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What sex shops tell us about change in the East
The director of the Contemporary History Forum in Leipzig, Uta Bretschneider, has traveled through East Germany with the historian Jens Schöne in recent years and conducted interviews with sex shop operators. The result appeared as a book under the title “Provinzlust”. photo
© Bodo Schackow/dpa
They once promised big money, but today they are the last of their kind: sex shops in East Germany. Some of the operators’ stories sound like something out of a movie. And tell a lot about the change.
If a screenwriter had come up with Andreas Weidhaas’ story, it might have been rejected as too clichéd. It’s about the turning point, sex, big money and decline. Of course everything with authentic Eastern props.
But it’s also about the present and the question: what to tell Sex shops in the countryside, like the one Weidhaas still runs today, are actually about the changes in the eastern German states? And are we more uptight today than we were back then?
Anyone looking for an answer to these questions will find it in the small town of Oettersdorf in the southeast of Thuringia and not far from the border with Bavaria. Weidhaas has been running an erotic shop here since mid-1990. Together with a business partner, he set up a mail order business in the garage of his parents’ house, obtained a business registration for 17 Ostmarks and placed his first advertisement in the newspaper.
Money rush in the early days
What followed was a rush of money that the 64-year-old is still amazed at today: “People put 300, 400, 500 marks in the envelope and ordered things. We were able to practically drive the money out here in a wheelbarrow.” The extensive renovation of his house was no longer an issue after that. “And all without credit.”
At some point the garage became too small and the mail order business became too expensive. So they bought a customs station at the border that was no longer needed from customs, drove it home in the Wartburg in pieces and rebuilt it in the garden. This is how the first stationary sex shop was created in Oettersdorf. With lingerie shows in the community hall or dildo presents to the mayor in the festival tent, as Weidhaas says with a smile.
Uta Bretschneider has heard stories like this many times. In recent years, the director of the Contemporary History Forum in Leipzig has traveled through East Germany together with the historian Jens Schöne and conducted interviews with sex shop operators. The result was recently published as a book entitled “Provinzlust”.
In the GDR, the distribution of pornography and therefore also sex shops were forbidden, says Bretschneider. With the change came the big time for trying things out: “There was a lot of new beginnings.” Self-employment was finally possible, and people were hoping for big money. “The things were incredibly expensive back then, with VHS cassettes sometimes selling for several hundred marks.”
The shame was briefly forgotten
Curiosity probably also led people to forget their shame to some extent. In the past, people would have rummaged through the boxes of VHS tapes, says Bretschneider. Today the door will be closed behind the customers. “It seems that in this spirit of optimism, the issue of discretion was somewhat left out.”
Shops have also been set up in many rural regions, in some villages two or three. There is no official number, but in one source she read that there were once 1,800 shops in the eastern German states. She thinks that’s realistic, says Bretschneider. Today there are still a few dozen owner-managed shops in the east.
This means that the sex shops in the East are no different than elsewhere in Germany. There are no concrete figures nationwide about the decline in stationary stores. But industry representatives have been complaining for years about fewer and fewer stores and competition from the Internet: free streaming services, for example, that reduce the revenue from porn. Or online retailers like eis.de, which, according to the retail research institute EHI, was ranked 60th among the trading platforms with the highest sales in Germany in 2022.
The decline: “Better a bread than a dildo”
And yet there is also a large piece of transformation history in the decline of many shops in East Germany, as Bretschneider says. After the short phase of uninhibited curiosity, reality quickly set in. Unemployment was rampant and there was a lack of prospects for the future. “Then people had to say to themselves: ‘I’d rather buy bread than a dildo’.” Internet trading then triggered the second wave of deaths.
Those who stuck with it often did so out of a certain pragmatism – what you start, you finish, says Bretschneider. But this was only possible in your own properties and usually with a sideline. Some shops are adjacent to arcades; in Herzberg in Brandenburg, someone runs a sex shop and a fish shop. And the spiral staircase up to Andreas Weidhaas’s current premises also begins in his fur shop on the ground floor.
The uninhibited times are now over. Weidhaas wants to give up the business next year. Now maybe three to four customers come to him every week, he says. Mainly older people, but sometimes also young people who are looking for a quick birthday present. His best seller is a standard vibrator. “We’re a province. Women here don’t want vibrators with twelve levels and three attachments.” But for many people it’s actually about something completely different: “People just want to talk. They don’t have anyone with whom they can talk about their preferences.”