Free love and sex before marriage - in the 1960s the bedroom became political. In Hamburg, for example, the "St. Pauli Nachrichten" is fighting for a breath of fresh air in bed and for political change.
by Helene Heise
Free love, sexual revolution - these were the buzzwords of the 1968ers. In Hamburg, the political dimension of sexuality even got its own magazine:In 1968, the photographer Günter Zint founded the "St. Pauli Nachrichten". What was initially intended as a one-off fun sheet quickly became an educational blockbuster. For only three pennies there were naked facts, provocative headlines and weird stories.
Revolutionary spirit and red wine
The team led by Günter Zint and the publisher Helmut Rosenberg quickly attracted a group of young, up-and-coming journalists. Since 1969, they have included well-known names such as Stefan Aust, who later became Spiegel boss, publicist and provocateur Henryk M. Broder and the draftsman Uli Stein. In the NDR documentary "When the sexual revolution came to Hamburg", Günter Zint remembers the often anarchic editorial meetings:"We often made the newspaper with more red wine than printer's ink."
The editors wanted to ridicule the tabloid press with headlines like "Strauß came from the Vienna Woods, two hookers killed him" - the "Bild" newspaper was a declared opponent. However, the newspaper got its breakthrough with its classifieds section:in the "marriage market" under the heading "Be nice to each other" there were requests for sexual and emotional contacts of all kinds.
Media-effective process against the wild goings-on
Today, advertisements such as "26-year-old little devil is looking for players of both sexes for hell trips and devil games" are hardly offensive. But in the late 1960s, such advertisements were still enough to bring the publisher to court:"The prevailing case law says:all intercourse outside of marriage is fornication," the court reporter for the "Hamburger Abendblatt" quoted the judge in November 1969 in the trial against the "St. Pauli News".
Naked facts in the courtroom:At the first Hamburg trial against a student in 1968, her fellow students protested in a way that was provocative at the time.At the end of October, the public prosecutor's office had the newspaper's entire list of advertisers confiscated. After a week, lawyer Gisela Wild managed to get the boxes with the addresses back in the newspaper's basement, unopened. This made it clear, she exulted in an official statement at the time, that freedom of the press also applied to classified ads.
The political dimension of sexual liberation
As one of the few women associated with the "St.Pauli Nachrichten" - apart from the scantily clad models in the magazine - she also recalls the magazine as liberating:"Of course I was a bit indignant about what was in there, but I found it very funny I found that you could emancipate yourself with it and that's what I did:I sexually emancipated myself through the St. Pauli Nachrichten."
Horst Tomayer (left) and Stefan Aust wrote for the newspaper "Hein und Fietjes comment".In a television interview in 1969, Stefan Aust summed up the position of the "St. Pauli Nachrichten" in a formulation that was very typical of the time:"Above all, the federal auditors should deal with the connection between repressive sexual morality and an authoritarian state. If we, the ' St. Pauli Nachrichten', make our modest contribution to making sexuality a little more free, then of course that is an absolutely political act."
Years later, his colleague Henryk M. Broder summed it up in an interview:"We thought that if we only wrote the word 'fuck' often enough, then the foundations of society would collapse."
From revolutionary to men's magazine
By 1971, the newspaper had a circulation of up to 1.2 million at peak times, sometimes even appearing daily. But with the economic success, the orientation also changed, it became more and more a purely men's magazine, the political receded into the background. The history of the "St. Pauli Nachrichten" as a revolutionary cult newspaper came to an end when Günter Zint left the editorial office. Today there is another magazine with the same name - but it has nothing to do with politics anymore.