Table Of ContentBefore Porn Was Legal
Before
Porn
Was
the erotica
empire of
Legal
beate uhse
Elizabeth
Heineman
University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Elizabeth Heineman is associate professor in the Department of
History and in the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality
Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of What Difference
Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and
Postwar Germany and editor of Sexual Violence in Confl ict Zones:
From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011
Printed in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 32521-7 (cloth)
ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 32521- 0 (cloth)
Much of chapter 3 appeared as “The Economic Miracle in
the Bedroom: Big Business and Sexual Consumer Culture in
Reconstruction West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 4
(2006): 846–77. Much of chapter 4 appeared as “ ‘The History of Morals
in the Federal Republic’: Advertising, PR, and the Beate Uhse Myth,”
in Selling Modernity: Advertising in T wentieth- Century Germany, ed.
Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 202–29.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Heineman, Elizabeth D., 1962–
Before porn was legal : the erotica empire of Beate Uhse / Elizabeth
Heineman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 32521-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN- 10: 0- 226- 32521- 0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Uhse, Beate, 1919–
2001. 2. Beate Uhse A.G. 3. Businesswomen—Germany—Biography.
4. Sex- oriented businesses—Germany—History—20th century.
5. Women-o wned business enterprises—Germany—History—20th
century. 6. Pornography—Germany—History—20th century. I. Title.
HQ18.32.U47H45 2011
306.77092—dc22
[B]
2010030713
o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992.
acknowledgments vii
prelude: The Beate Uhse Myth ix
Contents
1 Introduction: Sex, Consumption, and
German History 1
2 The Permissive Prudish State 27
3 The Economic Miracle in the
Bedroom 61
4 Interlude: The Beate Uhse Myth 87
5 The Sex Wave 101
6 The Porn Wave 129
7 Postlude: The Beate Uhse Myth 161
interviews 179
abbreviations 181
notes 183
index 219
Acknowledgments
I accumulated many debts in the writing of this book. Let me fi rst acknowl-
edge the fi nancial ones. The following agencies helped to fund my research:
the National Endowment for the Humanities (FA- 36988- 02), the German Ac-
ademic Exchange Service, the Howard Foundation, the State of Iowa Arts
and Humanities Initiative, Faculty Scholar and Dean’s Scholar awards from
the University of Iowa, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Univer-
sity of Iowa, and International Programs at the University of Iowa.
Many archivists, librarians, and scholars helped me to work through vast
quantities of paper in state, church, university, and private archives and li-
braries. I would like to thank Anja Adelt, Ursula Brendt, Gerhard Fürmetz,
Erwin J. Haeberle, Friederike Johann, Susanne Krejsa, Nadine Müller, Volk-
mar Sigusch, and Rainer Stahlschmidt. I had the extraordinary fortune to
gain access to internal records of many erotica fi rms as well as the indus-
try’s interest group during the course of this research. For their willingness
to share industry papers with me, I thank Jörg Dagies, Irmgard Hill, Uwe
Kaltenberg, Gesa Münzmaier, Claus Richter, Dirk Rotermund, Ulrich Roter-
mund, Gerhard Schmitz, Jörg Schröder, Lore Schumacher, and Jürgen We-
ber. Many individuals shared private papers or erotica libraries with me but
preferred to remain anonymous. I thank them for their generosity.
One side product of this project was the creation of the Beate- Uhse Ar-
chive and a library of sexual science at the Forschungsstelle für Zeitge-
schichte in Hamburg (FZH). Irmgard Hill and Ulrich Rotermund generously
donated papers from Beate Uhse (the fi rm) and Beate Rotermund (the per-
son), and Jörg Dagies contributed the valuable sexological library of the Wal-
ter Schäfer Gruppe. The director and deputy director of the FZH, Axel Schildt
and Dorothee Wierling, committed resources to the processing and storage
of the new collections. Librarian Karl-O tto Schütt processed the new library
acquisitions, and Linde Apel arranged for the transcription and storage of
viii acknowledgments
interviews. My deepest thanks go to archivist Angelika Voß- Louis, who pro-
cessed and cataloged the voluminous collection from Beate Uhse.
