Stern Rebuke

The rear view of a G-stringed nymph was bad enough. The photo of a smiling black woman swathed in chains was even worse. But the final straw was the June 8 poster of a scantily clad prostitute proffering the wares of her trade. When that picture ran on the cover of Stern, West Germany's largest illustrated weekly (close to 2 million in circulation), ten feminists demanded a court order barring the magazine from depicting women as "mere sex objects." Insulting one woman, they charged, is insulting them all.

The resulting "sexism trial" has titillated West Germany for weeks. The daily newspaper Die Welt polled readers on what they thought of Stern's cover. Said Actress Elke Sommer, 36: "I'm ashamed when the photos are almost obscene, but we live in a free country." Insults flew between the chief complainant and editor of Emma magazine, Alice Schwarzer, 35, ("Male perfidy," said she), and Stern Editor Henri Nannen, 64, ("Joyless gray skirts," said he). During one session in a Hamburg court, Nannen stirred a row when he whisked out huge cheesecake photos of two of the plaintiffs, one showing Actress Erika Pluhar in short shorts and boots, the other from an old movie portraying Film Director Margarethe von Trotta stark naked and making love to a man on the roof of a car.

Interestingly, Nannen had himself found the June 8 cover excessive and ordered it scrapped, but not before 1.3 million copies had been printed; the substitute was not much different: two naked dancers on a nightclub stage in St. Pauli, Hamburg's red-light district. Nonetheless, he protests that Stern (meaning Star) has been unfairly thrust into the company of the girlie press. He notes that the magazine ran nearly naked women on its cover only five times in 1977.

During the '60s, many West German women accepted nudity in serious magazines as a sign of emancipation, not exploitation. But West German feminists have been at least a decade behind their U.S. counterparts. Only this year did a West German woman fight and win the first equal-pay lawsuit. With the Stern suit, says Schwarzer, "we have set into motion a change of consciousness."

She may have a point. Though the court last week upheld Nannen, it took the unusual step of expressing "regret" that the complaint had to be rejected and encouraged the feminists to "work toward a true" portrayal of women. The losing plaintiffs could also take heart from a comment in the Stuttgarter Zeitung that the decision was a "boxing on the ears [for]all those--especially men--who have shoved women into a dubious corner and defamed them." qed

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