"It was a crazy time," Moser recalls, patting his two golden retrievers. "Everything was still a bit post-warish. Everyone's eyes were looking ahead. But in all their euphoria and blind striving for record production figures, they were trapped in a conception of honor called: quality, records." With a grand gesture, Moser, meanwhile in his editing studio, grants us a panorama view of his wickedly expensive equipment, that one or the other TV studio would give their eye-teeth for. "What good are records if quality goes down the drain? A guy like VW-manager Piech has realized that - that's why he's not building on shaky ground. Before I rent out my facilities for the production of record-oriented rubbish, I prefer to look upon them as a synthesis of the arts lying idle."

He has had to do that more than just once. And at one time he didn't have the chance to do even that. In 1989- the porn czar was at the peak of his success after having made Teresa Orlowski, the starlet he had discovered in 1981, a world-wide trademark and lifting pornography from the dark basement confines of social rank to the shining light of a lifestyle product (and being followed by dozens of free-riders dazzled by a monetary gold rush) - he hadn't realized, after all his clever inspiration, that he had more or less given her full decision-making powers.

The revolution turned on its own children. Hans Moser had become something like the sorcerer's apprentice, unable to rid himself of the genies he had let out of the bottle. The unshakeable " smart guy" who could turn his hand to anything was deprived of power overnight by his own creation. The millionaire and driving force of the whole industry had to come to terms with the fact that all he had left were the clothes he was wearing plus a couple of friends within calling distance. He had to get over it and summon up all his energy reserves. The motto of the day was: Now I am all the more determined! He left behind the most modern erotica studios in the world, and a film program that was unique in the genre.

The demise was no accident, though. It was also a logical consequence of an unparalleled technical armament. Global market, co-operation across the borders - Moser had already gone by the motto "Not the better ones will swallow the poor; those who are faster will swallow those who are slow" at a time when the majority of even those companies reputed to be progressive considered the typewriter a modern piece of office equipment, the fax to be all the rage, and the first PC to be hell-machines from another world.

The furniture salesman Moser had already learnt in the late sixties that he needed technology as his ally. Moser loved women without superficially possessing that what attracted them: power. He lacked prestige, influence and money. But his passion for women wouldn't simply let itself be channeled or appeased with a mediocre substitutive gratification. The sex wave was rolling in, and Moser did not plan to stay passive and get washed over by it - he was determined to surf on its very crest. Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni's memorable opus "Blow Up" he bought himself a camera. Private initiative and personal ads led to first cautious contacts with models. The photographic results went like hot cakes. He sold them to magazines - and those that were too risqué for them, Moser soon exploited himself.

Shots that were sold to Scandinavia could then be purchased by the German aficionado only via the black market, the organization of which Moser soon took on as well. His regular trips abroad, in particular to Denmark, could no longer be overlooked. Still illegal in Germany at the time, sex in magazines and "sex in the can" -as those super-8 films were dubbed - finally showed what even the honest housewife was eager to see after the kids were off to bed; and Moser funneled them wholesale across the border. Because Moser also did not possess a driving license, it simply could no longer go unnoticed that he failed to lead an irreproachable life as a law-abiding citizen. He was quote "repeatedly bombed out" unquote. He was prohibited from continuing his disgraceful carnal activities that brought him together on an extramarital level with the kind of women he had always dreamed of (and for whom he increasingly had the money).

The Banat-German blood in the veins of this man from Lower Saxony, however, refused to calm down. Moser proved to be stubborn - and defied. He turned into a persistent offender. A missionary fanatic even. After all, what he was doing created desire and gave people pleasure and joy. It also made a profit for Moser. However, it was already clear back then that money could only be a by-product. Money - the eclectic Moser philosophized - was a welcome consequence of a relentlessly creative and qualitative energy. Quality became his core area of authority. Moser was held in high regard in German and international magazine circles. "We don't only sell magazines, we sell friendship," was the message on the back covers of his magazines. And there was something true about that: the erotica customer acquired his product consciously, the market was reasonably small; the customer that preferred Moser's product preferred lecherousness in perfection. High-gloss print and highly erotic photography (occasionally presented by photographers who would have turned beet-red would it have leaked out that in addition to their high-quality photo journalism they also indulged in the microcosm of the pussy) culminated in Moser's magazine sin a climax - in every sense of the word. And not least because he had now left the ghetto: in 1975, pornography had finally succeeded in ridding itself of its illegal status. 

And thus Moser was finally allowed to do what he was doing. The self-made man, meanwhile not only photographer but also scan operator, typesetter and lithographer, had lost his bonds. Nothing seemed impossible now. Reputable negotiating partners from even more reputable, sometimes arch-conservative companies gave Moser, who had always been pleased to provide them with illustrative material, the go-ahead. Moser was granted loans "for the sake of my bonny blue eyes". He paid them back in record time and rearmed himself with technology - technology as an end in itself, accompanied by vague plans for corporate expansion. That was given a new dimension when Teresa Orlowski appeared on the scene -an initial spark that hit Moser's marriage like a bolt of lightning and even made him forget the Brazilian love of his life (both relationships were blessed with children).

