YNOT EUROPE – Oswalt Kolle, known in Germany as “the sex educator of the nation,” died in late September in Amsterdam. His family announced Oswalt’s passing the day before his 82nd birthday.

“Oswalt Kolle passed away after a long illness on Sept. 24, surrounded by his family,” Kolle’s son Stefan revealed in a statement.

A noted filmmaker, journalist and author, Kolle was one of his generation’s most outspoken critics of his native country’s sexual conservatism. Begin in the 1960s, he openly castigated West Germany’s social taboos and the Catholic church in print and on film. His numerous books have been translated into 12 languages.

“You can’t learn how to love, but you can learn sex,” became his motto about the same time his two-part film, The Miracle of Love: Sex in Marriage, debuted in January 1968. Germany’s motion picture ratings authority initially wanted several scenes removed, but relented in the face of Kolle’s determination to change nothing. Belgian and Swiss authorities did not, however, but censorship in those countries hardly was noticed as the movie went on to become a bona-fide box-office hit across the rest of Europe.

According to Kolle’s website, more than 140 million people worldwide have seen his eight films.

Kolle, his wife and three children moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s to escape harassment in his childhood home of Frankfurt. He remained a proud Dutch citizen until his death, though by 2008 he admitted having seen significant change in Germany’s traditional attitudes toward sex.

“Germany today is already just as free and tolerant as my chosen home,” he told the German news agency DPS that year.

In 2000, the German Society for Social-Scientific Sexuality Research awarded Kolle the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for outstanding service to sexual science.

Kolle’s wife died in 2000. He is survived by his partner and three children.