Beate Uhse (4 Stars)

Beate Uhse was born as Beate Köstlin in East Prussia in 1919. She died in 2001. This film follows her life from 1945 to 1972, the years in which she built up her business from a single room to a multi-million dollar empire. Franka Potente plays the film's title role as a fighter for women's rights. As she often proclaimed, "Every woman has the right to an orgasm". This might sound strange today, but in comparison, a study in 1959 revealed that over 30% of women had never had an orgasm.

At the age of 18 Beate was a pilot. She had the distinction of being Germany's only female stunt pilot. When the second world war began she was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where she worked training pilots. After the Russians conquered Berlin she was raped by Russian soldiers, so she stole a plane and flew to Flensburg, an area occupied by the British forces. Unlike other war criminals she was soon released without "denazification", because women weren't considered to be a serious threat.

In 1947, while she was living as a refugee in a Flensburg pastor's house, she realised that the pastor's daughters had no idea about sex. She wrote a pamphlet, "Die Schrift X", in which she described how to have sex without becoming pregnant. At first she sold this pamphlet by hand in the immediate neighbourhood, but then advertised and mailed it throughout Germany. This pamphlet remained her main income for two years, after which she began to sell condoms by mail, and then other sex aids such as lubrication. This led her into problems with the law and the church. At that time it was still illegal for unmarried people to have sex, and by selling condoms to unmarried people she was encouraging them to commit crimes.

Beate fought and won thousands of court cases. During this time her business multiplied in size. After 15 years as a mail order company she opened the world's first sex shop in 1962 in Flensburg. She rode on the wave of the sexual revolution of the 1960's, even though she often said that she did not support free love. Beate recommended monogamous relationships, and she intended her sex aids to be used to make monogamy less boring. By the middle of the 1990's German culture had changed, and her business was acceptable. She received many industry awards, and after her death in 2001 a street in Flensburg was named after her.

The DVD includes an interview with Beate Uhse recorded in 1998. The real Beate contradicts some of the points of the film. In the film she is portrayed as an idealist who wanted to help women everywhere. In the interview she says clearly that her main reason for her work was economic. After the war German nationals were not allowed to fly planes, so she needed to find another career. She saw sex education as a profitable market. She said that she was praised by feminists as a champion of women's rights, but in actual fact she was just doing a hard day's work. Ironically, in the 1980's feminists turned against her and accused her of being misogynistic, due to her practice of using photos of naked women for advertising. This is a typical German problem. It's common in certain circles to call pictures of naked women "frauenfeindlich" (the German word for misogynistic is more expressive, so I don't like to translate it). This isn't just a matter of feminism, it's due to a type of "Verklemmtheit" (totally untranslatable, the closest English word is "uptightness") among some women.

As I understand Beate Uhse from her interview, she was a strong woman whose primary interest was in fighting for herself. This is clearest when she tells the story of her rape in 1945. Beate and three other women were taken prisoner by 16 Russian soldiers. Rather than panic at the prospect of being raped she kept a cool head and offered herself to the man she identified as the senior officer. She spent the next few hours alone with this man, while the other three women were raped by the remaining 15 soldiers. She minimised her own suffering at the cost of the others. Selfish but clever.