In a story headlined Catholic Church Makes A Fortune In The German Porn Business, Worldcrunch condensed and simplified a sensationalistic story from the conservative German newspaper Die Welt that didn’t stop at throwing around accusations not just about porn, but about atheism, magic and Satanism.
I’m willing to bet that the only things most porn-savvy Americans know about German porn, they got from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, so suggesting that German porn promotes Satanism sounds reasonable to many of my friends. (And incidentally, there’s no such phenomenon of German “Scheisse” porn.) What’s more, some secular, agnostic or atheist folks I know are ready at the drop of a hat to accuse Catholics of just about anything, so “The Catholic Church = Satanic Porn” seems like an easy sell.
But to my knowledge, hardcore video porn is still basically illegal in Germany, with the result that German producers like Marquis focus on fetish both because of personal interest and content restriction. And accusing the Catholic Church of being Satanic has a dubious right-wing history stretching well back into the past…especially in Germany. So what the hell is meant by a fortune in the German porn business?
The company Die Welt is talking about is called Weltbild, which means “world view.” Weltbild sells a huge variety of DVDs and general-interest books, controlling about 20% of the German book market. Weltbild is also, according to the article and Wikipedia, 100% owned by the German dioceses of the Catholic Church.
Individual dioceses — districts — within the Catholic Church often own their own properties, including businesses and real estate. A regional group of dioceses may go in together on investments. They have great leeway in purchasing and managing their businesses — it’s not all run top-down by the Vatican, believe it or not.
Anyway, one of Weltbild’s divisions is Blue Panther Books, which publishes what looks like some really great books (and on their website they sell even better ones):
The 2,500 erotic books in [Weltbild]’s] online catalogue, including those from Blue Panther Books, an erotic book publisher owned by Weltbild, are only one example. Their titles include: “Anwaltshure” (Lawyer’s Whore), “Vögelbar” (F—kable) and “Schlampen-Internat” (Sluts’ Boarding School).
The Church also owns a 50% share in publishing company Droemer Knaur which produces pornographic books, and so indirectly is also a publisher of pornographic material, titles including “Nimm mich hier und nimm mich jetzt!” (Take Me Here, Take Me Now!), and “Sag Luder zu mir!” (Call Me Slut!).
[Link.]
The connection between the Catholic Church and Blue Panther was apparently kept discreet until Buchreport, a German book-industry newsletter, reported it last month. According to Die Welt, the German dioceses tried to sell Weltbild in 2008, but were unable to find a buyer because of the financial crash.
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of the terms “erotica” or “romance” when they’re used as euphemisms. I don’t dispute Die Welt calling erotic books “porn,” especially when they’re titled things like Lawyer’s Whore. But the headlines make it sound like we’re talking about video porn, which is far more salacious and outrageous than what we’re talking about, which are porn novels, something that is sold as romance in the U.S. and most other Western countries — and marketed not to men, as many anti-porn writers imply, but primarily to female readers. In fact, I believe that attackingBlue Panther’s flavor of erotic literature is, to my reading, laced not with a deep and revolting strain of anti-female sentiment.
What’s more, it turns out that:
For more than 10 years, a group of committed Catholics has been trying to point out what is going on to Church authorities, and they are outraged at the hypocrisy of the spokesman’s statement. In 2008, the group sent a 70-page document to all the bishops whose dioceses have shared ownership of Weltbild for 30 years, detailing evidence of the sale of questionable material.
[Link.]
So this appears to be a vendetta by a conservative German Catholic group — and among progressive Catholics in other parts of the world, German conservative Catholics are thought to be some of the most conservative around. Don’t forget that the super-conservative Pope Benedict is German (and a former archbishop.)
Die Welt, incidentally, is a very conservative newspaper, so the fact that they go flipping out about this is not surprising. What’s so great about it is that the accusations they make are refreshingly predictable and remarkably easy to translate, even for someone like me who barely reads German.
The German anti-porn group in question is called Katholisches! Weltbild or “Catholic! Worldview” to include the weird exclamation point, and their report sounds like a doozy.
If you speak German, you can perhaps make head or tail of the German article in Die Welt, but I warn you that the Google Translate version is largely incoherent — made all the much more hilarious because German nouns are capitalized…making it impossible for Google Translate to differentiate between Weltbild (the company) and “worldview” (the thing). The result is something like this:
The Catholic Church is in the “world view” trap, because it has invested hundreds of millions of Euros in the Augsburg Publishing House, which operates shops of which, says Pope Benedict, they were among the goods of the Church, her real estate darkened.
I think Her Real Estate Darkened is going to be the title of my next Erotischer Roman (erotic novel). But the article gets even more extreme. Using my meager German skills combined with Google, I actually get much more outrageous stuff from the original article than the stuff Worldcrunch bothered with:
The [Katholisches! Weltbild report] been demonstrated as an example that Weltbild has earned a lot of money on the spread of sex books, glorification of violence, esotericism, magic and Satanism.
Satanism? That’s what they said, Satanism. And yes, I looked for Satanic porn from Blue Panther, but I was unsuccessful in finding any.
It’s not a language barrier, either, since “Satanische” is, predictably enough, “Satanic,” and neither search terms gets me any black masses performed in explicitly erotic novels. Wanna know what they’re talking about? (The following inexact translation from the Die Welt article is mine):
[Weltbild] also offers such anti-clerical writings as the books of atheist Richard Dawkins…and anti-church literature without even a useful filter. Furthermore, esotericism, astrology, and violent and satanic media are listed in the online catalog.
