Stalags, a documentary film about Israeli Nazi porn paperbacks of the same name, is exposing audiences in North America to one of history’s most bizarre literary genres. The film asks probing questions about post-Holocaust Jewish identity and sexuality, in an attempt to explain why Israeli teens had an irresistible infatuation with busty blonde Nazis.
Read under the table by a generation of pubescent Israelis, often the children of survivors, the Stalags were named for the World War II prisoner-of-war camps in which they were set. The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.
After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum. (New York Times)
Salon.com has an interesting review of the film, which is not surprisingly gathering mixed reviews.
Stalags is screening in New York City until next week.
