Do Communists Have Better Sex?

by André Meier, Director
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2007
DVD, 52 mins., col.
Sales, $390; rental (VHS),$125
Distributor’s website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University


This reviewer had some high school friends from Germany. The girl was tall, lithe, and sunbathed topless in the family garden. Her brother was tall, intense and began early the dance studies that brought him professional success. And they had a lot of lovers and dates. The joke going around was that these young Prometheans had personally brought sex--from Europe--to our otherwise clueless Midwestern American town. I thought of them warmly when I read the title of this film.

The production contrasts sexual attitudes in East and West Germany, and makes use of sex education films from government archives and numerous television programs. All of these carnally serious matters are punctuated with jolly little square-headed cartoons by Motionworks. The film opens with a montage of uniformed youth blowing trumpets and carrying flags, mass athletic displays and nude beaches, plus strip clubs and porn that viewers of a certain age associate with the Beatles' days on Hamburg's Reeperbahn. We are introduced to historians Dagmar Herzog and Gisela Staupe, sex researcher Kurt Starke and "cultural academic" Dietrich Mühlberg. All develop the case that when there were two Germanies, the Eastern half was freer in its attitudes towards sex, and its women probably more satisfied.

After the devastation of World War Two and the partition of the nation, women in the East were directed to focus upon employment, which included factory work and bricklaying, and in the West to focus upon the domestic sphere of the home. Whereas a West German schoolteacher in the 1960s was taken to court by a parent for answering his eight-year-old students' questions about where babies come from, East Germany conscientiously promoted sex education. There was no prohibition against teenage sex, though it was intended to lead to marriage and the parents were informed if teachers were aware it was occurring. Childbearing was encouraged in young married women, hoping to be done with it before age 25.

Abortion was legalized in East Germany, with little debate, the day after International Women's Day in 1972. When the West discovered sexual frankness, it was in the form of Oswald Kolte's well-lit sex ed films for adults. We are shown answers to questions about sexuality put to young Christians and fairly conservative trade unionists. One young woman says women on the pill "can order their coffins at age thirty". Communal sexual experiments remained a phenomenon of urban leftists, yet in rural areas unmarried couples were beginning to live together too.

Kurt Starke explains that in the socialist East, there was no “cult of the orgasm” because socialist society was noncompetitive. Dagmar Herzog opines that generally sex couldn't be bought in the East, so instead it was experienced as beautiful, and nudism was a family experience. Yet East Germans showed a great interest in the West's erotica when it began to dribble or spurt across the border. One skeptic claims this interest "in porn will calm down later" as he shops for it. A woman, evidently in the West, reads a thankful letter for a delivery of sex toys and catalogs from an Easterner who offers to exchange fresh picked asparagus for future shipments. We see a fashion show, with hip-shaking and late-eighties' styles, and the camera lingers on one mixed-race model.

It soon cuts to a scene (from a dramatic movie or TV soap opera? It's unexplained) of a presumably post-coital conversation, where a woman says that sex between East and West is the forbidden fruit. Or perhaps sex in the East had the frisson of suspecting your partner to be a Stasi (secret police) agent, compiling the details of your caresses, spasms and gasps into a dossier. The documentary ends irresolutely, too quickly, after the Wall comes down (in the cartoon version, knocked down by nudists' beach balls), and hot Germans come together in celebration with beer and souvenir East German flags, as first portentous synthesizers then cheery oompah music plays beneath the credits.

Do Communists Have Better Sex? by André Meier doesn’t require a Gotterdammerung or even a Ride of the Valkyries at its conclusion. Yet nobody likes a sexual experience, even an informative documentary cinema one, to leave you unsatisfied. What is desired here? Perhaps a final summary from the four talking heads. Perhaps it needs some cogent quote on the German people, maybe from Goethe. His work included a novel of longing and desire The Sorrows of Young Werther and a system of color theory, which shows a temperament that was both romantic and scientific. You know, like German sex.