Summary:
Beate Uhse, a pioneering German entrepreneur, built Europe's largest erotic goods empire after starting as a post-war widow selling birth control pamphlets. Her business grew into a publicly traded company with international shops and a sex museum, reflecting and capitalizing on shifting social attitudes toward sexuality in Europe. She died in 2001 at age 81 from pneumonia.
Main Topics Covered:
- Beate Uhse's life and career as an entrepreneur in the erotic goods industry.
- The growth and scale of her business, including its public listing and diverse operations.
- The changing legal and social landscape regarding sexuality in 20th-century Germany.
Supported by
Women’s History Month
From 2001: Beate Uhse, 81, Entrepreneur in the Business of Erotic Goods
She developed Europe’s biggest emporium of erotic goods and opened a three-story sex museum in Germany.
This obituary was originally published on July 22, 2001. It is being republished in preparation for a package for Women’s History Month.
Beate Uhse, who as a destitute war widow sold birth control pamphlets from a bicycle before going on to develop Europe’s biggest emporium of erotic goods, died on Monday in a hospital in Switzerland. She was 81.
Her company, Beate Uhse A.G., based in the northern German city of Flensburg, said the cause was pneumonia.
She personified the revolution in sexual attitudes that spread across Europe during her lifetime. And her business career began in a time when selling contraceptives to the unmarried was illegal in Germany, as were sexually explicit materials.
Undeterred by scrapes with the law, she flourished when social and legal barriers fell. As staid German attitudes mellowed, her frank, humorous nature and business acumen gained her a degree of respect.
At her death she headed the supervisory board of Beate Uhse A.G., which had reported $100 million in annual revenues at the approach of 2000. The company is listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange, employs 1,000 people and runs strings of boutiques and cinemas, a mail-order house and a film studio.
Her shops, which extend from Poland to Portugal, sell everything from contraceptives to sex toys, from movies to lingerie, though she drew the line at sadomasochism.
In 1996, Beate Uhse (pronounced bay-AH-teh OO-zeh) opened a three-story sex museum not far from the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. The museum contains more than 3,000 objects, ranging from kitsch to 17th-century Asian art.
Most recently, her business, ranked 79th among publicly traded German companies, was said to be taking a fresh look at the American market. And to counter the business’s invasion of gasoline stations, German church leaders were envisioning setting up chapels along highways.
Beate Köstlin was born in October 1919 in what then was German East Prussia. As a girl, she idolized Charles Lindbergh and as a teenager learned to fly. Among the first women allowed to fly fighter planes for the Luftwaffe, she ferried aircraft to the front lines during World War II. She married another pilot, Hans-Jürgen Uhse, who was killed in the war, as were her parents.
At war’s end in 1945, with the Soviet Army approaching Berlin, she flew north with her 2-year-old son and wound up with thousands of other refugees in a small town near the Danish border. She tried to support herself and her child by selling toys, but soon realized that the women around her needed advice about birth control.
The subject had been taboo in Hitler’s Germany and condoms were difficult to find. So she bicycled from village to village with mimeographed sheets telling what she had learned from books and from her mother, who was a doctor, about the rhythm method.
She soon added contraceptives and used mail drops to advertise her inventory, which filled eight pages by 1949. The campaign covered West Germany and included brochures with advice on sex.
She bought a publishing house, built a printing plant and in 1962 opened her first shop in Flensburg. Others followed in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin, but it was in 1975 that the liberalization of West German laws admitted her to the big leagues of commerce.
Long shunned by conservatives and feminists alike, she claimed vindication in 1999 when the symbol of Beate Uhse A. G. — USE — crossed the board of the Frankfurt stock exchange.
“What I am happiest about,” she told the German news agency DPA that year, “is that we have in the last 50 years succeeded not only greatly in business, but also in being accepted in society.”
To preserve archival articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
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