishly and with such insistence.

Behold, the miraculous story of Cheryl from Preston, who after having a kidney transplant "ditched the lowbrow novels" and turned to "documentaries on Egyptology," Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It's a pity, though, that as yet this change in personality has not had an impact on the way Cheryl -- who says: "I totally respect the family which gave me this kidney" -- speaks. Now just where exactly in Pride and Prejudice did she find this unpleasant Americanism, I wonder?

Just to, like, totally reacclimatise myself with highbrow thought, I delved into some recent Judith Butler this afternoon -- you want to be prepared when the big personality change comes:

If one wants to begin with most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. Since, it seems clear that one cannot reference "this time" without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of what time this is. So if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about what time it is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try and consider some of these major issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But my suggestion here is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time (In: The British Journal of Sociology 59.1 [2008]: 1).

As no clock in this house shows the same time, I totally know what she means.

Breakfast Reading

Waking up to a bouquet of articles (at The Independent, The New York Times and The Telegraph) about fraudulent "misery memoirs", I feel prompted to cancel the plans I had for the morning and immediately put finger to keyboard.

The NYT discusses Love and Consequences by "Margaret B. Jones," which the author claimed to be a truthful account of her upbringing as a foster child in LA gangland. As was discovered a couple of days ago, the book was actually composed by one Margaret Seltzer, a young woman from a prosperous LA suburb apparently blessed with an imagination so wild it borders on the delusional.

The 'graph article mentions Jones'/Seltzer's book in connection with a comparable UK case: Kathy O'Beirne's Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries (aka Don't Ever Tell in Britain). An immediate best seller on publication in 2005, O'Beirne's account of the abuse she had suffered for years in the Magdalene home of Our Lady of Charity of High Park has now been exposed as a fraud by journalist Herman Kelly. Kelly's research, the results of which have become Kathy's Real Story, has uncovered, among other things, that there are no records of O'Beirne ever being in the home in question.

The articles bring to mind Germany's own literary scandal of this ilk, Feuerherz, an "autobiographical" account by Senahit Mehari, an Eritrean-born German pop star, whose claims to have been a child soldier are being seriously questioned as possible distortions of historical facts (including her life story). The author has admitted inventing key details of her book -- though this did not prevent the release of a film loosely based on it.

Given Homo sapiens' continuing fascination with confessing and "witnessing", the success of this type of text does not come as a surprise. There's a long tradition of "true" tales in the tradition of the Puritan spiritual autobiography, from Defoe's criminal Moll Flanders via Hogg's vicious antinomian Wringhim in Confessions of a Justified Sinner to McEwan's obnoxious Briony in Atonement (a prudish pubescent Puritan if ever there was one). The enduring popularity of confessional literature suggests that there is good reason to think of these texts in light of the social function of confession as a ritual whereby a sinner begs for reintegration into her or his community (even if the last two cases cast serious doubt over the success of this kind of reintegration).

But at least with Defoe, Hogg and McEwan, we know that we are dealing with fiction. In fact, Defoe's claim the his account of Moll Flanders is "truthful" -- established through the introduction of an intercepting editorial voice -- served as a defence against contemporary suspicions regarding fictional literature. He disguised his novels as confessions, because fiction qua fiction was then still considered by many a sinful waste of time.

While the current spate of what is sometimes disparagingly referred to as "misery lit" is part of this tradition of fiction as confession, it is also more troubling precisely because the authors of these allegedly non-fictional accounts deliberately set out to deceive their readers -- who themselves are only too happy to be taken in.

Granted, such sorrowful texts (and their current ubiquity and historical longevity) seem to testify to an apparently ingrained human sense of compassion. This might at first sight seem a good thing. But in manipulating readers' compassionate responses, misery literature also confirms Karen Halttunen's suspicion that a presumably humanitarian fascination with the suffering of others amounts to little more than a "pornography of pain".

"The truth" is far from irrelevant to this matter: the emotional punch readers experience when confronted with accounts of genuine suffering is far greater than that obtained through fiction. And it is this "punchiness" that makes misery lit so enormously marketable.

Which brings us to the other side of the coin. If the confession is a communal ritual in which the confessor begs for reintegration, then he or she too benefits from it. Michel Foucault makes that point when he calls the confession "a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement" (The History of Sexuality I, p.61). The confessor, precisely in affirming social power by participating in this communal ritual, asserts her or his identity as a person who deserves to be heard.

Apart feeding individual vanity, however, there are more down-to-earth benefits at stake in misery-lit. As the author of the Telegraph article astutely points out: misery lit is a neat little money spinner. "Inspirational memoirs," which differ on in degree from tell-all magazines for middle England's bored housewives, might make up as much as 9% of Britain's book market.

So why has other people's misery become such big business? One of the biggest factors is the impact of the rise of the supermarket: eight out of 10 misery memoirs are bought at the checkout, mostly by women (who make up 85 per cent of the market) who would not visit a bookshop but buy "true life" magazines such as Pick Me Up or Chat, which feature stories about abusive fathers, cheating husbands and distasteful diseases.

