The Telegraph reports:
'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'
By Clare Chapman(Filed: 30/01/2005)
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Many years ago (1977) the acclaimed German director Werner Hertzog made a film titled Stroszek in which prostitution stood as the mark of ultimate degradation. The story follows a prostitute and her boyfriend as they attempt to escape the misery of their lives on the streets of Berlin, where they were preyed upon by the criminal underworld, and to make a new one in America. They come to Wisconsin with high hopes that are gradually dashed as a ruthless and predatory capitalism reduces them inexorably to their former desperate state. The mark of their downfall is when the woman, desperate to make enough money to make ends meet, begins to service truckers at a truckstop.
Hertzog, a man of the left, was trying to make the point that capitalism is itself a form of criminality. Both the gangs and the businessmen were rapacious, predatory, and destructive of human dignity. As a lefty, his alternative was a benevolent, bureaucratic state. I wonder if today he would like to make a movie about the fate of this woman.
UPDATE:
A celebrated Berlin prostitute has come out publicly in favor of government agencies channeling unemployed people into the sex trade.
"Why shouldn't they send the unemployed to work in the sex industry? Before it was a grey zone, but now employees are insured and receive benefits," [she] told Reuters. "People would no longer be unemployed and could earn themselves a living."
Read the whole thing here.
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