What are we to make of the Germans and sex? Depending on the era and object of study, one can make a case that modern German sexual culture has been especially prudish, notably permissive, or simply practical. In this pathbreaking book, Elizabeth Heineman makes a strong case for a postwar West German sexual culture characterized by a dynamic mix of all three. Rather than an incoherent mishmash, this mix was and remains, she shows, an identifiably German, if also recognizably postwar, combination structured by history, politics, law, economics, and gender relations. Heineman's object of study is the famous erotica firm Beate Uhse. In witty, incisive prose dotted with deft, insightful analyses, she paints a portrait of Beate Uhse as a firm whose directors, and especially its founder Beate Köstlin/Uhse/Rotermund, astutely negotiated the shoals of censorship, divided public opinion, and diverse private desires in the 1950s and successfully rode the “sex wave” of the 1960s. Heineman weaves the “Horatio Alger” life story of Rotermund into a larger tale about the Federal Republic's erotica industry from its origins in the postwar rubble through its legal struggles as a mail-order business to its huge expansion after the legalization of pornography in 1973. Heineman presents a richly empirical examination of the modus operandi of an industry that was atypical in what it produced and its run-ins with state authorities, yet also market-driven and commercially innovative. Her book, thus, contributes to the underdeveloped scholarship on the social history of West German business during the Wirtschaftswunder.

Heineman's most significant contribution to West German history is to connect the business of erotica to a complex of major social issues such as gender relations, arguments about sexual knowledge and moral “innocence,” debates about privacy and individualism—and, of course, Germans and sex. She can draw these connections because she examines commercialized sexual literature and imagery from multiple perspectives, including public discourse, state regulation, consumer demand, and porn firms' responses to all of the above. This method is founded on a wide variety of sources: documents from federal and state archives; trial transcripts and other legal records; company records; interviews with major players in Beate Uhse and other firms; and publications of the porn industry, its opponents, and interested commentators. Using this expansive and well-grounded methodology, she frames the history of the porn industry within a wider narrative about West German political culture and gendered sexuality. The history of porn, she concludes, both reflected and facilitated the liberalization of West German political, consumer, and sexual cultures. Cultural liberalization, in turn, interacted with the lopsided social and economic power of men and the deregulation of pornography to produce a world of sexualized commerce that privileged male heterosexual desire by showcasing women's bodies, on the one hand, and tipping heavily toward hard-core porn, on the other.

The book, then, does not offer an uncomplicated account of the triumph of sexual liberation. Yet it also does not lay out a simple story about timeless gender inequalities or the unremitting sexism of the porn industry. In fact, Heineman revises commonly held assumptions about conservative, stuffy, and natalist West Germans in the 1950s. Her discussion of gender relations dovetails with other recent scholarship that qualifies an older narrative about the passive housewife in her kitchen. Motivated by economic necessity and emotional desire, postwar women, she argues, actively searched for reliable advice about how to prevent pregnancy and/or achieve sexual satisfaction in a love relationship. Rotermund, herself an unemployed single mother in the urban ruins of postwar Germany, energetically and creatively responded to women's willingness to pay for cheap pamphlets that offered sexual enlightenment of various types—and so got her start in the business of selling, eventually, condoms, spermacides, erectile-function creams, sex aids, etc. Over time, Rotermund stepped out of the shadows of the illegal porn industry to market herself as an exemplar of the liberated woman and even as the embodiment of twentieth-century German history from the Weimar era through National Socialism and war into the era of social-market democracy.

Rather than exploit images of women's bodies or sell crudely pornographic material, Beate Uhse initially peddled a message of equality of the sexes, at least in the realm of the senses. In its catalogs (which potential customers could peruse in the privacy of their homes), Beate Uhse promoted its publications and wares as elixirs that would help a couple control reproduction and help a wife enjoy sex and, thus, enhance marital happiness and “hygiene.” Rotermund and her lawyers also used the language of the loving, healthy marriage in their efforts to convince judges that their wares were the opposite of obscene or morally corrosive. This rhetoric helped the firm win legal victories against the censors and increase its customer base. These successes also show, Heineman argues, that postwar attitudes about both censorship and sex were more relaxed than the prudery of public sexual culture and laws against, especially, youth endangerment, suggest.

In a short review, I cannot do justice to other issues addressed by the book, including debates about the nature and legacy of National Socialism's sexual culture, shifts in constitutional arguments for and against censorship, and changing attitudes toward homoeroticism. I have only a few minor criticisms. Some discussion of the regulation of prostitution would have been useful, given Germany's history of state-controlled prostitution and associations between prostitution and pornography as major components of the sex industry. I also missed any consideration of the labor side of the story: who works as models and actors in the porn industry, and how does the state regulate their labor conditions? Finally, I was puzzled by Heineman's concluding comments on masturbation, “the form of sex most associated with pornography” (p. 177). Although posed as questions, her remarks suggest that she worries that too much adult and/or male masturbation is “unhealthy.” To my mind, the language here comes uncomfortably close to an older judgmental discourse about the dangers of masturbation.