Back in print! Available in deluxe paperback edition.

“Voluptuous Panic is simultaneously appalling and thrilling, repellent and seductive, grotesque and gorgeous—not a coffee table book. It would go better with absinthe drunk from a human skull.”
— Gary Meyer, Clean Sheets

When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.

This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay, designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.

Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” The deluxe hardcover edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts, Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”).

Mel Gordon is also the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House), and The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (DaCapo).

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of the notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s.

In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber’s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.

Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine.

• Includes nearly two hundred photographs and illustrations, including some that recreate Berber’s salacious and enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.”

• Berber was a lover of Marlene Dietrich and influenced and associated with Leni Riefenstahl, Lawrence Durrell, Klaus Mann, and the founder of modern sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld.

• An early movie star, Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and the silent epic Lucifer.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created two superheroes. One is Superman. The other is Funnyman, and this book details his amazing back story.

Inside find reproductions from Funnyman’s rare comic books, Sunday funnies and daily strips.

Revealed by authors Andrae and Gordon:

• The actual living model for Superman.
• The creation of Jewish humor and the cultural origins of Funnyman.
• Why a strange comic superhero emerged at the time of the creation of the state of Israel.

“It’s a bird, it’s a plane … it’s a red-haired, wisecracking super heroic tummler! Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon have excavated something that’s almost too good to be true—a crime fighting meshuggeneh from the Golden Age of Comic Books, who knew? Lovingly preserved and astutely analyzed, the Funnyman saga is a shpritz, a zetz, the stuff of postmodern novels.” — J. Hoberman, co-author, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting

Mel Gordon presents a companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic, the celebrated history about the sex culture of Weimar Berlin, returns with a stunningly illustrated look at Paris, The City of Pleasure, prior to and during German occupation during World War II.

Horizontal Collaboration encompasses the Jazz Age, Depression, World War and Occupation, and Liberation. It concludes with the shuttering of the licensed brothels in 1946, which some Parisian intellectuals thought was the final “destruction of French civilization”.

The term “Horizontal Collaboration” refers to the sexual liaisons between French civilians and German occupiers from 1940 to 1944. These were extremely widespread and included both individual wartime relationships in addition to prostitution. As Allied armies swept across the French countryside, thousands of young women—and some men—were savagely punished by the authorities or by vigilante crowds, becoming a source of deep national shame.

Author Gordon redefines the pejorative term to mean something much broader: French men and women “horizontally collaborated” to overcome all social obstacles, divisions, and regulations. These obstacles include married and unmarried couples, straights and homosexuals, foreigners and locals, gun-toting soldiers and their vanquished subjects. The natural yearning for sexual pleasure equally corrupted all cohabitating partners.

Erik Jan Hanussen made a name for himself as Europe’s most audacious and controversial soothsayer. Billing himself as “The Man Who Knows All,” he performed in cabarets and music halls, attracting the attention of everyone from Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann to Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre. His exceptional paranormal abilities–along with his stage specialty of hypnotizing women to orgasm–garnered ardent admirers and equally ardent denouncements, religious and otherwise.

In March 1932, when Adolf Hitler’s political future seemed doomed, Hanussen predicted a resurgence of the Nazi Party. The prediction proved a psychic salve for Hitler, and Hanussen became an influential confidant of the superstitious fuhrer. But what Hitler didn’t know initially was that Hanussen was not the Dane he claimed to be but a Jew from Moravia whose given name was Herschel Steinschneider.