Photo by Andreas Filla, taken at the Berlin Pride Parade 1994. CC-BY-SA
Hi my trans siblings!
I'm late writing this mega this week, I had hoped to do more research but maybe I can add stuff and re-write this as the week goes on.
This time I'd like to share some information I stumbled across about 20th century trans icon Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. She was born in the Weimar Republic in 1928 and survived Nazi Germany to make it as the most prominent trans woman that I'm aware of in the DDR (GDR or East Germany). There she ran the Gründerzeit museum, dedicated to the founding period of the German Empire and the period of its industrialization. The museum ended up becoming a popular hotspot for the gay and I presume trans and queer scene in the DDR.
She was politically active, having been an unofficial informant of the Stasi which ideally I'd love more information on. Was she helping them identify Nazis? Surely being a trans woman would've lured a lot of reactionaries out from behind their masks in her presence. In fact, after the DDR was taken over by the BRD (West Germany) in 1990, it only took about one year before one of the parties she threw at the museum was the target of a neo-Nazi attack, at which point she announced she was considering leaving Germany. She eventually moved to Sweden in 1997, where I believe she lived the rest of her life.
She died of natural causes at the age of 74 during a visit to Berlin in 2002.
This has been more or less a summary of the Wikipedia article on her where I did check some sources, but I really want to learn more about her. I only learned of her in the past couple days, and there is a film about her from 1992 called I Am My Own Woman, by Rosa von Praunheim.
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Yeah NATOpedia really not beating the NATOpedia allegations. I knew it as soon as I saw this sentence in the intro with not a single citation, "The museum became a popular meeting-point for East Berlin’s gay community, to the disapproval of the East German regime (Stasi)."
The "regime" disapproved so hard they did basically nothing about it. And even when they were interested in bringing it under government control, they decided otherwise due to resistance from her and community apparently. Who do they think they are listening to their citizens and respecting their wishes? /s
Actually, trying to bring this museum under state control was just as bad or worse than being imprisoned for being gay. The state "disapproving" is just as bad legal repression. Anything to make East Germany just as evil as the West.