“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.