Exploiting prostitutes was still criminal but everything else was now above board. Sex workers could now enter into employment contracts, sue for payment and register for health insurance, pension plans and other benefits. The idea of the law, passed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrat-Green coalition, was to recognise prostitution as a job like any other. But that isn’t how the legalisation argument was won 12 years ago. Quite a few people agree with Beretin – and not all of them are brothel owners grumbling about their tax bills. Prostitution was legalised “for the government to make a lot of money,” Beretin says, strolling past a woman in a lime green lycra shrug (and nothing else) while another woman, nude except for black hold-up stockings, leans against the bar. It’s now estimated to be 15 billion euros. Two years later, prostitution in Germany was thought to be worth 6 billion euros – roughly the same as Porsche or Adidas that year. Those figures were released a decade ago, soon after Germany made buying sex, selling sex, pimping and brothel-keeping legal in 2002.
People think Amsterdam is the prostitution capital of Europe but Germany has more prostitutes per capita than any other country in the continent, more even than Thailand: 400,000 at the last count, serving 1.2 million men every day. Several are clustered together, looking bored in their black glitter basques and hot pink fishnets, waiting for it to get busier. One is cuddling up to a pot-bellied man on a day bed. The women sit in the men’s laps at the bar.
It’s six o’clock in the evening at Paradise and about thirty men are padding about the swirly red carpet in wine-coloured towelling robes and green plastic slippers. “Take your clothes off!” cries Beretin, tugging at my coat. Each of its six floors is picked out with a thick stripe of burgundy cladding making it look from the outside like a very tall, stale slice of red velvet cake. It’s modelled on the Stuttgart flagship, which he invites us to visit on a day blighted by icy, spitty rain. “Yes, yes!” he laughs, his £100,000 Audemars Piguet watch glinting in the light of the pierced metal lamps.īeretin, a shamelessly flirtatious man with a grin like Jack Nicholson’s Joker and a habit of slipping between English and German mid-sentence, is about to open the 15,000 square foot, 4.5 million-euro Paradise Saarbrücken. So business is booming, I say to Michael Beretin, a partner in the company. Paradise is a chain, like Primark or Pizza Hut, with five branches and three more on the way. But that scuzzy little concern, with its scarlet-haired manager and beery tourist crowd, was seriously small fry compared to this. Within a couple of hours we’d seen enough to get the joke. In Bangkok aged 19 I checked in to a place called Mango Inn with two school friends.
Picture a Sultan’s palace crossed with a Premier Inn, then wedge it between anonymous office blocks on an endless industrial park and you’re there: Paradise. It’s one of Germany’s “mega-brothels” and, like a lot of those establishments, it has a Moroccan theme. Nisha Lilia Diu visits some of them to find out who won and who lost
It’s now worth 15 billion euros a year and embraces everything from 12-storey mega-brothels to outdoor sex boxes. When Germany legalised prostitution in 2002 it triggered an apparently unstoppable growth in the country’s sex industry.
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