'Fifty Shades' - set for silver screen success?

The story that author E. L. James tells in her book isn't terribly complex. A 21-year-old female literature student meets a wealthy businessman during an interview. The two become a couple, and their sexual relationship soon becomes sadomasochistic - a constellation described extensively and in detail in the book.

After the book's immense sales success, it's little surprise that Hollywood soon came calling. Film studios expected a big success after the book trilogy was sold millions of times around the world. For about a year, rumors have swirled online about the film project, and initial trailers have been up for months.

Now "Fifty Shades of Grey" is hitting theaters on Thursday, a day after its premiere at the Berlinale.

Werner Fuld is a prominent German literary critic who has published a book about the history of erotic literature, titled "Eine Geschichte des sinnlichen Schreibens" ("A History of Sensual Writing"). He says he believes there are other reasons for the novel's success.

DW: At the end of your book, you argue that "Shades of Grey" isn't an obscene novel at all. Instead, you call it "a highly puritanical textbook about self-optimization, disguised in the form of a late pubescent love story with female submission rituals." Can you explain that?

Werner Fuld: After all, the book answers a very old question that has always interested women: How can I catch a wealthy man? And its advice on how to position oneself to achieve this goal is through sexual submission. So, it's a pretty reactionary product: In the end, the student ends up with a beautiful house in the suburbs with a lawn and proper children.

How, then, do you explain the book's enormous success? Is it just the content - the detailed description of sexual practices? Or are other things playing a role?

Of course this success was only possible because female readers could download this book anonymously as an e-book, so no one could see what they were actually reading. The word of mouth propaganda played a big part.

But in your book, which looks back at 700 years of cultural and literary history, you list numerous titles that took up erotic themes and had big success. Is "Fifty Shades of Grey" not just another hit among many?

It's a further example of how new technology can generate content. The e-book wouldn't have established itself so quickly were it not for the appealing content. Other erotic novels were also relatively successful in their time, but they didn't reach such a broad public internationally.

Ultimately, we can say that writing erotic books is as old as writing itself.

That's very true. Up to a certain point in the 19th century, erotic literature wasn't even described as such. It's a modern concept. Erotic themes and topics have always been found in literature - and as a matter of course, without requiring any special emphasis. It wasn't until the introduction or invention of pornography - and by that I mean, limiting erotic literature to a male audience - that literature began including scenes specifically rooted in addressing a male audience. It used to be completely normal that both male and female readers enjoyed passages like these.

You describe three large linguistic regions in which erotic literature saw triumphs: the Italian, French and English. Why these three in particular?

In order for erotic literature to emerge, there needs to be freedom - the freedom in the salons, in which men and women socialized as equals and had exchanges with one another. That existed in those regions, but not in Germany. In Germany the development was far behind. When Italy was experiencing the Renaissance, Germany was dominated by war. There was still no national German language - people wrote instead in a very specific dialect. There was still no market for literature. You wrote for a very limited circle of friends.

And in France?

In the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, which culminated in the French Revolution, people were accustomed to discussing topics freely. That extended to all issues that were relevant to people. Of course there are very many discoveries - including in science - concerning the body and bodily functions. They were discussed very openly between men and women. Women wanted to know how men's bodies work and how their own work.

And the Germans? That didn't come about until later. In your book, you mention, for example, Goethe's novel "Elective Affinities."

First you have to keep in mind that in Germany, the French, English and Italian literature was read by a small and well-educated circle in the original languages. They also read Latin classics or Aretino [Ed. note: Pietro Aretino, 1492-1556, an Italian poet] in Italian and of course also the English and French authors. In Germany, a lot of rhymes were used - obscene poems were written and performed for circles of friends. Certain novels were shared among students. But there was no popular market for erotic books here in comparison with England or France.

Let's turn back to "Fifty Shades of Grey," where the topic of sexuality is closely linked with violence. Is that also a reason for its popularity?

Violence in "Fifty Shades of Grey" is only described in a ritualized form. The scenes in the book don't have even the slightest to do with reality. It's written for the American housewife market - "mommy porn" is how some described it. It's a particular conception of S&M. It's ritualized violence, regulated by a contract in which no wounds are inflicted.

Erotic classics like "Story of O," the French novel from 1954 by Anne Desclos, also treated the same issues.

Of course - it's all been done before, and people always tend to forget that. A book of the sort that I just wrote serves the purpose of bringing these traditions back into people's consciousness.

Werner Fuld is the author of "Eine Geschichte des sinnlichen Schreibens"("A History of Sensual Writing"), which was published in German in 2014 and is also available in English translation.