''Endstufe'' ("final stage) is a 2004 novel by the German writer

Thor Kunkel Thor Kunkel, a German author, was born in Frankfurt am Main on 2 September 1963. Kunkel claims to have spent his youth associating with drug friends and American soldiers stationed in the then West Germany. In 1981, on a scholarship to the United S ...

. Set in a

hedonistic Hedonism refers to a family of theories, all of which have in common that pleasure plays a central role in them. ''Psychological'' or ''motivational hedonism'' claims that human behavior is determined by desires to increase pleasure and to decre ...

version of the

Third Reich Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

, it follows a biologist who works for the SS where he oversees the secret production of pornographic films.

Themes

According to Kunkel, his intention with the novel was to "penetrate the private" and "use pornography as a poetic metaphor to fully grasp the phenomenon of the Third Reich".

Reception

The novel immediately became controversial in Germany, when the publisher

Rowohlt Verlag Rowohlt Verlag is a German publishing house based in Hamburg, with offices in Reinbek and Berlin. It has been part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Group since 1982. The company was created in 1908 in Leipzig by Ernst Rowohlt. Divisions * Kinder * ...

cancelled its contract with Kunkel two months before the scheduled release. The editor Alexander Fest motivated this by accusing Kunkel of "self-indulgent amoralism". After the book had been published by Eichborn Verlag, it created a debate in German newspapers. ''Der Spiegel'' called the novel "pure revisionism" for its portrayal of NS Germany as a "leisure society", while the end of the novel gives a detailed portrayal of Allied rapes and brutality. ''Der Spiegel'' also criticised Kunkel for the fact that the novel is not about

the Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

and noted that the title, ''Endstufe'', also is the name of a far-right German rock band. Further, ''Der Spiegel'' published private e-mails from Kunkel's former publisher Ulrike Schieder who complained about the novel's portrayal of Allied soldiers as "bloodthirsty animals" and of Germans as victims. Kunkel dismissed the accusations as ridiculous, and accused his accusers of being upset only because the novel is "about the moral dimensions of everybody", in that it does not portray the sexual perversions of the Soviet and American armies as more righteous than those of the German side. He also argued that his critics did not understand his black humour, and that the book would have been uncontroversial in Britain or the United States, describing himself as an "

Anglophile An Anglophile is a person who admires or loves England, its people, its culture, its language, and/or its various accents. Etymology The word is derived from the Latin word ''Anglii'' and Ancient Greek word φίλος ''philos'', meaning "frien ...

German". An additional controversy surrounded Kunkel's claim that the novel was based on intense research about actual German pornography from the NS era. When this was questioned, Kunkel said that he had used what he called "intuitive research".

References

2004 German novels Alternate Nazi Germany novels German historical novels German-language novels Novels about pornography Novels by Thor Kunkel {{2000s-ah-novel-stub

Themes

Reception

See also

References