Germany’s capital has long been a vortex drawing in the world’s societal outlaws – from art, politics and sex alike. From the early 20th century onward, Berlin repeatedly built and discarded its own mythologies. By the early 2000s, that new mythos was as the global capital of sexual freedom and pornography. And no one was contributing more to this mythos than gay porn production company Wurstfilm.

In the early 2000s, pornography was still taboo and still revolutionary. Berlin in turn was where you went to break taboos and take part in a revolution. It was a mysterious and alluring hotbed of horny people waiting to fuck on every corner, and a place to maybe become an underground star at the same time. Porn was a major part of what drew me and my punk rock, art-damaged international friends to Berlin.

This image of Berlin echoed through several features from the Wurstfilm crew throughout the decade, but the definitive portrayal of radical, subversive sexual Berlin on film is Ebo Hill’s Bonking Berlin Bastards, a porn not only with a name as wickedly anarchic and gloriously WTF as Germany’s capital, but it had a ‘plot’ to match. More accurately a proto-Wurstfilm, the film was released in 2001 as producer Jürgen Anger’s final feature for Cazzo Film, Wurstfilm’s Berlin-based predecessor. It kicked off the decade in which Berlin became a porn mecca and Wurstfilm, founded shortly after in 2003 by Anger, was its flagship representative of the dream/fuck factory.

Punk rock and scrappy, Bonking follows a loose-knit group of unnamed bastards as they fuck and cum through Berlin’s dilapidated streets, bars, cellars cemeteries and even in an aerial tram, while never giving much motive or reason for any of it – save for the rape-revenge scene enacted by a group of drag queens leaving Oranienstraße’s notorious gay bar Roses. Bonking stitches together hardcore gay sex scenes from the hot and hilarious to the extreme without stopping for breath. Action ricochets from punk crash pads to highway bridges, phone booths, bars, basements and finally a clinic, imitating the breakneck speed at which the metropolis paces itself… and fucks.

The opening scene in which a rough-looking punk pulls his cock out and shoots streams of piss upward onto himself in broad daylight – on a public street corner – lets the viewer imagine just what one could get away with in Berlin in 2001. This was bolder than bold.

It wasn’t just the protagonists and their sex acts that were radical, the filmmaking and structure of the porn was radical itself. The earlier scenes in the film present clear shots of the action – cocks, assholes, blowjobs and fucking – with the controlled clarity of conventional porn cinematography. But towards the end the film leaves the explicit obscured in a pixelated, experimentally shot climactic indoor pool orgy for its penultimate scene. By this point, one’s eyes have adjusted enough to know what’s going on, yet it’s hardly conducive to a typical masturbatory experience. Then, as a reminder that we are after all (most likely) watching the film alone, Bonking ends with a lone punk visiting a sperm bank for a literal ‘clinically shot’ final solo scene, closing it not with a whimper, but not a big bang either. It leaves the viewer a bit bewildered.

But Bonking‘s images remain with the viewer and are now iconic impressions of a Berlin more than 20 years ago. Today scenes from Bonking, like the two punks pissing on each other in the graveyard, resurface remixed and newly presented in various corners of the internet. Or as memes or stolen clips for music videos made by new generations of gay punk rockers. In 2021, two decades after the film’s release, the soundtrack was reissued on Ostgut Ton, the label of Berlin nightclub Berghain – proof that Bonking had already passed from porn into legend. Bonking was the first film to represent Berlin as the radical porn capital of the world in the new millennium and it continues to give that impression, long after most corners of Berlin have become too gentrified and too populated to get away with this sort of renegade filth.

In 2006, Wurstfilm brought out Horst Braun’s Gefangen in Analkerker. This Wonderland tumble down the rabbit’s fuckhole takes an even more state-of-mind approach to the Berlin mythos as a porn mecca. Just below the surface of the city is an entire world for the fucking! Most of the action in Gefangen takes place underground… a Dante’s Inferno of Nine Circles of Sex below a public toilet somewhere in Berlin. Gefangen follows performer Lupus (a mainstay of Wurstfilm throughout the 2000s) as he goes to relieve himself in a public lavatory. After giving the bathroom attendant a randy look, he heads in for a quick fisting. There’s no wait before getting to the hard stuff. On his way out, however, things take a stranger turn when Lupus refuses to tip the bathroom attendant and next thing he’s dropped with the flip of a switch into an underground labyrinth of fuck. It’s then and there that the surreal fuck scenarios start taking place, starting with Lupus being shoved into a box of dicks to suck, fuck and stroke and then being the one dick for multiple bodyless arms and hands to jerk off. And the number of players and their misdeeds grow as we are led around each new corner. At one point we get a scene where someone is literally blowing smoke up another’s ass. The unending, anonymous, and maze-like quality of Berlin’s Analkerker is almost reminiscent of a harder and filthier Berlin equivalent of Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1972 porn Bijou.

It ends with Berlin star of stage and screen Susanne Sachße entering the public lavatory and winkingly asking the attendant: “Gibt es etwas… für Damen?” (“Do you have anything… for the ladies?”) Laughs aside, it’s a testament to Berlin’s commitment to daring to be so radical (at the time) as putting a woman in a gay porn (which also happens in the Marcel Schlutt and Christian Slaughter’s softer 2009 Wurstfilm entry, Max and the City). But her request to be sent down the rabbit hole is a direct reflection of what many wanted from and thought of Berlin. Everyone wanted to come here and partake in Berlin’s amazing smorgasbord of sexual freedom and pornography.

Bonking Berlin Bastards and Gefangen in Analkerker may have done more than any other two films in spinning the legend of Berlin as pornographic candy land of the 2000s, but Wurstfilm continued to feed the mythos machine throughout the decade and beyond. Features like Sex TV (2005) and Max and the City (2010) were a bit more on-the-nose regarding making Berlin such a character: both could have their explicit scenes excised to create video postcards that the city government of Berlin would be proud of. But that’s all good and fine. Sometimes a straightforward fuck right after leaving Berlin Central Train Station is enticing enough.

Berlin has had many radical epochs over the 20th century: The political and social hedonists of Weimar Berlin, the student and cultural rebellions of late 1960s West Berlin. Bowie and Pop. The Baader-Meinhof Gang. Punk rock and gritty bohemianism in the 1980s. The Love Parade and Techno after the Fall of the Wall. And then the fantastical, edgy gay guerilla porn playground of the 2000s, cultivated by Bonking Berlin Bastards and Wurstfilm.

Porn may be fantasy, but Wurstfilm was concerned with something larger: mythmaking. The mythmaking of Berlin.