Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse

The name of Beate Uhse evokes—probably in many Germans of my own generation, born in the 1970s—a certain sense of shopworn erotic excitement. Elizabeth Heineman, who teaches History at the University of Iowa, successfully familiarizes an English-speaking audience with this special phenomenon. In her book about erotic consumption as a core dimension of the history of sexuality in West Germany after 1945, she skilfully avoids either ridiculing or glorifying Beate Rotermund (1919–2001) who ran one of the Federal Republic’s largest and most successful erotica firms under the name of her first husband. Three of the chapters, which act as prelude, interlude and postlude, are dedicated to ‘The Beate Uhse Myth’ and its different elements: her mother who was a physician and sex reformer in the 1920s, her early career in the Nazi Luftwaffe, her resilience as a widowed mother in the rubble years, her building a successful erotica business and a happy family in the 1950s, her divorcing her second husband in the 1970s and establishing ‘a long-term relationship with an African-American man who was a generation her junior’ (p. x), her being attacked by antipornography feminists in the 1980s and her distributing porn among the East–German population right after the fall of the wall. In the light of this trajectory, it does not come as a surprise that diverging versions of Uhse’s biography were time and again used by different groups and generations to reconstruct and promote specific understandings of German history in the twentieth century—with shopworn excitement potentially being one of them.