Potsdamer Platz - Curt Corrinth

Potsdamer Platz; or, The Nights of the New Messiah: Ecstatic Visions, by Curt Corrinth / ISBN 9781939663672 / small paperback with flaps from Wakefield Press *** First published in German in 1919, Potsdamer Platz was Curt Corrinth’s first novel to employ an Expressionist, frenetic prose and presented his excessive vision of free love. Inspired by Freud’s controversial disciple, Otto Gross, and his theory on sexual relations, Corrinth took this outlook to new extremes to preach the sexual orgy as a means to salvation and universal copulation as a new world religion. The book’s provincial protagonist, Hans Termaden, arrives in Berlin, where he quickly evolves from city rube to sexual messiah as he converts prostitutes and virgins into sensual warriors and frees men of sexual inhibitions. As word of his exploits spreads, people throughout the city flock to his headquarters in Potsdamer Platz, turning all buildings into brothels as Berlin itself swells with an influx of population from Eng