DW: East Germany's Fascination with Flesh Gets More Exposure

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East Germany's Fascination with Flesh Gets More Exposure

A new book detailing East Germany's passion for nudity is set to be launched in typically candid style just weeks after a documentary exposed the communist regime's secret porn industry. If selling a book with the recollections -- and photographs -- of nudist holidaymakers in East Germany wasn't enough to cause a stir, bookshop owner Helmut Maass intends to capitalize on the flesh angle of the new tome by promoting it with a reading to a naked audience. The book, which celebrates East Germany's renowned "Freikoerperkultur" [FKK], draws on the era before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Its publishers, Berlin-based Eulenspiegel, are enthusiastic about the publicity stunt.

Spiegel On-Line: The Mini-Penis Scandal: US Publisher Turns away from German Cartoon Nudity - by Franziska Bossy and Elke Schmitter

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The Mini-Penis Scandal: US Publisher Turns away from German Cartoon Nudity - by Franziska Bossy and Elke Schmitte

The drawings are harmless really. But a US publisher has decided not to publish a series by children's book author Rotraut Susanne Berner. The problem? Cartoon breasts and a half-millimeter-long willy.The drawings are harmless really. But a US publisher has decided not to publish a series by children's book author Rotraut Susanne Berner. The problem? Cartoon breasts and a half-millimeter-long willy.

American kiddies, obviously, could never be expected to handle such a depiction of the human body. The US publisher, somewhat awkwardly, asked if they could be removed."It was really a sensation," Berner told SPIEGEL ONLINE. At first. As it turned out, there were a couple of changes that had to be made before the books could be unleashed on the America public. First off, smokers had to be removed from the illustrations. But that wasn't all. One image shows a scene from an art gallery -- and for realism's sake, there is a cartoonish nude hanging on the wall along with a tiny, seven-millimeter-tall statue of a naked man on a pedestal.