Pornography in Weimar Germany

Une scène du tout premier épisode

In one of the first sequences of the Babylon Berlin series, Gereon Rath, of the Berlin police, and his colleague Bruno Wolter burst into a photography workshop where a porn movie is being shot, with characters not usually met in such a context: Jesus, the Virgin, the Archangel Gabriel ... A remark of the director, who takes his "artistic" work seriously, is worth quoting :  "Frieda you are supposed to be receiving the Redeemer, but I cannot see that in your acting ... "

The police proceeds to arrest him, but the man invokes article 118. This article of the constitution of Weimar, did indeed forbid the censorship. Except that, in 1920, a Law of the Cinema was approved, which among other provisions, made pornographic films illegal. So, the director is arrested. It is, btw, also this law of 1920 that would be later used by the Nazi regime to take control of the film industry.
In the wake of the sexual liberation of the 1920s, more and more photo studios began to produce so-called Stag-Films, short films that were subsequently exhibited in private performances or in brothels. Unlike French porn movies of the same period, German productions were more focused on fetishism.
On the other hand, printed matter with pornographic content, unlike films, was tolerated to a certain extent.

Above, two pages of DasKriminal-Magazin from September 1930, about the police’s "fight against pornography".