So, apart from being self-centred and egotistic, misery-lit is the soppily self-indulgent flip side of a culture dominated by the fantasy of the quick buck. In a world of the sub-mediocre, where people without talent, intelligence, charm or skills can become media superheroes, confession promises to be a route to the top (and dovetails neatly not only with a quasi democratic rags-to-riches fantasy, but also a more esoteric demand for "authenticity"). The X-factor and Oprah are both variations on that theme. In this climate, misery lit -- both of the truthful or deceitful variety -- was an accident waiting to happen.

Sadly, though not unpredictably, too many academics in search of an as yet unoccupied ecological niche have jumped on this cultural bandwagon. This is not to deny the reality of trauma (though I'm not so sure about therapeutic hopes for "closure" deriving from this reality). However, much of "trauma studies" -- especially in humanities departments -- is not only solipsistic and self-centred, but actually harmful to the understanding and treatment of truly traumatised people.

More disturbingly, there is a political angle to all this. Tales of personal suffering such as those mentioned here are often sold as having political relevance. Now. some of them might actually have this relevance. However, as the author of an article in die Zeit about the scandal surrounding Mehari's Feuerherz rightly points out, some tales of personal suffering might actually distract from or even undermine the political debates in which they claim to participate.

Another article you needn't read ('cos I have done it for you)

Die Zeit has an utterly negligible article on Charlotte Roche, whom most of you probably haven't heard of until now. Here in Germany, though, Charlotte Roche is quite the media darling. Born in Britain not so very long ago, she moved to Germany as a child, which was probably a good thing, too -- who knows, had she stayed in binge country she might have gone the way that all photogenic it-girls with sleek shiny hair seem to go there and ended up spending her days staggering from pub to club in a state of inebriation with her skirt hitched up and her long tresses in tatters (with apologies to Francis S., who is in for another shock).

In a relatively civilised country like ours, she had do something with her life -- such as pretend to be a musician and an artist, work for VIVA (Germany's answer to MTV) and other TV-stations, become a cameo actress on TV and in pop videos, give readings of other peoples' books and mildly obscene doctoral dissertations and pocket not only neat sums of money but also prestigious media awards for her manifold achievements.

Liberal intellectuals loooove Charlotte, finding her sassy, street-wise and subtly feminist. Roche herself claims a certain affinity with old-school feminists like Alice Schwarzer -- Germany's own Germaine Greer -- though she also thinks that feminism has moved on in the past years. To make this point, she takes every opportunity she gets to tell the world that she is into S&M.

Now, this exhibitionist desire has made it into a full-length book with a weighty title: Feuchtgebiete ("Wetlands") .

Oooo -- naughty, naughty. Yes, the book is porn, and apparently so hot that the first publisher decided to drop it like the proverbial potato. In no time at all a new one was found so that Roche could blurt her liberationist message. For pornography, according to Roche, is one way of stepping out of the alleged speechlessness afflicting women when it comes to their sexuality:

Women have no language for their desire .... When it comes to their bodies, women are uptight. Women don't even have sexual fantasies of their own.

So, feminism has moved on, has it? How come it seems to be repeating itself?

I'm seriously tired of having to go through the same kind of subversion-through-pornography rigmarole every ten years or so. Not only have I had enough of hearing about the famous feminine speechlessness (Have you ever shared a train compartment with an all-female bowling-club drenched in prosecco? No bloody speechlessness there, I can tell you), I'm also tired of the truly daft suggestion that pornography of all things should be the means through which women can gab themselves to freedom (NB: Not all speech is good or relevant!).

Now, I'm not suggesting à la MacKinnon, that porn is merely the instrument of patriarchy's plot against women. It's just that I don't believe that "chick porn" can really change matters. If right thinking, feminist pornography hinges on post-structuralism's neo-Kantian claim that we can transcend the physical shackles that tie us down by engaging in kinky fantasies, it is just as silly as ordinary pornography, be it of the common or the artsy style. If it has anything more relevant to say, then it might suggest, with de Sade, that there is no way that we will escape the physical realities of life.

As Angela Carter wrote in 1979 about de Sade's The Hundred and Twenty Days at Sodom:

The Chateau of Silling, the imitation Sodom, is utterly impregnable and the paths that brought the victims there have been destroyed behind them. The victims have been erased from the world and now live, their own ghosts although they are not yet dead, only awaiting death, in a world where the function of their own flesh is to reveal to them the gratuitous inevitablity of pain, to demonstrate the shocking tragedy of mortality itself, that all flesh may be transformed, at any moment, to meat.

In summary, then, de Sade's message is bleak: "The primal condition of man cannot be modified in any way; it is, eat or be eaten." This insight is the price of the libertine's self-assertive debauchery, which rests on the assumption that others are, and can at all times be reduced to, mere meat.

This is a dire insight indeed -- though I don't think (I don't hope!) that this is what pleasure-seeking Ms Roche had in the damp nether regions of her mind. Let's hope her pornography is of the silly variety -- and not bother to buy the book!