de.talk.liebesakt

Long-form reference · 1,799 words · about a 8-minute read

The group and its era

de.talk.liebesakt was not so much created as re-christened. The group began life as de.talk.sex, and in February 1998 its readers were balloted on a package of changes under the de.* hierarchy's formal voting procedure. When the result was posted on 9 March 1998, most of the package had been rejected — but one item passed: the renaming of the group to de.talk.liebesakt, together with a new short description and a new charter. Liebesakt, 'the act of love', is the more decorous term by some distance, and the new charter matched it.

The renamed group proved durable. In December 1998 a request for discussion proposed deleting de.talk.bizarre, de.talk.liebesakt and de.talk.romance in a single sweep; the proposal went nowhere, and all three groups outlived it comfortably. A February 2000 ballot on adding a more specialised subgroup beneath de.talk.liebesakt was likewise defeated, leaving the group to cover its subject whole. By the time this gateway opened in 2000 the group was an established fixture of the hierarchy, and it stayed on the de.* rolls long after the gateway had closed.

The era matters to what the group was. German-language discussion of intimate life had long been conducted in print, in the advice columns and correspondence pages of the illustrated press. The online medium of the years before Usenet reached German homes was Bildschirmtext, the videotex service launched nationwide by the Deutsche Bundespost in 1983, which reached subscribers over V.23 modems and charged by the page or by the minute. Btx was a closed and metered system with a single operator, renamed Datex-J in the 1990s and switched off for good at the end of 2001. Usenet offered the opposite arrangement, unmetered and carried by whichever provider chose to carry it, and it was into that arrangement that the subject moved during the 1990s.

What was discussed

The 1998 charter defined the territory as human sexuality treated as a subject of discussion — expressly including its connections to feelings, health, law and social policy. Just as expressly, it ruled personal ads out: under the de.* reading of Netiquette, a talk group was for talking, and contact-seeking belonged elsewhere. What that produced, at the level any charter can guarantee, was conversation in the plain sense — questions, experience and argument about the physical side of relationships, along with the periodic disputes about the group's own boundaries that no Usenet group has ever lacked.

The charter also welcomed writing as well as talk: sexually charged stories and erotic poetry were explicitly within its scope. That made the group a standing German-language venue for amateur erotic literature at a time when the open web offered few equivalents — verse and short fiction posted alongside the discussion the name promised.

One clause set the group apart within its own hierarchy. de.* ran on a strong convention of posting under one's real name; the de.talk.liebesakt charter deviated from this deliberately, accepting pseudonymous and even anonymous posts provided the sender could still be reached by reply. Given the subject, that was less a liberty than a courtesy. Otherwise the charter leaned firmly on the Netiquette points concerning politeness and commercial postings, and the house rules were kept in circulation by the group's regularly posted FAQ, the dtl-FAQ.

Structurally the group was of the plainest kind Usenet offered: unmoderated, open to anyone whose provider carried it, and written. The de.* hierarchy consists almost entirely of text groups, binaries being confined to the separate de.alt.dateien.* branch, so a de.talk group was a written medium and nothing else. There was no membership and no editor; what a reader saw was whatever the group's conventions, and the readiness of others to object, had left standing.

Who such a group served is a question the charter answers only indirectly. A German-language forum on this subject served readers who wanted to discuss it in their own language and against their own country's law, medicine and social assumptions rather than in the English-language groups that dominated the network; the charter's inclusion of health, law and social policy alongside the personal registers that expectation. The pseudonymity clause points the same way: the group was written to be usable by people who would not have posted under the real-name convention that de.* otherwise expected.

Context

Within de.talk.* the division of labour was reasonably clean: de.talk.romance took love and relationships as felt, de.talk.liebesakt took them as practised, and de.talk.bizarre took much of what remained. The joint deletion proposal of 1998 treated the three as a set, and their joint survival says something about how firmly the personal-life groups had established themselves in a hierarchy often caricatured as consisting entirely of computing groups.

The arrangement also says something about the de.* temperament. English-language Usenet largely kept sexuality out in the unmanaged alt.* hierarchy; de.* chose instead to hold the subject inside the managed structure, with a voted charter, a FAQ and the same procedural machinery as any other group. In the hierarchy's vote archive, the 1998 renaming sits between ballots on a banking group and a television-technology group, recorded with precisely equal gravity.

