The Rack at the End of the Platform

The Groschenroman—the German pulp paperback, sold from spinning wire racks at train stations and kiosks—was never something I’d touched. Those skinny booklets with their lurid cover paintings, heroically hairy doctors and lovestruck nurses locked in some vague wartime clinch, felt like reading material for a very specific kind of person. Not my world.

Then I came across Callgirl 2000. The series ran in the Seventies and is so completely of its moment that it loops back around into something worth admiring. Das haute ihn um, goes one line, the man literally at a woman’s feet. Natürlich, bei solchen Perspektiven. It’s written with the breezy confidence of someone who has never once considered that a reader might object, and there’s something almost refreshing about that now.

Publish a page of it today and you’d have an inbox full of outrage before the afternoon. But because Callgirl 2000 is so thoroughly sealed inside its own era, it sidesteps all of that—it exists now as artifact rather than provocation, a time capsule of hard guys and barely-dressed women assembled with zero pretense about what it is. If you want a copy, eBay will sort you out.