She opened the first sex shop in the world: Who is Beate Uhse?

She was born as Beate Köstlin (maiden name) in Wargenau, East Prussia, as the youngest of three children of a farm owner father and a medical doctor mother. After finishing primary school, twelve-year-old Beate was enrolled in a boarding school in Juist. While attending school in Oberhambach an der Bergstrasse, this young girl, who was passionate about sports, won the Hessea state junior championship in javelin throwing and joined both the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth) and BDM Bund Deutscher Maedel (German Girls' Union).

Although her mother wanted her daughter to study medicine, Beate left her education after a year and went to England as an au pair (babysitter/household helper). After completing her internship at home, Beate, who turned 17, was able to realize her long-awaited desire to become a pilot. After receiving her flying badge near Berlin, she passed her aerobatic flight exam in 1938 and entered an aircraft factory as a trainee.

Beate Uhse-Rotermund (25 October 1919 – 16 July 2001) was a German pilot, entrepreneur and sex pioneer. She was one of the very few female stunt pilots in Germany in the 1930s. During World War II she ferried planes for the German Luftwaffe and after World War II she started a sex shop. The company she started, Beate Uhse AG, is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Thanks to her good relations with the German Aeroclub, she participated in international competitions with a national team and soon began to test pilot new planes, and also performed acrobatic flights for the Ufa Film Company, acting as a stuntman for her cinema idol, Hans Albers.

Beate married flight instructor Hans Uhse four weeks after the Second World War broke out. Her husband was immediately sent to the front. The 20-year-old young woman also took Air Force planes to places where they would be put into war after 1940. She became a mother for the first time in 1943. Her husband died in a night clash in the same year. Widowed, Beate returned to the front as a captain. In 1945, she and her son took refuge from Berlin via Lübeck to Leck on the Danish border to escape from the Red Army, where the British captured her.

Sexual Counseling with “X Text”

The fact that many of the women around her became unintentionally pregnant in the days after the war motivated Uhse to publish a pamphlet. Here she explained the Knaus-Ogino Method (a natural method of preventing pregnancy by calculating the fertile and non-fertile days).

This brochure, which Uhse called "Article X", was successful and left him a profit of 1 DM per order after the currency reform (July 1948). Uhse moved to the St Marien Parish in Flensburg and founded her company with her second husband, Ernst-Walter Rotermund (they married in 1949; they divorced in 1972 and had a child together), who sold hair tonics by mail.

As more people sought advice from him, she added enlightening sex books and condoms to her mail-in distribution program. It did not take long for Rotermund to become known to the Flensburg police, as citizens who believed they were being harassed by the advertising brochures she sent by mail frequently complained.

The young entrepreneur then started mailing her brochures in sealed envelopes. She registered her company in the trade registry in 1951. For the first time, she hired some staff, rented a larger space, and went on the offensive. From now on, she will attach her own photograph to all advertising materials she sends out so that those seeking help will not have to turn to an anonymous person.

Sexuality and sexual enlightenment were taboo topics in Germany in the 50s and 60s. For this reason, the number of cases filed against Rotermund, who was accused of her "immorality" by the courthouse, and state and church authorities, was increasing. At the same time, the Beate-Uhse-Mail-Sale trade was also growing, as the demands of customers and those who wanted to learn were increasing.

“Stimmt in unserer Ehe alles?” Her catalog on sexual enlightenment and erection ointments, which she sold under the name "Is Everything Going Well in Our Marriage?", broke sales records in 1952. Its turnover exceeded the one million mark for the first time in 1956.

Rotermund expanded its product range with erotic underwear sewn by itself. The world's first sex shop, which Rotermund opened in Flensburg in 1962, was followed by others opened in all major cities.

The pornography charges against the Beace-Uhse company came to a head for the first time when the book Die Memoiren der Fanny Hill (The Memoirs of Fanny Hill) was included in the sales program. With the start of student movements, society took on a more liberal atmosphere, and taboos were broken.

Instead, friction arose with the women's movement, which accused Rotermund of betraying women's interests and tried in vain to impose harsher pornographic criminal law. The reason for this was that Rotermund got into the porn business after 1972. After 1975, porn movies also followed. After cancer surgery in 1983, businesswoman Rotermund took up her job at the company she has been managing with her son ever since.