New Museum of Erotic Art manages to catch the jaded eye of world weary Berliners

IT TAKES a lot to impress Berliners, who have cultivated a cool, metropolitan indifference to every kind of pomp and grandeur. Christo won the city's heart last summer when he wrapped the Reichstag in white nylon, and the Love Parade, an annual Techno street party, has become a cherished fixture in the cultural calendar.

But other recent attempts to dazzle the down to earth denizens of the German capital, from a multi million deutschmark musical on the life of Marlene Dietrich to a succession of luxurious shops and restaurants, have all been doomed from the start.

So when thousands of Berliners started queuing last month outside a nondescript concrete building near Zoo Station, it was clear that something remarkable was happening.

The building, a former department store, is the home of Ms Beate Uhse's Museum of Erotic Art, the largest museum of its kind in Europe, with more than 3,000 exhibits. Ten thousand people paid £4 each to visit the museum on its opening day and, two weeks later, there is no sign that interest is trailing off.

At 76, Ms Uhse is Germany's undisputed Queen of Porn, controlling an international empire of sex shops, films, videos and magazines. Born in east Prussia in 1919, she became one of the first female pilots in the Luftwaffe flying supplies to the troops at the front during the second World War.

When the war ended, she was a penniless widow with a small son to support. She hit on the idea of selling contraceptive information to women who feared becoming pregnant after their husbands returned from prisoner of war camps, charging two reichsmarks for a two page explanation of the rhythm method.

An open, matter of fact approach to sex and pornography has been at the centre of her marketing philosophy, as she introduced generations of Germans to sexual experimentation through such books as Helga and Bernd Demonstrate loo Love Positions.

Within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Ms Uhse sent a convoy of trucks into East Germany, distributing tens of thousands of her catalogues to porn starved Ossis.

Her latest venture is an attempt to marry commercial success to public respectability, as she draws the mantle of erotic history around her shoulders. Although there is plenty to see, there is no sign of a curatorial concept and few exhibits carry any explanatory notes.

Apart from countless oriental pictures and ceramics, usually depicting hugely endowed men copulating with tiny, lascivious women, the museum boasts a number of installations devoted to erotic themes.

One of the few informative sections is devoted to the history of sexology in Berlin, with four showcases dedicated to Ivan Bloch, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Marcuse.

Hirschfeld, a pioneer of sexual liberation who was driven out of Germany by the Nazis, would have been 100 years old next year and Ms Uhse was asked why she did not name her museum after him. She replied sweetly that it was all a matter of economics.

"All the money we put in here has to be hard earned. And we earn it more easily with the name Beate Uhse than with Magnus Hirschfeld", she said.