A Hostel Is Not a House

Except for its saucy rows of opaque lemon awnings, the four-story building next to the Duesseldorf railway station might almost pass for a clinic. Attendants carry stacks of fresh linen through its quiet halls. Its pleasant central dining room keeps hospital hours: breakfast from 8 to 10, lunch at noon, dinner at 5. Its 228 tenants, each of whom is examined by city doctors at least twice a week, spend most of their time in bed.

But not alone. The $875,000 establishment, built three years ago by an enterprising female real estate speculator, is the biggest, shiniest and most antiseptic example of a modern German variation of organized sex: the hostel of prostitution.

Never on Sunday. A hostel, police are quick to point out, is not a house. Houses of prostitution were banned in Germany in 1927, but prostitution itself is condoned. Absent from the hostel are the pimps and madams of the house. In Duesseldorf's cupboard of tarts, the girls pay only for room, board and services, just as they would in a normal hotel. Moreover, their hostel is a place of immaculate order; noisy guests are ordered to leave, and drunks are not allowed in. In Stuttgart's eight-year-old Drei-Farben hostel, business is transacted only from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.--except on Sundays and holidays, when its 71 practitioners knit and watch television.

To the connoisseur, the hostel is a sad comedown from Europe's gilded past, when internationally celebrated bordellos lined their ballrooms with erotic murals and antique chairs, offered their patrons bare-breasted dancing partners as a starter. But wherever they have sprung up, the hostels have done a land-office business. The Duessel-dorf establishment alone handles nearly 8,000 customers a day--at $3.75 apiece --and in Stuttgart, the monthly take is $250,000.

Right to Work. No one appreciates the hostels more than West Germany's police, who are desperately trying to control the estimated 140,000 prostitutes now pacing the nation's pavements. Many cities have walled off whole streets of the girls from public view and declared them off-limits to minors. In Frankfurt, bed and board of the late Rosemarie Nitribitt, the cruising floozy of the movie Das Maedchen Rosemarie, downtown traffic is jammed every night by fleets of motorized trollops. They crawl along in their Mercedes flashing their parking lights at prospective clients--then charging them $25 for double parking. When Munich banned them from its downtown area, angry prostitutes formally accused the city council of violating federal right-to-work laws. Then they moved to the suburbs, turning once quiet streets into a nightmare of drunks, procurers and petty crime.

Resigned to the perpetuity of the old profession, West German authorities see in the hostels the opportunity they have been waiting for to get whores back, indoors. "The prostitute problem is solved in Duesseldorf," says the city's police chief happily, and police in other cities are quietly trying to promote hostels to solve their problems too. It will not be an easy task, for public opinion is often against them. In Cologne, the pastor of powerful St. Ursula's Roman Catholic Church has warned that if a hostel is ever opened he will demand the removal of St. Ursula as the city's patron saint.

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