German Brothels Expect Nil From Soccer Fans

There’ll be a lot of naughty boys in town during the World Cup, but few, if any, will be handcuffed and spanked on the leopard-skin rug of Karolina Leppert, a dominatrix with a wall of whips and a shrewd instinct for market economics.

“Men visiting for only a few days won’t seek my services,” said Leppert, sitting amid chains, wigs and a rack with a tightening screw. “The dominatrix relationship is one of trust built over time. The World Cup doesn’t mean more customers for me. All this talk about the sex business booming is hype.

“Besides, I don’t think it’s nice to regard the soccer fan as a sex-driven primate.”

In the media rapture around the World Cup, which began Friday, prostitutes and sex have been analyzed here as much as midfielders and penalty kicks. The monthlong tournament, spread over 12 German cities, is expected to draw 1.5 million visitors, many of them men with folding money and lonely hours to while away between matches.

About 400,000 prostitutes work legally in Germany, and human rights organizations say thousands more will be smuggled in from Eastern Europe for the tournament.

Feminist groups, Polish nuns, Swedish politicians and others have condemned Berlin for allowing the sex industry to flourish. A recent U.S. State Department report criticized Germany, which also has an estimated 140,000 illegal prostitutes, as a “transit and destination” country for women forced into the sex trade.

“There is no place in the world without prostitution,” said Leppert, head of the Federal Assn. of Sexual Services, a red-light district lobby organization. “In countries where it’s illegal, the women suffer. It’s completely different in a country like Germany, where it’s permitted and women don’t have to hide in shadows and dark corners. They have places to go.”

The sex industry and the World Cup are paragons of commerce; both inspire passion and deal-making.

Comely looks and phone numbers peer from newspaper and magazine ads, and a new spa in Berlin offers saunas, cigars, cocktails and erotic fantasies negotiated in advance.

Germans are much looser about sex than they are about exact change or pesky neighborhood noises after sundown. They don’t blush at fetishes; copulation and pleasure toys are common on nighttime TV. The decadence of the Kit Kat Club in Berlin and the sex strip in Hamburg are storied, and more than one man has been seen sashaying through the night in a bathrobe toward his Mercedes after a stop at a brothel.

But the tabloid titillation around sex and the World Cup may not reflect reality in the rented bedroom. Leppert said most of the 80 small and medium-sized brothels in her organization predict no more than a 10% increase in business. Some fear that their regular clients, preferring discretion over a raucous sporting event of fervent nationalism and painted hair, might be scarce until matches end July 9.

Such is the prevailing sentiment in the Venus Club, a Berlin brothel with a metal door and a neon heart in the window.

“I don’t think there will be a chance to make big money during the Cup,” said Ines, a lithe Pole with black hair and a silver barrette who offered only her working name. “Most men will end up in a living room with a TV set or in a sports bar. They’ll be preoccupied with soccer, not with sex.”

Thomas Woche is temporarily running Venus for his wife. Dressed in a dark shirt and a gray sport coat, he’s more accustomed to construction sites. He is perplexed by the tax numbers, pension benefits and other bureaucracy that arose when prostitution was legalized in 2002. And, he doesn’t expect the World Cup to have men clamoring to ring his buzzer.

“Maybe I should bring in some TVs and have games running,” he said, sitting next to Ines on a velour bedspread in a dim room while a woman in another room zipped up her jeans. “If I hung a few soccer balls in the window, maybe I’d need an endorsement” from FIFA, the international organization that sponsors the World Cup.

Ines is a former waitress and a single mother. There are few opportunities in her native Poland. Her father and brother left home to find jobs in the Netherlands. After splitting recently with her German boyfriend, she decided to raise her daughter in Berlin. She hasn’t been working long, but she has an explicit price list. It costs 15 euros to kiss her; 100 euros for more.

She says she has three regular clients and a sporadic assortment of “lawyers, bricklayers, journalists, all with different preferences.”

“This is a chance to make money, and I get the money before the job. Some days are good, some days not; some weeks a lot of clients, others few. I made up my mind to be here. I’ll quit when I buy a house.”

Ines says she feels safe. She has a bowl of condoms and the number of the police.

The country also has a website called “Responsible Johns” that allows prospective customers to search a directory to find out whether a prostitute is working legally. In March, the director of the German Football Assn. started a campaign to limit mafia influence called “Final Whistle -- Stop Forced Prostitution.”

“Germany is slowly beginning to deal with sexual services as a profession,” Leppert said. “My organization has been invited to the Finance Ministry. I think they’re happy to be talking to an expert who is also legal. The World Cup could open discussion on prostitution, but if it’s too many days in the headlines, people will start thinking that forced prostitution is the same as legal prostitution. We don’t want that.”

Wearing blue jeans and a striped shirt, her bangs precisely cut, Leppert sat next to drawn curtains decorated with spider webs. She was more demure than the leather mistress, Lady Vera, on her website. The rack near the mirror appeared to have been hauled up from a medieval dungeon and polished. The room had the air of an old Viennese salon where whips, riding crops and trinkets of pain had replaced porcelain vases and fruit bowls.

“I was strictly raised,” she said. “All the decent women I knew seemed so unhappy. I thought, ‘What is the dark and hell world they described as prostitution?’ But I was in a bourgeois life. I was married to a policeman for 25 years.... My marriage ended one day and I was curious to find out about this dark world. I had no debt. I have no pimp. It suits me. Really, I consider a dominatrix to be more of a therapist.”