BERLIN'S EROTIC ART MUSEUM
Around the turn of the century, the capital of Germany overtook Paris to become the capital of sex. The city went about it in a typically German way — scientifically. Magnus Hirschfeld created the world's first institute for the study of sex and Thomas Mann wrote thick, serious novels about sexual trauma. But, after WWI, Berlin learned how to have fun with sex too. Vicki Baum's “Grand Hotel” spilled all the secrets of the Adelon, the city's greatest hotel, and “The Threepenny Opera” depicted street sex to become the biggest hit in Berlin's theatrical history. Then came the Nazis and all of that freedom was destroyed, including the Adelon itself.

Giant wooden Balinese phalluses and a vintage piece of commercial erotica illustrate the museum's range

Today Berlin is in the midst of a great Renaissance. Even the Adelon is back, exactly as it was, only even grander (not one red-caped doorman — three!). As yet, no new Institute for Sexual Research has opened but there is the next best thing — a museum of erotic art. This extravagant monument to sex comes courtesy of one of postwar Berlin's great individuals, Beate Uhse, a woman whose proselytizing for sexual freedom often dipped into `bad taste' but never ceased to encourage people to move beyond outmoded moral codes. She always practiced what she preached: in her seventies she married a man one-third her age.

Her museum stands at the heart of modern Berlin, one block north of the famous Café Kranzler and one block south of the even more famous Berlin Zoo. Inhabiting a six-story architectural landmark, it justifiably bills itself as the “Largest Erotic Museum in the World!” The 5,000 artifacts inside range over all of history and every culture. Elaborately-carved whale's penises, Roman lamps, Greek coins, Balinese and African fertility objects, and Japanese pillow books, are interspersed with life-sized tableaus of sexual scenes (which are the least successful of the displays, being unimaginatively and cheaply executed).

But the greatest glory of the museum lies in its memorabilia from the city's own erotic past, dozens of photographs of notorious clubs and personages and, best of all, works by Berlin artists both known (Zill, Grosz) and unknown. The set of erotic watercolors by George Grosz are perhaps the finest works the artist ever did, yet are never seen anywhere else (they are really hard-core).

All types of erotica are democratically displayed — gay, straight, mainstream, fetish — everything gets equal treatment. Supporters of the Tom of Finland Foundation's own erotic museum project should be motivated by the success and scale of Berlin's Beate Uhse International Erotik Museum.

Giant wooden Balinese phalluses and a vintage piece of commercial erotica illustrate the museum's range --http://www.tomoffinlandfoundation.org/foundation/Dispatch/dispFW99/eroticnews.htm [Oct 2004]

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