HOME


"Ford exposes drug use, mob connections and murder plots..." Evan Wright, Rolling Stone

"There's a kind of low-key genius..." Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood-Elsewhere.com

"Serious history of the dirty-movie business." Booklist

 


The world's most powerful pornographer may be Beate Uhse, a German woman.

Shortly after Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, Uhse flew out of Berlin's Gatow airport, just ahead of Red Army advanced units, to the only part of Germany not yet in the hands of Allied forces, Flensburg, 250 miles north west of Berlin.

Beate's husband had been killed on a night-fighter mission towards the end of the war. Her parents had died at the hands of the Russians advancing into East Prussia where she'd grown up.

At 25 years of age, Beate had a two-year old boy to look after and 200 Reichsmarks to her name.

"There were a great many refugees there, women alone, with and without children. A village of 300 people was trying to cope with thousands. And when the war finally ended the men began to turn up, men who had survived the war and had gradually been released from prisoner-of-war camps. In those first days there was enormous joy, then after six weeks - tears and misery because they were having a baby. In Germany at that time there was no bread and butter, no cooking pots, no flannels and towels - nothing; and no contraceptives. So they were stuck there. They had lost their homes, the man had no job, he'd been a soldier for five years, and now there was a baby on the way. It was a total catastrophe."

Nazism had discouraged contraception and sex education. But Beate knew about that stuff from her mother - one of the first five women in Germany to qualify as a doctor. She'd told Beate about the rhythym method, a way of calculating a woman's fertility days in her menstrual cycle. Uhse printed up several thousand copies of a book on the subject which she sold for two Reichsmarks. Business boomed and soon she sold other books, contraceptives and sex aids.

In 1962, Uhse opened the world's first sex shop, named Sex Institute for Marital Hygiene in Flensburg. Within a decade every major German city had one. Income from them allowed Beate to pay for a new company premises in Flensburg which the Mayor opened in 1969, saying that "People can work here with pleasure and love for the business of pleasure and love."

In 1975 West Germany legalized hardcore, but it could only be bought in shops, not through the mail. So Beate began stocking fully explicit magazines and films, many of them from Scandinavia. She then opened movie theaters where she played X-rated features.

By the 1980s, all three of her sons worked in the family business. One of them, Uli Rotermund, tried to establish a chain of retail porn in the US. David Friedman remembers. "Beate Uhse tried to set up business in the USA. She was about as welcome here as a case of hives.'

None of the established US chains would sell Beate's movies. "Someone called Uli and pointed out how unfortunate it would be for business if he kept finding bodies in his auditoriums," says one source. Uhse eventually pulled out of the US after losing $500,000. (Porn Gold)