“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 portrayal of sex in *Wintermärchen* functions 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…