In public, at least, they seem remarkably unfazed by what they have done. And in some senses of course they needn't be. They are a loving couple, who have been together for seven years and want to be with no one else. They have had four children. Beyond these details, however, the story gets more troubling. Patrick and Susan Stübing, who live in Zwenkau, near Leipzig, are brother and sister. Two of their four children have developmental problems and all four have been taken into care. Patrick, 30, has served more than two years of a prison sentence for incest.
Their case is raising much prurient speculation in Germany, not least because their reaction to the threat of further imprisonment for him has not been apology and shame but defiance - an attempt to overturn paragraph 173 of the German legal code, which forbids sex with a close relative.
The Stübings seem to be a textbook example of a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It occurs between blood relatives who have been separated for most of their lives and meet in adulthood. It has been known to happen in all sorts of permutations - father/daughter, birth mother/son, siblings - even occasionally same-sex relationships between people who would not otherwise identify themselves as homosexual.
Patrick had already been put in a children's home in East Germany when his sister was born, the third of eight children, five of whom died. (Asked in an interview what the others died of, Susan, 22, simply shrugged.) After a lifetime spent in and out of care homes and foster families, Patrick finally found his mother in 2000, but she died of a heart attack six months later. Brother and sister - neither of whom had known of the other's existence before this - had only each other for comfort. But it would probably be fair to say that there would have been more to it than grief. Those who experience GSA speak of what they feel in terms we all recognise as romantic ideals of perfect love.
"As we looked at each other over lunch it was as if a light was turned on. Something had happened which was difficult to control," Tony Smedley told the Daily Mail in 2003, a week after he was found guilty at York crown court of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Janet Paveling. "It was terrifying," Paveling said. They spoke of feeling like mirror-images of each other. "Watching her was like watching myself," said Smedley. "Whatever was happening seemed awesomely powerful. When we made love, it was very moving. Very intimate. Nothing could stop us. I know it's disturbing, but it felt right." Paveling added: "Each day we fight the impulse to be together. It has been like an obsession. We feel complete only when we are together."
There is more going on than simple attraction between strangers. "It was something to do with recognition. It was like kinship, the proof you're finding each other. It was just mutual, unspoken," said a respondent in one of the only scientific studies conducted of the phenomenon, by Maurice Greenberg and Roland Littlewood of University College London, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1995. They were surprised to find that more than 50% of people who sought post-adoption counselling "experienced strong sexual feelings in reunions".
These days people are often warned that this might be a possible reaction before they meet blood relatives - yet except for the occasional memoir, such as Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is an account of her incestuous relationship with her father - it is rarely talked about in public.
The term "genetical sexual attraction" seems to have been coined by Barbara Gonyo, who was taken aback by the lust she felt when she was reunited with a 26-year-old son she had given up as a baby.
The relationship was never consummated, but she wrote a book about it in which she suggests "that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of 'missed bonding' that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."
When relationships such as this do become sexual, they tend to complicate knee-jerk assumptions about abuse and incest. "There is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust," Dr Greenberg said. "And no victim. If sex occurs, it involves consenting adults."
This seems to have been the case with the Stübings, although Susan was only 16 when they met, one reason she has not yet been prosecuted. (Described as "slow" by her carers, she became pregnant for a fifth time when Patrick was imprisoned, by a 49-year-old man who described himself as her boyfriend. Their child, born last year, lives with her father.)
The Stübings' lawyer insists that the main scientific arguments behind Germany's law banning incest no longer hold. "Sociologically speaking, incest is not the cause of difficult problems in families, rather the consequence of them. The risks of inheriting defects are as high as the chance of inheriting positive things," he claims, pointing out that people with inheritable conditions are not forbidden sexual intercourse.
What is unusual about the Stübings is the number of children involved. Apart from two of them having developmental difficulties (it is not certain whether this is because they were premature or because they share so much genetic material) the fact that they have been taken into care, as Patrick was, means that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the whole cycle could begin again.
In the meantime Patrick has been voluntarily sterilised, in the hope of avoiding further prosecution.
All the Stübings want, their lawyer says, is to be left alone. "They want to be a family - to have that which was impossible to have in their own childhoods."