That habit of documentation is the group's real afterlife. Public archives have always handled adult newsgroups warily, and coverage of the postings themselves is uneven — but the charter, the FAQ and the complete voting record were preserved by the hierarchy's own record-keepers, and they remain the most dependable account of what de.talk.liebesakt was for. The conversations, as so often on Usenet, survive only in part.

The de.talk.* branch and how groups were made

de.talk.* was the discussion wing of a hierarchy whose bulk lay elsewhere. Alongside it stand the administrative groups of de.admin.*, the computing and communications branches de.comp.* and de.comm.*, and de.rec.*, de.sci.*, de.soc.*, de.etc.*, de.org.*, de.newusers.* and de.alt.*, besides single groups such as de.markt and de.test; as of October 2019 the hierarchy amounted to 378 newsgroups. The talk branch was always the small one. Its current members are de.talk.bizarre, de.talk.jokes with its discussion counterpart de.talk.jokes.d, de.talk.misc for what its short description calls endless topics, and de.talk.tagesgeschehen for whatever is currently being talked about. de.talk.liebesakt and de.talk.romance were the branch's personal-life pair, and neither appears on the current list.

What held the branch in order was procedure rather than policing. Under the hierarchy's Einrichtungsregeln, the rules of establishment, a proposal goes to the moderation of de.admin.news.announce as a request for discussion, is published there, and is then argued out in de.admin.news.groups for not less than two weeks. If the proposer presses on, a call for votes follows, again published in de.admin.news.announce, with a ballot period of at least three weeks and at most one month and votes sent by e-mail to a named tallier. A proposal carries only if the valid yes votes are at least twice the no votes and number at least fifteen. The renaming of 1998 and the later proposals that failed all ran through this machinery, and the paper it generated is why anything can be said about the group at all.

Youth-media protection and the German legal frame

German law had settled its position on adult material before the group existed. Since 1975 the distribution of pornography in the Federal Republic has not in general been prohibited, content involving violence, animals or minors remaining criminal; the weight of the law shifted onto keeping such material away from minors. The instrument of that policy is indexing. The federal review board for media harmful to young persons, established in 1954 and known by its initials — BPjS, then BPjM after the Protection of Young Persons Act of 2002 took effect in 2003, and BzKJ since 2021 — may place a work on a list, after which it may not be sold or made accessible to minors, displayed where minors can see it, or advertised to them.

The online extension of that regime arrived after the group's formative years. The Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag, an agreement among all the German federal states, came into force on 1 April 2003 and applies youth protection to broadcasting and telemedia, requiring among other things that certain adult content be distributed only inside a closed user group with age verification. Usenet had already met German youth-protection enforcement in a blunter form: in 1995 CompuServe cut off access to a list of newsgroups for its subscribers worldwide under pressure from the Munich public prosecutor's office, and its German managing director was convicted at the Munich district court on 28 May 1998 and acquitted on appeal at the Landgericht München I on 17 November 1999. A large part of the groups caught by the block carried nothing of the material at issue.

The point at which this regime touched Usenet was the carrier rather than the group: the Munich proceedings turned on what a provider made available to its subscribers, not on the charter of any one newsgroup. The practical weight of the German regime fell there, on the providers deciding which groups to take and which to drop.

Erotic writing and what came after

The charter's admission of verse and short fiction placed the group, modestly, in a line of German-language publishing with a long and well-documented record. Josefine Mutzenbacher, published anonymously in Vienna in 1906 and now generally attributed to Felix Salten, has sold more than three million copies and spent much of the past century inside the machinery described above: placed on the index, the subject of a Federal Constitutional Court ruling of 27 November 1990 holding that a work may be both pornography and art and that the first does not dispose of the second, re-listed in 1992 on youth-protection grounds, and delisted only in November 2017. The tension the charter settled in a sentence had been litigated over a novel for decades.

What became of the writing is easier to trace than what became of the discussion. German-language Usenet traffic fell away through the 2000s, and the two functions the group had combined went separate ways: talk moved to web forums and later to social platforms, while amateur prose and verse moved to dedicated creative-writing sites, which typically give a text a permanent address, a category and an author page — none of which a newsgroup, where an article expires from the spool, could offer. Sites of that kind are the successors to the fiction side of the group, and a reader arriving here from one of them is looking at the arrangement that came before.