Second Career: Businesswoman
Beate Uhse's career as a pilot ended after the war: former members of the Luftwaffe were not permitted to fly. The young widow therefore had to find some other way to earn money to feed her son. First, she made a living on the black market. She was selling products door-to-door and met many housewives and learned of their problems: the men returning from the front were impregnating their wives, not caring that there was "no apartment, no income and no future" for the kids. Many of the women went to untrained abortionists. Beate Uhse remembered lectures her mother (who had died during the war) had given her on sexuality, sexual hygiene and contraception. She searched for information on the Knaus-Ogino method of contraception (rhythm method), and put together a brochure which explained to the women how to identify their fertile and infertile days.
By 1947 she had sold "Pamphlet X" 32,000 times through her "Betu" mail order company, and began to expand to larger cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. Many people wrote her letters, to ask for advice on sexuality and eroticism. "These people were unaware of the facts of life," she wrote in her autobiography. Soon she was also selling condoms and "marriage guides."
In 1951, with four employees, she started the "Beate Uhse Mail Order" company, offering condoms and books on "marital hygiene." Just two years later, the company had fourteen employees. Beate Uhse married retailer Ernst-Walter Rotermund and had a second child, Ulrich.
In 1962, in Flensburg, she opened her "speciality store for marital hygiene," the first sex store in the world. She offered, both in her store and her catalog, more and more "articles for marital hygiene." Soon the police began acting against the items in her store which supposedly served to "inflame and satisfy lustful desires in a manner contrary to decency and morality." By the year 1992, her store had been indicted more than 2,000 times. She was also discriminated against by other organizations: the "Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels" (a financial organization of the German book industry) refused to admit her Stephensen publishing house due to "moral concerns." The Flensburger tennis club refused to admit her due to "general concerns."
In 1979 she divorced her second husband. In 1983, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, but survived. At age seventy-five she obtained a diving license. In 1996, she fulfilled a long-held dream, and opened the Beate Uhse Erotic Museum in Berlin. Three years later, in 1999, her company, Beate Uhse AG, was listed on the German stock exchange and was met with great interest in the financial community. The stock went up to sixty-four times its initial offering price. The stock certificates are greatly desired because of the depiction of two scantily dressed women.
Uhse died of pneumonia in a clinic in St. Gallen, Switzerland in 2001.
Like Oswalt Kolle, Uhse was one of the most important people for sexual liberation in the German-speaking world. In 1989 she received the "Bundesverdienstkreuz" (German Cross of Merit), and in 1999 she was declared an honorary citizen of the city of Flensburg.
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