Comments | snowgrouse: I don't know how you convince them and get them, but/I don't know what you do/it's unbelievable

snowgrouse

I don't know how you convince them and get them, but/I don't know what you do/it's unbelievable

Dec 06, 2014 00:58

-I've been trying to watch tons of old movies and other stuff to keep my mind occupied. But it's horrible because I just went on a Connie binge again like I'd been starving myself and--he frightens me. Like, after you've seen him do the whole evilsex thing and after you've heard him purr and do that panther glide and--there's nobody who can compare ( Read more... )

perfume, claude rains, conrad veidt, the black beast of aaaaargh

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ext_237760 December 10 2014, 01:47:43 UTC

HOW COULD SOMEONE HAVE THAT MUCH EVIL IN THEIR EYES WHILE BEING A NICE GUY IRL AND I--I sometimes don't even want to know what he saw in the dodgiest Berlin nightclubs in the 20s, you know? I'm still convinced that he couldn't have done such perfect sensual diablerie if he hadn't tasted that level of perversion himself. And going by several sources, he did some pretty squicky and fucked-up stuff and I just--gods. I'm glad our knowledge of those things is only on the level of hints and rumours, and I know he was truly an angel at heart even if he was fucked up in his youth, but... I'm not sure anyone could do that if they were just an ordinary oversexed guy or something. That man's looked deep into the darkness and the darkness kissed him and left its mark. *shudders while also clenching at the same time and whimpering*

This. Exactly this.

snowgrouse December 10 2014, 16:31:01 UTC

It's really disconcerting, though. To have to remind oneself that this is less than a hundred years ago and the age of consent had already been introduced as a concept, yet people didn't give a shit about that in the Weimar Berlin days. So the idea of him and everyone else banging everyone regardless of age is frightening, even if it's not dissimilar to something you would've had in ancient Rome or Greece or medieval Persia. Those periods are further away historically and as I said, the age of consent wasn't really a thing back then, so the whole 1910s and 20s debauchery was laden with more sinfulness because people knew what they were doing was wrong. (And even if the emerging gay culture was still valorising the whole boy/man relationship thing, it was still dodgy.) Yet everyone was doing it and even the street next to the theatre he worked in was crowded with aggressive child prostitutes and then he was coked and boozed off his tits and with his mates and... fuck. It's messed up. And then there are the tales of him having ( ... )

ext_237760 January 16 2015, 21:28:47 UTC

It took me a while to answer because I couldn't believe what you said, wanted to do my own research, at least a little. I got stranded on a site with video clips from the 30s-50s for a while (can't remember where now) and found an interesting book about women photographers in the 20s, among other things. My local library doesn't have much on Conrad Veidt, and the internet was strangely quiet, too, except for a lot of pictures and some articles you have to pay for (which I can't). It sounds like you know a lot about Veidt and Berlin in the 20s, and I wanted to ask if you could recommend a book or an site or smth?

And yes, it makes me incredibly uneasy to think that someone really might have seen and done a lot of these things. Some things should be left to fiction, and fiction alone.

snowgrouse January 16 2015, 21:39:57 UTC

There's a book called Voluptuous Panic that's... well, while it's a bit of a trashy and scandalous book and while some of the material in it is something I'd take with a big grain of salt, it's a good resource on all the "sinful" life in Berlin at the time. Like, fuck, everyone was doing it--there were department stores with boy choirs where you could just buy one of the boys for your use and... it was horrible. It was mostly due to the recession and nearly everyone having to sell themselves and even good middle-class folks offering their kids for prostitution that... I'm not surprised at all that there was such a huge conservative backlash and such huge mental scarring and moral fuckage-uppage that led to the rise of Nazism. It explains a lot if it was a whole generation of people who had been sexually used and it's really damn disturbing. I had no idea it was that widespread but it was pretty much everyone, especially in the artist circles who had to sell themselves and who'd occasionally buy others ( ... )

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