What Katholisches! Weltbild and Die Welt have done is to conflate two things — the general-interest arm of Weltbild, which publishes people like Dawkins, garden-variety mainstream astrology and other kinds of esoteric books — and Blue Panther, which publishes erotica. Both are exceedingly mainstream, in Europe and elsewhere. From what I can tell, the Blue Panther books are pretty average top-shelf material, of exactly the sort that’s surely familiar to Tiny Nibbles readers.
Die Welt is mixing its objection to Blue Panther’s erotic titles with a generalized objection to the overall European move toward pluralism and secularism. The fact that Blue Panther’s books are mainstream in many Western nations is obvious. They’re also inoffensive to the vast majority of secular Europe’s citizens. But what’s more, the idea of mixing up hatred for atheist books and erotic publishing is patently absurd — it is, ultimately, an objection to every kind of mainstream publishing.
What’s more, accusing the Catholic Church of supporting Satanism is a familiar element in fanatic Anti-Catholic hate speech throughout the ages, sometimes from groups that claim to be Catholic, or reformed Catholics. I have no idea if the author of the article is Catholic, or if the group Katholisches! Weltbild is actually Catholic or not. But I’ll say that “Catholic! Worldview” certainly sounds to me like the title of a Chick Tract. It all looks kinda fishy.
None of that stops Die Welt from engaging in a standard-issue porn-hysteria technique: overstating the magnitude of erotic publishing compared to publishing overall, implying that there’s some mythically vast amount of profit associated with it — and then, with the same arguments, implying that reputable businesspeople won’t deal with erotic publishing. Here’s my translation of a strangely telling paragraph:
A mail order business of this magnitude cannot filter out erotic books, CDs and DVDs without accepting substantial losses in sales. After all, “World View” today about 2,500 erotic titles in their online catalog….[Blue Panther] the publisher was not even represented this year at the Frankfurt Book Fair, because the organizer “could not offer a suitable stand” for a publishing company of its kind.
This sounds very familiar…it’s so similar to the recent anti-porn hysteria we’ve seen from North America and Australia. The porn business is huge…it’s monolithic…and there’s no way to stop it because its proprietors are making so much money. And they worship Satan!
The Satanism mix-up seems to be an innovation from Die Welt, but it’s an impressive one. The connection to the Catholic church is factual, but it’s obviously being exploited for sensationalism. Less obviously, there’s an entrenched anti-Catholic sentiment running through Die Welt’s article that should scare anyone who remembers how Catholics once got lumped in with certain other despised groups by certain of Germany’s arch-conservatives.
And to risk stating the obvious…the ludicrous stance of Die Welt is not just anti-porn and anti-sex…it’s anti-romance, anti-sex, anti-publishing, anti-Atheist, anti-pluralist and anti-just about everything. It doesn’t have to be anti-Catholic to be bigoted garbage…that’s just the icing on the cake.
I’ve never commented here, though I’ve read this blog for at least a few years now. I have nothing to add to the topic at hand- I just want to thank you. You could easily have parroted the ideas presented and thrown in a few “child molesting priests” jokes for the extra page views, but you didn’t. I can not tell you how much I appreciate that.
Being a pretty liberal German myself, I never would have thought I’d ever defend the conservative newspaper “Die Welt” – but alas, here I go, hopefully clearing some things up.
“Die Welt” didn’t author the article, but merely publish it. It was written by Bernhard Müller, who is the executive editor of the “PUR magazin”. In the article, he describes said magazine as “conservative” and “catholic with sympathy towards pope and church” which already is saying quite a lot, actually (the German Catholics being heard do tend to be some of the most conservative around). Pointing towards kath.net (which is what you would get if the Westboro Baptist Church were German and catholic) at the end of his article further implies that this is one very conservative man bitching about how a church-owned company is not adhering to what he thinks “catholic” ought to mean (I will use quotation marks when I use the term in Müller’s very conservative understanding).
However, the article does not ever imply that German porn promotes Satanism. The whole “spread of sex books, glorification of violence, esotericism, magic and Satanism” thing is just to illustrate how non-“catholic” the “Weltbild” company is by selling – in Müller’s own words – “media, that cannot be compatible with catholic faith” and “books, that mock every page of the catechism”. To him, the question is “money or morals?” and “Weltbild” sided with money, where they ought to have chosen “catholic” morals. The whole “credibility of the church” is at stake, because “priests are not living up to their personal responsibility” (of prohibiting “their” company from selling such non-“catholic” media) – yeah, he actually wrote that. Talk about laying it on thick.
The idea of mixing up hatred for atheist books and erotic publishing is not at all absurd if you look at it from his perspective – yes, it is an objection to every kind of mainstream publishing, but to him this ought to be a “catholic” company that doesn’t do such things, because they are incompatible with “catholic” faith.
And no, this whole thing doesn’t look even a tidbit fishy to me, but simply to be the German and catholic equivalent of American evangelicals like the aforementioned Westboro Baptist Church (my condolences, these guys are awful! Lucky for us Germans such lunatics don’t have nearly as much political power here).
Needless to say he is not at all implying that the catholic church supports satanism (well, most indirectly it actually does, by owning and financing “Weltbild” which sells books about it, but he does want this company to stop doing this) but concerned that a church-owned company sells media he deems unworthy of and even harmful to anything related to the catholic church.
So all together, I think you nailed it with classifying this whole story a vendetta by a conservative German Catholic group. Said group seems to have been ignored by the church (wise decision!), which upset them and lead Müller to write the article in “Die Welt”. He seems to be part of said group – in fact, I have little doubt from reading his article that he is a leading force behind the movement “Katholisches! Weltbild” (to which I unfortunately didn’t find any confirmation).
Müller is anti-Catholic the same way Fred Phelps is anti-Protestant – but luckily Müller has far, far less influence.
PS: Germans not only capitalize nouns, we also use very long and complicated sentences as well as lots and lots of commas.