Popular Culture and the Politics of Sex Education in 1950s and 1960s West Germany

In the 1950s and 1960s, as West Germans tried to introduce sex education into their schools, parental opposition and disagreements about what should be included, resulted in an approach to sex education that was more akin to gender education, teaching proper gender roles, rather than any information about sex and sexuality. However, as this paper will demonstrate, West German youths increasingly learned about sex from popular culture, such as films, television, and magazines. Magazines geared their material towards the interests of youths, acting as interlocutors with their readers and by the late 1960s were offering both advice columns on sexual matters and even computerized dating services. While films offered an often idealized image of romantic relationships, contemporary research implied that many West German youths believed that films offered an image of reality that was “more real than reality itself.” In an effort to combat the often unwanted influence of popular culture, West German authorities started to use popular cultural media in order to offer their own version of sex education, producing and financing sex education films for the masses (one of which was seen by over ten million people in 1969) and started using television to air sex education series. I will argue that not only did popular media educate West Germans about sexual matters in the 1950s and 1960s, directly influencing the change in sexual mores of the period, but it also showed the West German state how best to reach its population, thirsty for knowledge about sexuality.