But the question is how far apart we are since Adam and Eve
Their case is raising much prurient speculation in Germany, not least because their reaction to the threat of further imprisonment for him has not been apology and shame but defiance - an attempt to overturn paragraph 173 of the German legal code, which forbids sex with a close relative.
The Stübings seem to be a textbook example of a phenomenon called genetic sexual attraction (GSA). It occurs between blood relatives who have been separated for most of their lives and meet in adulthood. It has been known to happen in all sorts of permutations - father/daughter, birth mother/son, siblings - even occasionally same-sex relationships between people who would not otherwise identify themselves as homosexual.
Patrick had already been put in a children's home in East Germany when his sister was born, the third of eight children, five of whom died. (Asked in an interview what the others died of, Susan, 22, simply shrugged.) After a lifetime spent in and out of care homes and foster families, Patrick finally found his mother in 2000, but she died of a heart attack six months later. Brother and sister - neither of whom had known of the other's existence before this - had only each other for comfort. But it would probably be fair to say that there would have been more to it than grief. Those who experience GSA speak of what they feel in terms we all recognise as romantic ideals of perfect love.
"As we looked at each other over lunch it was as if a light was turned on. Something had happened which was difficult to control," Tony Smedley told the Daily Mail in 2003, a week after he was found guilty at York crown court of having an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Janet Paveling. "It was terrifying," Paveling said. They spoke of feeling like mirror-images of each other. "Watching her was like watching myself," said Smedley. "Whatever was happening seemed awesomely powerful. When we made love, it was very moving. Very intimate. Nothing could stop us. I know it's disturbing, but it felt right." Paveling added: "Each day we fight the impulse to be together. It has been like an obsession. We feel complete only when we are together."
There is more going on than simple attraction between strangers. "It was something to do with recognition. It was like kinship, the proof you're finding each other. It was just mutual, unspoken," said a respondent in one of the only scientific studies conducted of the phenomenon, by Maurice Greenberg and Roland Littlewood of University College London, published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1995. They were surprised to find that more than 50% of people who sought post-adoption counselling "experienced strong sexual feelings in reunions".
These days people are often warned that this might be a possible reaction before they meet blood relatives - yet except for the occasional memoir, such as Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is an account of her incestuous relationship with her father - it is rarely talked about in public.
The term "genetical sexual attraction" seems to have been coined by Barbara Gonyo, who was taken aback by the lust she felt when she was reunited with a 26-year-old son she had given up as a baby.
The relationship was never consummated, but she wrote a book about it in which she suggests "that romantic love and erotic arousal may be the delayed by-product of 'missed bonding' that would have normally taken place between a mother and her newborn infant, or between siblings had they not been separated by adoption. Many such people, as adults, need to go through that early missed closeness. It may become sexual, or it may not."
When relationships such as this do become sexual, they tend to complicate knee-jerk assumptions about abuse and incest. "There is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust," Dr Greenberg said. "And no victim. If sex occurs, it involves consenting adults."
This seems to have been the case with the Stübings, although Susan was only 16 when they met, one reason she has not yet been prosecuted. (Described as "slow" by her carers, she became pregnant for a fifth time when Patrick was imprisoned, by a 49-year-old man who described himself as her boyfriend. Their child, born last year, lives with her father.)
The Stübings' lawyer insists that the main scientific arguments behind Germany's law banning incest no longer hold. "Sociologically speaking, incest is not the cause of difficult problems in families, rather the consequence of them. The risks of inheriting defects are as high as the chance of inheriting positive things," he claims, pointing out that people with inheritable conditions are not forbidden sexual intercourse.
What is unusual about the Stübings is the number of children involved. Apart from two of them having developmental difficulties (it is not certain whether this is because they were premature or because they share so much genetic material) the fact that they have been taken into care, as Patrick was, means that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the whole cycle could begin again.
In the meantime Patrick has been voluntarily sterilised, in the hope of avoiding further prosecution.
All the Stübings want, their lawyer says, is to be left alone. "They want to be a family - to have that which was impossible to have in their own childhoods."
But the question is how far apart we are since Adam and Eve
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