Selling Sexual Pleasure in 1930s Germany

Abstract

Historians have long recognized that in the immediate post-war period, most Germans had fond memories of the years 1933 to 1939. It is easy to dismiss these happy memories as a romanticization of life in the eye of the storm — the fleeting calm in an era of devastation.1 But scholars have begun to take seriously the possibility that, at least for ‘racially valuable’ Germans, these years marked a period of considerable enjoyment and pleasure. In this chapter I examine how advertisers and some representatives of state authority negotiated competing, and sometimes conflicting, priorities when it came to channelling, creating and responding to individual consumer desires. In particular, I focus on the ways in which sexual pleasure was presented in print advertisements and product literature for a popular anti-impotence treatment, ‘Titus Pearls’. I argue that there were significant changes to the way sexual pleasure was pictured and discussed by the product’s manufacturer, and by German advertisers more generally, after 1933. In the last years of the Weimar Republic, sexual pleasure was promoted by the company as essential to the companionate marriage and the individual satisfaction of both spouses. While the company continued its pro-sex marketing after 1933, promotional literature for Titus Pearls in the Nazi era emphasized the role of sex as key to maintaining and regaining a more holistic (spiritual and physical) vision of pleasure for the male alone. This shift, I will argue, was the outcome of a large constellation of forces, including international trends in biomedical research on sexual dysfunction, national socialist ideals concerning gender, individual pleasure and consumption, and corporate interests that aimed to meet consumer desires and remain viable in the new Nazi marketplace.