Supermarket for Eros

Beate Uhse, a 49-year-old blonde, has built a mail-order house and chain of supermarkets into one of the fastest-growing retail businesses in West Germany.

Since 1964, her sales have almost tripled to a peak last year of more than $6,000,000. She claims to have 2,000,000 steady customers and ten times as many occasional ones. Yet Beate is some thing of a social outcast. The West German Association of Women Entrepreneurs has resolutely refused to admit her to membership. Church leaders regularly denounce her. Even the tennis club in Flensburg near her home will not allow her to join.

The problem is that Beate's business is sex-- pure and adorned. From a head quarters in Flensburg and eleven stores in cities across the country, she markets some 1,500 prurient products designed for those who believe that sex improves with aid. Her wares include a wide assortment of contraceptives, special-formula bonbons that are supposed to make reluctant fraeuleins more cooperative, "quick-lift" panties, battery-operated stimulators priced at $9 each, and even creams to control male timing in sex. "Together to the Peak of Happiness," exhorts Beate's blue-tinted catalogue. To make the journey more enjoyable, she supplies a variety of love potions, creams, sprays and contraptions that purportedly stimulate sex, prolong it or render it more efficient.

Like a Pharmacy. Her self-service stores, which are divided into departments by large signs that make them resemble supermarkets, can hardly keep up with the demand. The one in Stuttgart has been so busy since it opened last December that at least once a day the manager hangs out a sign that reads, "Closed for a few minutes because of overcrowding." When that happens, people gather on the street and gawk at the merchandise in the windows. As customers come out with their red-and-white shopping bags labeled "Beate Uhse," more stream into the store. The interior looks as antiseptic as a pharmacy. The customers, 95% of them men, browse among shelves that display everything from erotic classics (Fanny Hill and Frank Harris' My Life and Loves) to reels of film with such titles as Intimate Glimpses of Six Swedish Girls.

If he proceeds to an inner sanctum of the store, the shopper can look at even raunchier merchandise, including a dozen kinds of rubber phalli in varying sizes. According to the manager of the Stuttgart store, Beate's son Ulli, such Deutsche Wertarbeit (German quality workmanship) is particularly popular with French tourists.

While Beate's firm makes a few of the items that it sells, most of them come from other manufacturers at home and abroad. From Beate's headquarters in Flensburg, 200 employees (70% of them women) each day mail no fewer than 13,000 orders in anonymous brown wrappers to customers in Germany and other countries. (So far, Beate has not tried to capture a share of the U.S. market.) Her book-of-the-month club has just come out with its second selection, Helga and Bernd Demonstrate 100 Love Positions. The $4.95 book is illustrated with photographs of models clothed in tights. On top of a 50,000-copy advance sale, eager customers bought 70,000 copies when the book reached Beate's shelves last week.

Unabashed Salesmanship. Beate, who flew fighter planes from the factory to the front for the Luftwaffe during World War II, started her business soon after Germany's defeat. Shrewdly realizing that Germans were eager to avoid having children because of food and housing shortages, she began cribbing contraceptive data from a medical tome and selling the information by mail. Her success is based on thorough organization and unabashed salesmanship. Uhse sales clerks, for example, are all trained to casually enunciate such words as penis and orgasm without flinching.

Beate's entire family is involved in the enterprise. Her sons Ulli, 20, Klaus, 25, and Dirk, 24, all appear as nude models in one of their mother's bestselling books, Sons of the Sun, a pinup collection of male nudes. Her second husband, Ernst Walter Rotermund, concentrates on "long-range planning." To assure quality, says Beate, "we never put out any product that we haven't tried first in the family."

Some of her hardware no doubt appeals to the abnormal. Plainclothes police frequently prowl through her stores looking for illegal merchandise. Beate herself has appeared in court about 20 times to answer charges against her, but has been convicted only twice. The last time, she was fined $1,500 for selling obscene goods through the mail. The remarkable thing about her enterprise is that it operates--and advertises--like other successful retail chains. While she does not consider herself a missionary of sex, Beate does argue that she is helping to break down old taboos in her country. "When we started, there were more than 100 outfits in the business," she says. "But they kept sex under the table. We were willing to bring it out and not be ashamed of it."

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