The Bankruptcy Story

It's a page one story in Germany today, and it deserves some explanation on how it reached this point.

Back in the mid to late 1970s....Beate Uhse became a household term.  It was a sex-shop franchise operation that went across West Germany.

In Frankfurt....1978....they opened up a two-story shop that was a block down from the train station.  In the midst of the glitter and lust....it was basically a 6,000 sq ft operation on two floors and featured just about everything you could imagine from magazines and toys, to clothing and 'gifts'.

The mind behind Beate Uhse?  Beate Uhse-Rotermund.  She was a pilot from WW II and a entrepreneur.  You could probably write a 600-page book on Beate...a remarkable woman who just never saw doors shut. 

After WW II....with her husband dead, she found a fairly demoralized German society....particularly with women.  Roughly three years after the war, she had started up a social media type group that got into eroticism.  In the early 1950s....she started a mail-order company that featured various sexual toys and erotic clothing.  By the early 1960s....she opened up a full-up shop.  Over the first year, there were tons of cop visits, and the authorities had at least 2,000 charges put up against her or the shops that she ran.

In the 1990s....in her seventies....she finally decided to turn the company into a 'AG' which listed itself on the Frankfurt stock exchange. You could actually buy stock in the company. Most significant towns in Germany by 2000.....had a Beate Uhse shop. 

You could probably suggest that it was at this point at the absolute peak.  Everyone in Germany knew the company, and it turned a profit.

Today.....they announced that the company is bankrupt.  They are asking for court help to rebuild it and it might survive, although in the size that it is today.

What happened?  I suspect the internet changed the whole game, and competition occurred. 

Uhse herself?  She died 16 years ago. 

Sitting somewhere in the middle of this bankruptcy story is an epic movie that ought to be made....over Beate, the WW II experience, the 1950s/1960s era on the sexual revolution in Germany, and the eventual bankruptcy that occurred.