A raunchy best seller gets Germans talking

TEGERNHEIM, Germany: Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-18 audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best seller "Wetlands," by the television personality and author Charlotte Roche.

With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and private grooming habits of the novel's 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into a national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon's global bestseller list.

The book, which will be published next year in the United States, is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct, physical and psychological, of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel, and hard to describe in a family newspaper. If you are reading this over breakfast, stop eating for a moment.

"Wetlands" opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident with a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids, continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and - here is where the debate kicks in - just possibly female empowerment.

The subject has struck a nerve here, catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society.

With its female chancellor, Angela Merkel, and progressive reputation, Germany would hardly seem to be thirsting for such a discussion. Yet Germany has an old-fashioned tendency to expect women to choose between careers and motherhood, rather than trying to accommodate both.

There are also real gender-equality problems in the largest European economy. Of the 27 European Union members, Germany is tied with Slovakia as third-worst in the wage gap between men and women, with women earning 22 percent less, a figure surpassed only by Cyprus and Estonia.

And so the topic is being debated in every newspaper and magazine in Germany right now. Two more traditional, nonfiction books about young women, "New German Girls" and "We Alpha-Girls," have amplified the discussion.

And the provocative female rapper, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, and said she stands for "strong women, courage and sexuality," grabbed headlines when she accused Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch.

"I am what's in the book," the rapper, 27, whose real name is Reyhan Sahin, said in a telephone interview.

Germans have been accused, on occasion, of over-analyzing. Sometimes a funny, dirty book is just a funny, dirty book - but not this one, according to its author.

Roche, 30, has long identified herself as a feminist and, in a vein first explored in 1960s-era American feminism, describes the book as a cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women's world. Newspapers here have contrasted her unhygienic free-spirited fictional heroine to another, American-import model of womanhood: the German supermodel Heidi Klum's stable of plucked, pencil-thin models who reliably burst into tears in every episode of Klum's popular reality show, "Germany's Next Top Model."

But Roche told the audience here that her inspiration for the book came not from them but from the feminine-product aisle of her local store. Peeking out at the audience from under her dark-brown bangs, speaking in a childish voice that accentuates her transgressions against propriety, Roche explained, to howls of laughter, how the lemon-scented products called out to her in uncensored terms that she was, as the commercials put it, not so fresh, or at least not fresh enough.

"It's not feminist in a political sense, but instead feminism of the body, that has to do with anxiety and repression and the fear that you stink, and this for me is clearly feminist, that one builds confidence with your own body," Roche, the mother of a young daughter who is more serious in person than onstage, said last week in an interview after her reading here.

Roche's critics say that it is just a modern spin on not shaving your legs, this time for the genital-waxing generation. Meanwhile, sex sells, and always grabs the spotlight. As a result, a debate that might more profitably center on career counselors and day-care beds is instead mired in old questions about sexual liberation.

With this in mind, critics have asked what practical help a book like "Wetlands" could offer, and even whether by hyper-sexualizing the main character it represents an all-too-familiar commercial ploy rather than a step forward.

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