The sex empire started with an unsuccessful hair restorer. Nobody wanted to buy the substance that Beate Uhse brought to the market with her husband Ernst-Walter ("Ewe") Rothermund after the war. So in 1947 she wrote the famous "Schrift X". In the small booklet Uhse spread basic knowledge about cycle and period, she also explained the "Knaus Ogino method", at that time mocked as "Vatican Roulette".
"It should be the natural right of every human being to determine the size of his family according to their social circumstances," wrote Uhse. Their "typeface X" became a blockbuster: the duo Uhse-Rothermund sold 32,000 copies in the first year and sent them to private homes for two marks and 70 pfennigs.
Soon, people craved more. More information and insights, more contraceptive options. So the couple began to sell contraceptives. This was followed by pleasure donations such as "Kraft Bonbons" and Erotin-Dragees ", the dildo" Sorgenfrei "or the negligee" Paola "In 1962 the first sex shop in the world opened in Flensburg under the name" Beate Uhse - Fachgeschäft für Ehehygiene ".
No question: Beate Uhse had instigated a revolution in the sleeping quarters of the postwar period. But was she therefore a champion of feminism, as many claim? Not at all, is the conclusion of the journalist and blogger Katrin Rönicke in her readable new biography "Beate Uhse: A life against taboos".
Dolls drowned her in the bathtub
Rönicke emphasizes: "The longer I dealt with Beate and the history of the Beate Uhse company, the clearer it became to me: this is anything but the emancipation story of a post-1945 woman who fights for the sexual freedom and happiness of people."
Uhse was first and foremost a tough business woman, writes Rönicke. And the "Scripture X" less a liberating manifesto than a way to feed the hungry and poverty-stricken family.
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Beate Uhse: pilot, entrepreneur, Sauberfrau of sexUhse, born on 25 October 1919 as Beate Köstlin in East Prussia, was a very obstinate personality. She grew up on a Prussian estate and had two siblings, the mother was a doctor, the father farmer. The parents believed in progress and independence - for both was Beates unusual desire to become a pilot, no problem.
At an early age she resisted conventions she could not handle. When her sister locked up little Beate in the bathroom so that she should start playing with dolls "like a real girl" instead of dreaming about flying, the girl drowned the "shit dolls" in the bathtub.
With assertiveness and great self-confidence, she started in her pilot career. Beate met her first husband, Hans-Jürgen Uhse, in the flight school. In the Second World War she flew for the German Air Force and transferred war planes to deployment bases.
As a mother Beate Uhse would not have to fly, but wanted it. Although she never publicly proclaimed herself to Hitler and was not a member of the party, she participated in the machinery of the regime: the pilot stood for propaganda films in front of the camera and doubled well-known actors like René Deltgen in dangerous stunt scenes.
Uhse knitted the myth itself
At the end of the war she came into British captivity for six weeks - and typed shortly after the first "font X". Uhse transfigured her to the emancipatory proclamation written by a woman who was primarily concerned with equal rights and education. Katrin Rönicke, however, sees in it a "pure business idea (...), maybe even usury".
Everyone from Beate Uhse's environment, with whom Rönicke spoke during the research, would have told her that the entrepreneur never had much left for women. "So why limit your own opportunities to make money for a few members of the sexes that Beate did not respect too much anyway?" Rönicke asks. Uhse it was simply about sales gone - and a good picture in the media.
Especially in the first two decades of the company, Beate Uhse staged the woman as a new, important component of the sexual debate in the young Federal Republic. She emphasized in her catalogs: "Surely you can imagine that it is not possible for me as a woman to promote the happiness of women and the preservation of marriage without great idealism in this way." A new feminist era had dawned, at the top: the erotic queen.
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Beate Uhse: A life against taboos
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Some media even spoke of the "hour of the woman" - ideal for Uhse, because now they could develop their advertising strategy in the media landscape, not only in their catalogs. The company has been distributing its life story to journalists since the 1950s - they readily swallowed history.
According to US historian Elisabeth Heineman, fulfilled marriage and sex life in the fifties and sixties was seen by the German media public as a tried and tested means of fighting totalitarianism. Uhse carried this idea forward, without feeling cold; According to self-promotion, the entrepreneur's main concern was to uphold the social common good.
For this she was still a woman and able to stage herself uncoupled from her Nazi past. According to Heineman, this "Beate-Uhse myth" allowed the West German public to exemplify the arduous path of a war-torn nation.
"Frau Saubermann of the German Sex Shop"
Numerous court cases led to a constant increase in public interest in Beate Uhse and the myth could be further consolidated. In the first ten years alone, she has been in court more than 25 times. In total, the judiciary carried out around 400 criminal cases against Uhse's empire, mostly for "aiding and abetting" according to a 1919 penal paragraph.
The Enlightenment staged, however, with the time in the background, until it finally disappeared, at least as far as the practices of the company. Previously enthusiastic media now expressed much more critical. Uhse's advertising department was drilled to "introduce her as a kind of woman Saubermann of the German sex business," wrote Der Spiegel in 1971, "but the image that Beate Uhse can be designed by himself is retouched."
The company, which had meanwhile dedicated itself entirely to the film business, commented laconically: "We could not ignore the new needs of our customers." The customers meant the now almost purely male target group, who wanted staged bad movies, partly full of violence. Women became more and more of a means to an end in these streaks - but worthwhile for the company: 1974 was an outstanding year for Beate Uhse and a confirmation of being on the right track.
Feminists protested, especially Alice Schwarzer. With the 1987 campaign by the magazine "Emma" campaign "PorNo" they tried to obtain a law against violence-glorifying and misogynistic pornography, but without success. Beate Uhse was accused of betraying her own sex in favor of profit.
In 2001, she died at the age of 81 years and did not live to see how her company drove into bankruptcy in 2017. The criticism had always rebounded on Beate Uhse - also because she never understood herself as the idealist to whom she was stylized throughout her life by the advertising department and the media. "She does business with sex, is harshly attacked by feminists, who accuse her of misogyny and the degradation of women as an object of desire, she sees quite relaxed," summed up the "time" 1985. Because she confesses quite frankly: "I am not Jesus but entrepreneurs. "
