Wetlands, a scandalous best-selling German novel

Not many literary readings are restricted to an over-18 audience. Fewer still take place under circus tents. Yet nothing could be more appropriate for the scandalous German best-seller “Wetlands,� by a television personality and author, Charlotte Roche. With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Memel, Ms. Roche has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany. Since its debut in February, the novel (“Feuchtgebiete,� in German) has sold more than 680,000 copies, becoming the only German book to top Amazon.com’s global best-seller list.

"This generation of women dares to declare that there are other things in life than either career or children,"

One source of generational discord is pornography. Schwarzer initiated the PorNo campaign in 1987 to fight for a ban on porn. Roche, by contrast, says "I get a lot out of good porn," and calls traditional feminism "joyless."

Traditional feminists such as Alice Schwarzer, a pioneer of the German women's movement in the 1970s, have condemned the latest feminists for being interested only in "their personal affairs: that is, career and men."