Tainted love: Are we wrong to treat incest as a taboo?

It was love at first sight for Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski. At least that's the way they tell it. "We both stayed up late into the night and talked to each other about our hopes and dreams," says Patrick, recalling the first night the couple spent together. "Trust grew into a different type of love," remembers Susan.

When they met that first time, Patrick was 23, Susan just 16. He was a locksmith from Germany. Susan, a simple girl, was just out of a school, yet to decide which path her life might take, apart from perhaps, to meet a nice boy and settle down. Sceptics chalked their relationship down to puppy love.

Yet seven years on, Patrick, now 29 and Susan, now 22, appear to be proving their critics wrong. They have had four children together and live happily in a small flat near Leipzig with their pet dog, Tyson. Happily, except for the fact that Patrick is facing a 17-month jail sentence. He has already been incarcerated twice. The reason? Susan is his biological sister.

The bizarre case of Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski has captivated the world since the couple crashed into the headlines in 2001 with the birth of their first incestuous son (two of their four children are disabled). Not just because their self-proclaimed love seems to break one of the modern world's last taboos. But also because last week the couple's lawyer, Dr Endrich Wilhelm, lodged a plea with the country's highest judicial body, the Constitutional Court, in a bid to attempt to overturn Germany's ban on incest.

According to Dr Wilhelm, there is simply "no moral or legal basis" for incest to be a criminal offence today. Patrick and Susan have issued a statement in which they declare: "We do not feel guilty about what has happened to us. We want the law which makes incest a crime to be abolished."

But while the world and Germany's Constitutional Court ponder on how and why a brother and sister, cruelly dubbed by Germany's tabloids "the incest couple", fell in love and maintained a sexual relationship for almost a decade, psychiatrists simply shrug knowingly.

Susan and Patrick's love, they say, is a clear example of Genetic Sexual Attraction, an obsessive emotional response which affects as many as 50 per cent of siblings or parents and offspring who, like Patrick and Susan, were separated at birth, only to be reunited in adulthood.

"The basic idea is that people who look like each other, for example brothers and sisters, are attracted to each other," says Professor Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthrop-ologist at University College, London. "Under normal circumstances, of course, you are brought up in close contact with these people and at some point the attraction mechanism somehow gets switched off. The sexual attraction between the siblings or family members is lost."

Professor Littlewood, who has interviewed several couples who entered incestuous relationships, says the experience mirrors non-incestuous pairings. "It really is almost exactly the same in terms of how one feels," he says.

For centuries incest has been a social, if not a legal, taboo in most European societies. But that hasn't stopped it happening at both ends of the social spectrum. For the poor, especially in rural outposts of 19th-century Ireland and other Catholic societies, incest was the result of hopelessly crowded conditions and the absence of alternative sexual partners.

For the aristocracy, marriage between cousins, which is legal, has long been considered normal - not so much in-breeding as expanding the membership of the dynastic club. The poet Byron was said to have slept with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and the hideously scarred Duke of Cumberland with his sister Sophia. Napoleon, according to reports, slept at various times with his step-daughter, sister and niece.

Some of these stories may simply have been attempts to blacken reputations and the fact is, in pre-DNA days, it was almost impossible to prove incest, even more difficult if no child came from the union.

That is the main reason why many European societies decriminalised it - France in 1810, then Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Portugal. It is also legal in Turkey, Brazil and Japan. In Britain, by contrast, the law banning incest was extended to cover step-siblings in 2002. It remains illegal elsewhere, including Germany.

Patrick and Susan, however, do live in the age of DNA testing, and their offspring are plainly the result of an illegal act: that is what has made them so vulnerable. But that, they say, does not detract from the feelings for each other, nor those of others that have experienced incestuous love first-hand.

The mother and father of Kathryn Harrison, an American writer, split up when she was a baby, and she did not see her father again until she was 10. By 20 she had fallen into a passionate, and she says ultimately costly, affair with him.

Ms Harrison, who is now married and has children, says she does not believe her experience "falls neatly under the heading of Genetic Sexual Attraction". Instead, it "depended on both our relationships with my mother - as became obvious to me when she died and I found I was no longer compelled by my father as I had been when she was alive."

She has retold the passion of her incestuous affair in her 1998 memoir, The Kiss. Save for the parental references, it reads like any tragic love affair. "My father takes my face in his hands," she writes. "He tips it up and kisses my closed eyes, my throat. I feel his fingers in the hair at the nape of my neck. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids."

Anthony Smedley, a British man convicted in 2003 for having an incestuous relationship, described the moment of meeting his half-sister Janet Paveling, with whom he went on to have an affair "as if a light had been turned on". He recalled: "Watching her was like watching myself: we had the same colouring, the same skin and even the same distinctive triangle of dark-coloured freckles near the thumb on our right hands. Whatever was happening seemed awesomely powerful. When we made love it was very moving. Very intimate."

Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski's love story runs a similar course. Born into a broken home, Patrick was placed in care aged four and later sent to live in Potsdam, near Berlin.

In 2000 he succeeded in contacting his birth mother and discovered he also had a brother and sister, Susan. He went to live with them, his mother allowing him to share a room with his sister. By 2001, Susan had given birth to their first son, Eric. Three daughters in three years followed.

Their relationship has triggered a stampede for interviews, book deals and film rights. However, there have been suggestions that Patrick and Susan's relationship is not a good case for legalising incest in Germany.

Three of the couple's four children have been taken into care. Some who have met the couple describe Susan as mentally subnormal; others believe her to be under her brother's bullying manipulative spell.

Yet others praise the couple's attempts to overturn the ban. "This is a law which stems from a different century," says Jerzy Montag, a legal expert with the Green Party. The couple's lawyers argue that they are being denied their constitutional right to choose a partner.

"My research showed that most of the relationships were pretty harmless; the couples in question lost interest in each other and the relationships fell apart after about a year," Professor Littlewood says.

"The main problem is, of course, that the couple might produce unhealthy children. But if they don't have children, then I see no reason why not, in this day and age. But then, I'm a scientist, not a moralist."

Dr Wilhelm says he expects the court to make their final ruling within one to two months. Even if the court rules against the couple there is little doubt that Susan and Patrick will continue their union. "I know we will never voluntarily leave each other," Patrick has said. "If anyone doubts our love they should just see we will not be kept apart."

"It is perfectly legal for them to live together, to share a bed," says Dr Wilhelm. "The only thing that constitutes breaking the law is if they have penetrative sex." Patrick voluntarily underwent a vasectomy in the summer of 2004, Whether they win or not, Susan and Patrick will find their way back to each other, most observers believe. "And then, who will be able to determine whether they are sleeping together, anyway?" asks Dr Wilhelm.