On the move: Lesbian group networks in the GDR in the 1980s

The Rise of a Dense Lesbian-Feminist Network

Despite these difficulties and the severely limited opportunities to print and distribute programs, invitations, and other materials, a lively and dense lesbian-feminist network emerged within only a few years. Various factors and practices played a role in the development and consolidation of such contacts—for example, the congresses and peace workshops that took place under the aegis of the Protestant Church, as well as access to church congregations in general. From circa 1985 onward, lesbian groups also increasingly took part in women’s forums at church congresses. One such instance was a women’s day called “Become Who You Are!” at the 1988 congress in Halle. The East Berlin group Lesbians in the Church took this opportunity to organize a forum entitled “Human Rights – Christian Rights – Women’s Rights”.1Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft (RHG)/GrauZone(GZ)/A1/614, Werde, die du bist! Texte und Bilder, 1988.

Personal contacts, friendships, and love affairs also played an enormously important role. On all written material issued by gay and lesbian working groups, there appeared a contact address—usually the home address of one of the group members. As Bärbel Klässner, who was active in the lesbian group in the town of Jena, reported, “On account of this ‘internal church business’ our home address was spread all over the GDR. People therefore paid us a visit or wrote to us. There was a constant stream of women at our door, mostly between twenty and thirty years of age, rarely much older. Similar scenes were playing out in parallel in other towns and cities. There were six such places—or perhaps eight—that drew lesbians like a magnet, and we magnets were in touch, too, of course, and paid one another visits.”2<p>Bärbel Klässner: Als frau anders war, in: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Sachsen-Anhalt / Gunda Werner Institut (Ed.): Das Übersehenwerden hat Geschichte. Lesben in der DDR und in der Friedlichen Revolution. Tagungsdokumentation, Halle (Saale)/Berlin 2015, 62.&nbsp;</p> The lesbians also invited each other to their various events.

To be so out, and visible in the GDR was a surefire way to end up in the sights of the secret police or Stasi. A great many Stasi files bear witness to the intensive surveillance of people who were active in the lesbian and gay liberation movement. Unofficial informants of the Ministry for State Security, many of whom were lesbian themselves, reported not only on group meetings but also, in extreme cases, on sexual and romantic encounters between other lesbians; the state’s coordinated surveillance and “subversive measures” (designed to wear down people’s resistance) were likewise documented in meticulous detail.3<p>For anecdotal evidence, see Wallbraun, Barbara: Lesben im Visier der Staatssicherheit, in: Das Übersehenwerden hat Geschichte, 26–50.</p> Yet in the 1980s, despite this repression, the number of groups and committed individuals never ceased to grow.

Meeting Places: Festivals for Women and Lesbians

Interregional events helped strengthen the bonds between the so-called unofficial women’s groups.4<p>Sänger, Eva: Begrenzte Teilhabe. Ostdeutsche Frauenbewegung und Zentraler Runder Tisch in der DDR, Frankfurt a. M. 2005, 110–112.&nbsp;</p>Festivals for women and lesbians provided especially intense experiences. On the weekend of June 14–15, 1985, the first women’s festival, organized by the local gay working group ‘AK Homosexualität’, took place in Dresden under the motto “Lesbian Love in Literature”.5RHG/GZ/A1/082, Einladung 1. Dresdner Frauenfest. In 1989, a lesbian from Jena sent the following testimony to the underground magazine frau anders: “I meanwhile knew the reputed 5 percent, had met [the activist] Karin Dauenheimer, had encountered lesbians from all over GDR at the women’s festival in Dresden—and I’ll never forget the overwhelming sense of happiness and emotional security that I felt being among so many women, so many lesbians, for the very first time!”6<p>Gruppenvorstellung Jena, frau anders 1 (1989), cited in Sänger, Begrenzte Teilhabe, 105.</p>

