"It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket book called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land. So begins an article by Isabel Kershner in The New York Times (06 Sep 07).
The history of stalags is a fascinating waking life dream. "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."
The waking dream continues. "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."
These books served a collective need as fodder for sexual fantasies and all the complexities that they entail to stimulate imaginations and titillate. "The Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the Israeli society of the early 1960s, which was almost puritanical. They faded out almost as suddenly as they had appeared. Two years after the first edition was snatched up from kiosks around the central bus station in Tel Aviv, an Israeli court found the publishers guilty of disseminating pornography."
[A new, Israeli] "60-minute documentary puts the Stalags under a spotlight for the first time and exposes some uncomfortable truths. One is that the stalags were a distinctly Israeli genre, created by Israeli publishers and penned by Israeli authors, although they had masqueraded as translations from English and were written in the first person as if they were genuine memoirs".
As in the overlayered world of dreams, the appearance of stalags demonstrated to those with curious eyes some of the horrendous complexities of post-World-War-II Jewish and Israeli life. "Until the Eichmann trial began in 1961, the voices of the Holocaust had hardly been heard in Israel. The survivors sensed the ambivalence of the old-timers who blamed them for not having emigrated in time, and questioned what immoral deeds they might have done in order to stay alive."
How appropriate that an artistic dream that is pornographic became one of the first voices in Israel to talk about the pornography that the Second World War was for not only Jews, but all Europeans.