Justin Bartsch and Christine Brandenburger provided research assistance
at early stages of this project. Javier Samper Vendrell helped to edit a portion
of the manuscript, and Amy Braun meticulously examined the galley proofs.
I am especially grateful to Matthew Conn for his careful reading of the fi nal
manuscript and his work on the index.
Many scholars offered encouragement, provided feedback on drafts,
shared tips and sources, or organized conference panels or lectures that al-
lowed me to share preliminary fi ndings. These included Doris Bergen, Frank
Biess, Belinda Davis, Glenn Ehrstine, Jennifer Evans, Peter Fritzsche, Michael
Geyer, Dagmar Herzog, Paul Jaskot, Ralph Jessen, Paul Lerner, Josie McClel-
lan, Sonja Michel, Maria Mitchell, Robert Moeller, Thomas Pegelow, Sven Re-
ichardt, Bernhard Rieger, Julia Roos, Johanna Schoen, Detlef Siegfried, Julia
Sneeringer, Pamela Swett, Annette Timm, Richard Wetzell, Dorothee Wier-
ling, Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan Zatlin. I am sure there are others who
deserve similar thanks; with a project of such duration, it becomes diffi cult
to keep track. I thank anyone whom I inadvertently omitted from this list.
Despite the passage of time since graduate school, I continue to discover
ever more ways I profi ted from the wisdom and engagement of my mentors,
Konrad Jarausch, Gerhard Weinberg, and Judith Bennett. In more recent
years, I have benefi ted from my humane and intellectually lively colleagues
in the Department of History and the Department of Gender, Women’s, and
Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. I thank Douglas Mitchell of the
University of Chicago Press for his commitment to this project and Kathy
Gohl and Carol Saller for their careful editorial work.
In a household in which the personal, the political, the professional,
and the scholarly mingle in impenetrable ways, fi rst Johanna Schoen and
then Glenn Ehrstine were partners in every sense of the word, and I thank
them both. Members of the extended Schoen family welcomed me into their
homes and made my research trips personally as well as intellectually re-
warding, and my own family of origin politely declined to remind me just
how long I’ve been working on this book. When I informed my son Josh that
this book would appear in print in the imminent future, he declared that he
couldn’t remember a time when Beate Uhse had not been part of his life. It
must be a strange thing to grow up as the child of sexuality studies scholars.
I only hope he has learned as much from me as I have from him.
Prelude
The Beate Uhse Myth
To begin, a brief biography of the most famous German to remain unknown
to Americans: Beate Uhse.
Beate Köstlin was born in 1921 to a lawyer and one of Germany’s fi rst female
physicians. After the birth of the second child, the family decamped from
Berlin to an East Prussian estate. Here Beate grew up as an athletic, outdoorsy
child. The Köstlins provided their children with a progressive upbringing,
including encouragement for daughters as well as sons to chart their own life
courses, an open education in sexual matters, and, in Beate’s case, a stint at
a Waldorf boarding school. After a year as an au pair in England, Beate, long
fascinated by fl ight, decided to get her pilot’s license. She was the only young
woman in her class of sixty.
When the Second World War began, all licensed pilots were inducted
into the Luftwaffe. Women did not fl y combat missions, but Beate fl ew test
fl ights and ferried planes to the front. She married her fl ight instructor, Klaus
Uhse, had a child, and became a widow when Klaus died in a fl ight accident.
With the Soviets surrounding Berlin in April 1945, Uhse commandeered
a rickety plane, loaded the baby and nanny on board, and fl ew west. She
crash- landed in the sandy dunes of Schleswig- Holstein, Germany’s north-
ernmost province.
After a stint in a prisoner- of- war camp (she was released because of the
baby), she turned, like so many others, to the black market to survive. Here
she specialized, initially, in children’s toys. Soon, however, she learned of an
even greater need: contraception. In those desperate years right after the war,
pregnancy could be a catastrophe. Beate penned a brochure explaining the
rhythm method. Grateful customers snapped up the brochure and asked for
other items, like condoms and books on sexuality. Banned, as all Germans
were, from fl ying, Beate Uhse had found her second calling.
Piece by piece, Uhse built the world’s largest erotica empire. In the 1950s,
