Lost pornographic novel thrills critics

A sprawling erotic novel written on the eve of World War II has been hailed as “the great German pornographic novel”.

The poet Rudolf Borchardt, born in 1877, wrote Weltpuff Berlin after moving to Tuscany in 1903.

A sprawling erotic fantasy written on the eve of the Second World War has been hailed as “the great German pornographic novel” after it was published this month against the wishes of the author’s son.

Weltpuff Berlin, which loosely means Berlin, Brothel of the World, describes the sexual adventures of Rudolf, 24, a philology student who is unleashed on the metropolis during the freewheeling first decade of the 20th century. It was composed on 300 densely packed pages of tiny handwriting by Rudolf Borchardt, a poet with a classically austere style who had moved to Tuscany in 1903.

Although his intricate and allusive writing means that he is not as widely read today as more famous authors from his period such as Thomas Mann and Alfred Doblin, he is recognised by scholars as one of the most sophisticated figures of his day. He died in 1945.

The novel was rediscovered by a scholar in 2011 and published despite the opposition of Borchardt’s youngest son, Cornelius.

One critic compared its importance in the world of literature to DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or the Marquis de Sade’s violently explicit works.

Martin Walser, one of Germany’s most prominent modern novelists, said that it made the memoirs of Casanova look “flat” and the works of Henry Miller, a notoriously frank and experimental American writer, seem “simple”.

Borchardt was a nostalgic writer with a deep devotion to the Greek and Roman classics and the European medieval tradition personified in poets such as Dante.

Born in the East Prussian city of Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad, in 1877, he studied philology in Berlin and Bonn before turning to poetry with the aim of provoking a “conservative revolution” that would revivify German culture.

His flourishing career as a public intellectual was thwarted by Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Borchardt, whose father was Jewish, was rounded up by the SS in 1944 and taken to a labour camp in Innsbruck. He was released soon after but died of heart failure early the next year.

Weltpuff Berlin is set in 1901, when its young hero is summoned away from his studies in Gottingen and imprisoned in Berlin by his father. Rudolf quickly escapes and embarks on a libertine tour of the city, having sex with up to six women a night. The novel features a priest and a bewilderingly expansive sexual vocabulary referred to by one Austrian critic as an “orgy of words”. At one point the protagonist’s penis is described as a “giant asparagus”.

Large sections of the text, which at 1,088 pages is nearly as long as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, are written in French, Latin and Greek.

The novel’s publication, announced this month at the Frankfurt book fair, was not universally well received. Kolja Mensing, a culture editor at the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, said that the book launch had been “a very, very embarrassing event” and a “#MeToo parody of the literary business”.

— The Times