Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

“Voluptuous Panic is simultaneously appalling and thrilling, repellent and seductive, grotesque and gorgeous—not a typical coffee table book. It would go better with absinthe drunk from a human skull.”—Gary Meyer, Clean Sheets

When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings. Anticipating the expanded edition, Feral House placed Voluptuous Panic out of print, and for the past year buyers paid as much as $460 to online dealers for a used copy.

This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring hip clubgoers, filmmakers, gay historians, graphic designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.

Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter, “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” The deluxe hardcover edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin Fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO Secret Society, and sex crime (“the Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”).

Mel Gordon is professor of Theater at University of California, Berkeley, and also the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House), and The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (DaCapo).