Between May 1969 and December 1970 unmarried secretary Margret S., 24, and her German businessman boss, Günter K., 39, were engaged in a clandestine love affair.
Günter kept records of the romance, hundreds of color and black-and-white photographs showing Margret S., samples of her hair (head and pubic), her fingernails, empty contraception packages, a blood-stained napkin, hotel receipts, movie and theater tickets and sexually explicit diary entries. More than thirty years later, the records were found, locked inside a briefcase.
Veit Loers notes:
“In September 1970, the diary entries set in, with precise descriptions of what happens during foreplay and then of the sexual act itself, but also mentioning all kinds of things happening besides. All this is meticulously typed, in red and black ink, as by a bookkeeper of his own obsession. The couple go on ‘business trips’ in Günter’s Opel Kapitän, stay at spa hotels and visit the casino in Wiesbaden. Then the trysts begin to take place in an attic flat in Günter’s store building. Nobody is supposed to know, but people must notice something. Margret prepares roulades and redfish filets with cucumber salad. They drink Cappy (orange juice) with a green shot (Escorial, strong liquor) and watch ‘colourful television’.
Margret dresses for him in the clothes he has bought her. He, the perfect lover, in truth is a macho man who wants to have everything under control. She enjoys his attention, his generosity, is happy to let herself be manipulated, is jealous, becomes pregnant despite the pills, and has an illegal abortion − for the third time in her young life. Just before Christmas 1970 the reports and photographs break off. The relationship appears to be at an end. Margret is scared. She tells him that ‘after Christmas the fucking will be over and you will not dance at two weddings anymore’. He gets involved with other women. These are no love stories, though, just obsessive sexual romps, chronicled nonetheless in hundreds of grotesque documents testifying to the stuffy German milieu in the early years of the Kohl era.”
Does Mrs K suspect? Yes:
Monday 7.9.1970: At lunch Leni [Günther’s wife] says to Margret: Madame, you are a lesser character, you are disrupting a good marriage.
Tuesday 8.9.1970: Around 10 a clock Margret says to me: You let this insult from your wife against me pass? No more sex, you can jump on your own wife. Whatever you do, you are not allowed to jump on me anymore.
Later, my wife has to apologize to her at lunch on 8.9.1970.
The loves retire for sex. He later adds:
Devil salad is eaten. Everything is okay again.
The photographs are extraordinary. They are also racy and NSFW. We do get to see Günther in one picture. It the part of him that did his thinking.
Via: White Columns. Rad more in the book Margret: Chronik einer Affare
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