“Always this gross sex.” On reading the reviews of Jan Bonny’s *Wintermärchen*

The arts reviews give the impression that emphasizing one’s own outrage and revulsion is a necessary conclusion that viewers must draw whenever sex and terrorist violence are presented together. And this is despite the fact that, if you look closely, the way sex is portrayed in *Wintermärchen* works differently from the callous, hardcore sex scenes in other neo-Nazi films. In contrast, the explicit scenes in Jan Bonny’s film look surprisingly “normal.” Normal = no steel-hard bodies, the fumbling seems clumsy (“ow!”), there is insecurity, jealousy, envy; it seems bored, then, to spice things up, they…