Before 28-year-old Olivia Packard walked up the steps of the Public Health Office on Neumarkt in Cologne on 23 November 1984, she had already worked as a prostitute in several German cities.1 Olivia was a British citizen. She had been born and raised in the mid 1950s near Epping Forest District, Essex, north-east of London. In 1982, she left the United Kingdom and migrated to the north of the Federal Republic of Germany to offer sexual services. A year later, she moved to Essen. There, and at times also in Cologne and Düsseldorf, she continued to work in prostitution. From 1984 onwards, she was employed at the Eros Centre at Hornstraße 2 in Cologne, one of the largest brothels in West Germany, later known as ‘Pascha’. At the end of the same year, in December 1984, she moved to Munich to continue her work there.2
Continue reading Sexual Borderlands and Social Margins: Prostitution and Migration in West Germany, 1949–1989/1990Author: Mona Rudolph
Mona Rudolph is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of 19th–21st Century History at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. She completed her doctorate in 2021 with a thesis on the global commodity chain of diamonds from colonial Namibia. Her current research and second book project examine the history of migration and prostitution in the Bonn Republic.