Cherrypicker | Literature  Field research in sex shops

The two scientists Uta Bretschneider and Jens Schöne dedicate a picture-text book to erotic shops in East Germany. The result is participant observation in the truest sense of the word.

What do places like Aschersleben, Herzberg, Lauchhammer and Oschatz have in common? That's right, they are all in the east of Germany. What else? Erotic shops were opened in all of these places in the first few years after reunification. At that time, the sex shop business was booming, which was certainly also due to the fact that it was illegal in GDR times and could result not only in “public censure” or a fine, but also up to two years in prison.

The newly won freedom also led to a, well, catch-up development in the erotic goods trade, as the new freedom was a capitalist one or – if you want to put it in a less classist way – a market economy in which there is interaction between supply and demand. By the mid-1990s, however, the gold-rush mood was already over. Deindustrialisation and mass unemployment in East Germany meant that more than half of the new erotic shops soon had to close again. From the 2000s onwards, online retail and porn portals were the final straw for some shops.

Fish and dildos

Uta Bretschneider, cultural scientist and director of the Forum of Contemporary History in Leipzig, and Jens Schöne, historian and deputy to the Berlin Commissioner for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, met in Erfurt in February 2020. They realised that they both came from the East German provinces and shared an interest in rural areas in the post-reunification period. They decided to develop a joint project, but the subject of their research was still unclear. That changed when Bretschneider was driving through Brandenburg in April 2021 and her navigation app displayed a sex and aquarium shop. What a combination! “Fish and dildos! And in the middle of nowhere.” After a brief consultation with Schöne, the topic was found.

For their book Provinzlust (Provincial lust), the two then travelled through eastern Germany for two years and interviewed erotic shop owners using a previously designed guide. They pursued this project in their free time and spent “two annual holidays in and with sex shops in the East German provinces”, as Bretschneider reported in an interview. She even worked as an “intern” in one of the sex shops for a few days in 2022. Incidentally, this industry is not, as one might assume, a male domain; it is not uncommon for women to run the shops. All of them see themselves as business people, are self-confident and deal openly with the questions asked: “The erotic business is normality for them” – or as one operator puts it: “I sell the things and that's that.”

In the beginning, everything was bought

The fact that the erotic shops in East Germany had to diversify their range after the initial boom – “In the beginning, people bought everything”, recalls one owner – was due to the economic slump that soon followed. Those who wanted to survive had to get creative by specialising (e.g. in lingerie) or building up a second source of income. In one place, this was the aforementioned aquaristics, while another operator had set up “a small GDR museum” next to the sex shop: “Both areas can be entered separately.”

In their book, Bretschneider and Schöne show that the upheaval in East Germany after 1989/90 also brought with it the typical post-reunification experiences in a niche market such as the erotic industry: new beginnings were followed by upheaval and experimentation, but also decline: “Many erotic shops in the provinces are not doing particularly well economically”, they seem to be “a dying breed”.

Manufactory and “bubbly, good-mood shop”

In addition to the erotic shops in villages and small towns, the two also visited two “new” sex shops in Leipzig and Berlin. This business is likely to have a better future in bigger cities. There is a larger and more diverse clientele there, which allows a different approach to the subject. The owner of the Berlin shop studied sculpture, founded the feminist-orientated, sex-positive shop playstixx and established it as a manufacturer of environmentally friendly dildos and vibrators. The owner of Leipzig's voegelei is a former philosophy student who worked for a couple of years at an institute for relationship and sex counselling before opening his alternative sex shop in June 2021. However, the shop doesn't want to be too alternative, because nobody should feel excluded. Others don't think voegelei is queer-feminist enough, but there's another sex shop in Leipzig for that, Juicy: “We're more of a bubbly, good-mood shop, and they're the shop with more serious political aspirations.”

In addition to the sex shop portraits, which are all true-to-life, full of anecdotes and refreshing to read, Provinzlust also impresses with the photographs by Karen Weinert and Thomas Bachler, who photographed the interviewees and their shops. Two chapters from the book can be read on the website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education.  

March 2025