Teresa proved to be a catalyst for the thoroughbred entrepreneur. Compared with his usual chronic innovative energy, Moser went into the video business amazingly late - in 1984. Video was the future. Moser seized it and worked it with both hands. He launched "Foxy Lady", a legendary video and magazine series personified by Teresa. Old-established sex-film producers, happy and content with the spoils from the good old days of 16 and 35-mm films, when pornography still filled the cinemas and Moser was not yet part of the game for lack of funds, simply took note of him and his products - not more.

Moser's campaigns, his untiring fight for the acceptance of the portrayal of sex by society, his persistence in the issue of a functional co-operation with the media and in particular with television had them force a bored smile. A couple of years later they courted him, the dinosaurs of a bygone age, as a "princeps inter pares"- a leader among equals. And as someone who had shown how much purchasing power the "cheap" medium video could generate, and how much quality it could achieve.

Moser set up a studio in Hanover that took their breath away. His studios operated with technology by Grass Valley, Ikegami, Ampex, and Sony - cameras that cost DM 150,000 each, intercom systems, dollies, a fully computerized lighting system. Nothing seemed to resist the exhilaration of expansion. The American team of actors, led by eminent authorities such as John Leslie or Sharon Mitchell, showed our man from Lower Saxony respect. When production took place abroad, Moser had truckloads of equipment transported over thousands of miles - which was rather unique in the business. He invested seven-digit sums for the production of a single film. In order to not miss out on anything he took his audiovisual studio right with him: an outside broadcast van that moved advanced technicians to tears with enthusiasm. In his crew and his cast Moser gathered around him everybody who was anybody, suspiciously eyed by Teresa, who wouldn't tolerate any other goddesses beside her (like Sibylle Rauch or Karin Schubert), and wildly acclaimed by the audience. 

Then, in 1989, he was left with nothing, done out of his life's work by Teresa Orlowski. "Making a free fall from an annual turnover of 20 million DM down to 20 DM in your pocket - with no safety net whatsoever - my optimism simply hadn't deemed one necessary - that wasn't exactly the dream I had been dreaming." The reason why this "hostile takeover" was so hard to digest was because this time it was not the law that put an end to his activities, like before. This defeat was a very personal one.

And yet it proved to be beneficial. "Suddenly I had the opportunity to constitute myself a new, like I'm doing now. You have to rid yourself of the burden that always accumulates when you've established yourself too long at a certain level and have become one of the unimpeachable success stories, and encounter the challenges of the future with the adequate remedy," says Moser and looks in the direction of the island that not only lies behind the horizon, but meanwhile also behind himself: Ibiza.

The realization he came to was: mission yes; sex mission, by all means - but one that would keep the missionary alive. Moser, the workaholic with a good chance of expiring in front of the computer while doing overtime, came to his senses. His remedy was -first of all - Sarah Young, whose potential as a star he immediately assessed and recognized with the X-ray vision of a shrewd producer; and secondly- after his resurrection in Hanover - Ibiza: "The biggest open-air studio in the world; a place to live, to breathe and to relax - even while working." In 1991 in Las Vegas, Sarah Young became his third wife. The wedding was videotaped - after all, Moser's life had to be captured for the customer at the other end. On the sixth take the gruff, unruly erotographer even passed the perfectionist taping session of the program item "Carrying the Bride Over the Threshold".

With the renewed success, the old obsession- minus the life-prolonging Spanish mañana-factor of Ibiza - returned. Dyed-in-the-wool Moser threw himself into the surge, but the waves of the market eventually broke on his gruffness. The grandees of the German market who were still the most important guarantors for Moser's turnover, couldn't believe their ears when he called them amateurs and criminals - after all, they financed his lifestyle through the purchasing of his craft. Moser disliked their purchasing policies. They took that personally, not with the wisdom of a diplomat, who regards criticism and objections in the sense of long-term strategy. Moser, not exactly a dyed-in-the-wool diplomat himself, now drowned in the flood of indignation. But this time the purchasing blockade only cost him his head in terms of business. "I wanted to reach my goal too directly. And I paid the price. But I remained true to myself, and that's what counts. Maybe one day I'll have to recant, like Galileo. But I am not in a religious dispute - that's my advantage. And my second advantage is the world-wide forum."

A forum that the lone wolf (who can never remain alone because he needs private support "more urgently than water" and has recently married for the fourth time) has now totally devoted himself to. "The Internet," says Moser, "is the next higher authority, to which I now dedicate my message, far away from narrow-minded markets quibbles."

The message remains the same: quality. Or, to put it somewhat more nonchalantly and giving meaning to a slogan that had put soul into Moser's products once before: "Elegance in Erotography".