ABSTRACT
In 1956, Karl Saller, the director of the Anthropological Institute in Munich, complained about the ‘eroticisation and hence sexualisation of public life, especially in towns’. He referred to the ‘poisons of civilisation’, such as radio, television and cinema, and especially ‘the excessive and shameless advertising’ that, he claimed, was causing moral decline and an individualism in which sexuality lost ‘its population-related biological and natural purpose for the future of mankind’.1 This type of complaint was typical of the conservative cultural climate of the 1950’s in West Germany. Thus, the fiction film, The Sinner (Die Sünderin, West Germany, 1950) was frequently cited by conservative and catholic politicians in their campaign to promote more selfcensorship by the film industry and to introduce new regulatory legislation (the Jugendschutzgesetz) in the early 1950s for the protection of the young.2 In contrast, when a decade later, after the infamous fiction film Silence (Das Schweigen, Sweden, 1963) had been released in the Federal Republic, conservative members of parliament attempted, with their ‘Initiative for a Clean Screen’, to re-tighten what they perceived to be the slackened screws of cultural censorship, their efforts proved abortive.3 In this respect, it is arguable that the mid-1960s represented a watershed in the social and media politics of youth sexuality in West Germany. In many ways, this shift was paralleled by shifts in the provision and content
of sex education within the West German educational system. In the 1950s, apart from some cities such as Hamburg and Berlin, where the educational authorities had set guidelines for sex education as part of the regular school programme, hardly any formal sex education was taking place in the schools.4
All other school authorities had refused to address an issue considered to be the privilege and duty of parents. Where sex education did take place, it was strongly informed by Christian and conservative values and by the ideal of chastity before marriage as a preparation for family life and parenthood.5
