10/17/2007

Banishing Ladies of the Night

Berlin Residents Want to Stop Giant Brothel

Plans for a giant bordello in Berlin have caused an uproar. Local residents want a ban on prostitution in the neighborhood.

The corner of Kurfürstenstrasse and Potsdamer Strasse in the Schöneberg district of the German capital Berlin has become an unofficial red-light district, dominated by a six-story "sex mall" called Love Sex and Dreams (LSD). The owners want to install a 40-room bordello in the same building -- much to the consternation of local residents and business owners, who are now calling for a prostitution ban in the city district.

"We have nothing against prostitution, which we've always lived with here, but we are against its expansion," Heidrun Abraham, a member of the Potsdamer Strasse neighborhood society that opposes the bordello, told the newspaperDie Welt.

Prostitution is legal in Germany as long as the women work for themselves and not under a pimp. Berlin also has no "district bans" on sex work, which has kept prostitution -- and any related crimes -- from clustering in one part of the city.

But Ekkehard Band, the mayor of the district Tempelhof-Schöneberg, has suggested a ban on prostitution in the district as a way to keep the bordello out.

"We will use all legal means ... to keep the neighborhood from completely falling apart," he told Die Welt . "The social effects (of the sex mall) are already severe for the area."

He said a district ban could be on the table for a neighborhood meeting to be held on Nov. 1 which will address the problem.

But such a ban would be unprecedented in Berlin. Stephanie Klee, from the German Society of Sexual Services, told another paper, Die Tageszeitung, that a district ban could eventually lead to a concentration of sex work elsewhere and create a red-light district resembling Hamburg's notorious Reeperbahn.

Klee said a more even distribution of smaller bordellos around Berlin has kept the sex-work scene relatively free of crime. "Around Potsdamer Strasse they just noticed the problem too late," she said. "And now they're having trouble knowing how to react."

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