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Salesmen’s sex orgies find home in museum

Leipzig's Haus der Geschichte has included evidence from a case in which insurance salesmen were rewarded with an all-expenses paid sex trip to Budapest in an exhibition on changing sexual morals.

Published: 11 December 2014 15:11 CET
Salesmen's sex orgies find home in museum
Budapest's Gellert Baths are usually home to much more wholesome activities. Photo: DPA

The museum aims to show "deep changes in sexual morality and the interconnectedness of the sexes" since the Second World War, the museum said in a press release.

"We decided on [this case] to show that prostitution no longer belongs in the grimy corners of society," a museum spokeswoman told Handelsblatt on Thursday.

Among the exhibits will be evidence from a case against representatives for insurer Hamburg Mannheimer who won a 2007 contest for most policies sold.

They were treated to an open-air orgy in Budapest's Gellert Thermal Baths, where four-poster beds were set up and prostitutes identified with coloured armbands had their arms stamped after each customer they attended to.

"It was an absolute blast", the company newspaper reported at the time.

"In any case we haven't found anyone who was there who didn't want to go straight back."

Torsten Oletzky, chairman of parent company Ergo, saw things differently when details emerged.

The trip had been "unspeakable and inexcusable", he said at the time, and the company brought legal action against the organisers for breach of trust.

Such was the depth of the scandal that Hamburg-Mannheimer was dismantled and rebranded Ergo Pro.

Museum curators at the Haus der Geschichte (House of History) say that they want to educate the public about changes in sexual morality in the second half of the 20th Century.

In that time Germany has seen massive expansion of what can be shown on film, the legalization of abortion and homosexuality, and an increasing commercialization of sexuality and eroticism.

"This isn't primarily about private matters, but about ideas of social order and the way society sees itself," the museum's introduction to the exhibition reads.

Prostitution is a particularly hot topic, with 18 percent of men regularly paying for sex in a €14.3-billion industry which is legal and regulated in Germany.

Beyond the Ergo case, the exhibition includes objects ranging from dungarees worn by feminists to erotic playing cards produced exclusively for export in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, former East Germany).

SEE ALSO: Two men charged after sex shop tantrum

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TODAY IN FRANCE

France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

France has paved the way towards paying reparations to more relatives of Algerians who sided with France in their country's independence war but were then interned in French camps.

Published: 16 May 2023 08:29 CEST
France to compensate relatives of Algerian Harki fighters

More than 200,000 Algerians fought with the French army in the war that pitted Algerian independence fighters against their French colonial masters from 1954 to 1962.

At the end of the war, the French government left the loyalist fighters known as Harkis to fend for themselves, despite earlier promises it would look after them.

Trapped in Algeria, many were massacred as the new authorities took revenge.

Thousands of others who fled to France were held in camps, often with their families, in deplorable conditions that an AFP investigation recently found led to the deaths of dozens of children, most of them babies.

READ ALSO Who are the Harkis and why are they still a sore subject in France?

French President Emmanuel Macron in 2021 asked for “forgiveness” on behalf of his country for abandoning the Harkis and their families after independence.

The following year, a law was passed to recognise the state’s responsibility for the “indignity of the hosting and living conditions on its territory”, which caused “exclusion, suffering and lasting trauma”, and recognised the right to reparations for those who had lived in 89 of the internment camps.

But following a new report, 45 new sites – including military camps, slums and shacks – were added on Monday to that list of places the Harkis and their relatives were forced to live, the government said.

Now “up to 14,000 (more) people could receive compensation after transiting through one of these structures,” it said, signalling possible reparations for both the Harkis and their descendants.

Secretary of state Patricia Miralles said the decision hoped to “make amends for a new injustice, including in regions where until now the prejudices suffered by the Harkis living there were not recognised”.

Macron has spoken out on a number of France’s unresolved colonial legacies, including nuclear testing in Polynesia, its role in the Rwandan genocide and war crimes in Algeria.

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