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The second festival in Dresden, from October 24–26, 1986, adopted the motto “The Working Woman: Between Job and Self-Fulfillment.”7RHG/GZ/A1/285, 2. Dresdner Frauenfest. To each congress, participants flocked from all over the country, up to two or three hundred strong. From April 30 to May 3, 1987, the festival for women and lesbians took place for the first time in Jena. Over one hundred women attended, many with children in tow.8<p>Klässner: Als frau anders war, 63.&nbsp;</p> The program mainly consisted of group discussions of diverse issues, such as coming out, children in lesbian partnerships, and the place of lesbians within the gay and the women’s liberation movements. In addition, there was a flea market, a concert, a disco, and shared meals.9<p>Invitation to the third women’s festival, as reproduced in Kenawi, Samirah: Frauengruppen in der DDR der 80er Jahre. Eine Dokumentation, Berlin 1995, 196 f.&nbsp;</p> With the motto “Power in Relationships,” the third women’s festival in Dresden (October 2–4, 1987) proposed that refuges should be opened for women suffering [sexualized] domestic violence.10RHG/GZ/A1/302, Programm zum 3. Dresdner Frauenfest &sbquo;Macht in Beziehungen&rsquo;.  

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Out in the World: International Networks

In the ‘GrauZone Archiv’, occasional examples of private correspondence often attest to very personal exchanges between individual lesbians who were active in various fields—and whose opinions evidently diverged at times. For not only network-building but also conflict has always been a feature of feminist movements. Controversial issues in the independent women’s movement in the GDR included, for example, the relationship between ‘heteras’ (straight women) and lesbians, between religious and atheist groups, and between women and men.11<p>Sänger: Begrenzte Teilhabe, 112–113.</p> Moreover, the letters document another important connection, namely to groups and individuals across the globe. Dauenheimer, founder of the ‘AK Homosexualität’ in Dresden, maintained a steady correspondence with people in West Germany (FRG), the US, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden.12RHG/GZ, Bestand Karin Dauenheimer. Contact to individuals and groups in West Germany was particularly common. When it came to contact with ‘the West’ and access to gay literature, the groups in the GDR had a definite advantage vis-à-vis their counterparts in the rest of the ‘Eastern Bloc’.

But there, too, working groups on homosexuality emerged in the second half of the 1980s. Networks with and among these were built first and foremost by the Eastern European Information Pool (EEIP). On behalf of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), three members of the ‘Homosexuelle Initiative Wien’ (HOSI, Vienna) had begun gathering material in 1982 about homosexuals in the various Eastern Bloc countries. They published their insights annually in a multilingual newsletter and then, in 1984, included all three newsletters in one book: Rosa Liebe unterm roten Stern. Zur Lage der Lesben und Schwulen in Osteuropa (Pink Love under the Red Star: About Lesbians and Gay Men in Eastern Europe). From 1987 to 1996, EEIP conferences took place where activists from East and West—also from the GDR.”13<p>RHG/GZ/A1/2589, Protokoll (Verlaufsprotokoll) des 3. EEIP, 21.–23. April 1989. This play on “armed struggle” was a popular button at the time in English-speaking gay circles.</p> It remains to be seen how much networking took place via the International Lesbian Information Service, an organization which had contacts in over sixty countries and likewise published a regular newsletter in the 1980s.14<p>The newsletter can be accessed in two Berlin archives: FFBIZ and Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv.</p>  

Lesbenwerkstätten (Lesbian Workshops) and the Underground Magazine frau anders 

Scope for networking and, above all, for the exchange of news and views on specific issues was provided also by the ‘Lesbenwerkstätte’. The first one took place in October 1988 in Dresden and attracted twenty participants.15RHG/GZ/A1/1356, Einladung zur 1. Lesbenwerkstatt. The interim workshop held at Whitsuntide 1989 in Hanstorf, near Rostock, was attended by twenty women from all the known groups. These lesbian workshops were an opportunity to take stock of the attendees’ present situation as well as to relax and develop ideas for future joint projects, such as collecting literature, films, and press articles about being gay, setting up an index of activists’ lecture topics, and founding a lesbian archive.16RHG/GZ/A1/1173, Die Zwischenwerkstatt in Hanstorf &ndash; Pfingsten 1989 &ndash; ein Bericht. In addition, there were so-called ‘Lesbenrüstzeiten’ (lesbian religious period of reflection), modeled on the retreats organized by the Protestant Church, which offered a few days of rest and self-reflection, often with a program addressing a specific issue.

A particular role in this networking and work on lesbian issues was played by the underground (illegal) magazine frau anders, which was produced by some members of the Jena lesbian group from 1988 and, ultimately, from January 1989, copied and distributed in a print run of 100. Ink cartridges and paper were supplied by supporters in West Germany.17<p>Karstädt, Christina / Zitzewitz Anette v.: , ... viel zuviel verschwiegen. Eine historische Dokumentation von Lebensgeschichten lesbischer Frauen in der DDR, Berlin 1996, 191.</p> The magazine gave a voice to individual readers as well as groups; submissions were actively sought and the editorial group penned only some of the features.18<p>RHG/GZ/A1/2589, Inhalt [Konzept frau anders]</p> Portraying a group and adding details of upcoming events and a contact address was a way to foster further networking.19<p>For more on frau anders, see Sänger, Eva: Lieber öffentlich lesbisch als heimlich im DFD. Die Samisdat-Publikation frau anders in der DDR 1988/89, in Susanne Lettow et al. (Ed.): Öffentlichkeiten und Geschlechterverhältnisse. Erfahrungen Politiken Subjekte, Königstein 2005, 159–183.</p>

Also, in the time of upheaval around the Peaceful Revolution (1989–1990), building networks remained the prime concern of frau anders. Co-editor Kerstin Rösel thus wrote in January 1990 to the contact women in Jena: “Our main concerns were to network existing lesbian groups, to make it easier for women to contact such groups, to discuss the issues important to us, to spread lesbian literature, to inform women about upcoming events, and to create in this way a kind of ‘lesbian land,’ where being a confident and self-determined lesbian was simply a matter of fact.”20<p>See RHG/GZ/A1/786, Informationsbrief der frau anders an die Kontaktfrauen Jena, 25.1.90.</p>

Lesbian Commitment in Times of Upheaval

The period 1989–1990 was one of constant upheaval. As early as November 1989—immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall—lesbian groups were involved in founding the ‘Unabhängige Frauenverband’ (Independent Women’s Association) in Berlin’s ‘Volksbühne’ theater.21<p>See Hampele Ulrich, Anne: Der Unabhängige Frauenverband. Ein frauenpolitisches Experiment im deutschen Vereinigungsprozess, Berlin 2000.</p> This led to the participation of Eva Schäfer, Pat Wunderlich, Christian Schenk, and others in the sessions of the ‘Zentraler Runder Tisch’, where they argued that lesbian issues should also be included in the new (and ultimately abandoned) draft constitution. While on the one hand this led to the legalization of certain groups such as, for example, the ‘Sonntags-Club Berlin’22<p>See RHG/GZ/A1/381, Sonntags-Club, [Flyer], 1990.</p>, the ‘RosaLinde’23<p>See RHG/GZ/A1/381, AG RosaLinde, Veranstaltungsprogramm April bis Dezember 1989.</p> in Leipzig or the ‘Gerede’24<p>See RHG/GZ/A1/381, Gerede, Programm vom November '89 bis Juni '90.</p> in Dresden, as well as to the emergence of new projects, other groups now fell apart. Encounters between lesbians from the GDR and FRG unfolded under difficult conditions given that each party’s concerns, formal organization, and types of political campaign had developed along different lines. Nonetheless, coalitions were formed for specific purposes, such as protest marches or squatting vacant houses.25<p>See Rauchut, Franziska: Lesben in Bewegung. Der Werdegang der DDR- und BRD Lesbenbewegungen nach 1989, in: Das Übersehenwerden hat Geschichte, 74–77.</p>