5 Feminism and Domestic Violence Activism in the GDR

In the autumn of 1987, the third East German Frauenfest (Women’s Festival) was held at the Lutheran Church of Reconciliation in Dresden. Organised outside of the auspices of the state, the weekend-long event was run by the local lesbian Arbeitskreis Homosexualität (working-group on homosexuality) and supported by other dissident women’s groups, including Women for Peace Dresden, Lesbian Group Jena and members of the Fennpfuhl women’s group in Berlin. The festival was a women-only event aimed at engaging participants in a critical discussion of life and womanhood under socialism. Indeed, as the flyers for the festival made clear, it was a space for all women to come together, with an organising committee made up of ‘lesbian and non-lesbian Christians and non-Christians’.¹ At the festival, the participants attended lectures, focus groups and feedback sessions where the organisers invited them to discuss and share their experiences of being women in East Germany. But it was also a social occasion, with communal meal breaks and a dance party on the Saturday night. There was even childcare so that mothers could attend.²

While this was one of several independent women’s events in the GDR, what made this festival stand out was its focus on the theme of ‘Power in Relationships’. For the organisers, it was important to ‘recognise the forms and consequences of the exertion of power in personal relationships, at work and in society’.³ In preparation for the festival, organisers even asked participants to consider their own experiences of coercion and power, where and how they exercised it and what consequences there had been. These reflections formed the basis of the festival’s focus groups, which examined various issues of power, including the social pressures lesbians experience, dependence and subordination in intimate relationships and even violence in language.⁴ Much like consciousness-raising groups in the West, this critical self-reflection served a political purpose: bringing women together through their shared experiences of power and oppression.

But it was the festival’s keynote address that really caught the public’s attention. On the evening of Friday, 2 October, Ines Walter gave a lecture on violence in the family.⁵ The audience assembled at the church that night was mixed; although the festival was for women only, men were allowed to attend the keynote. In her talk, Walter tackled the kinds of common assumptions that shrouded domestic abuse. ‘Many see the abuse of women as an individual problem’, began Walter, ‘it is important to counter this false view: all women experience powerlessness and vulnerability during their lifetime.’⁶ More than this, Walter also took the SED and state institutions to task for failing to protect women. ‘The fact that violence against women exists–and not as a “problem of a few sick men”, but as a general social problem–is documented in the high divorce rates, in women’s calls for help to the police, in the marriage and sexual counselling centres and in the child welfare system’, she argued. Even worse for Walter was the fact that ‘the workers of these institutions know the difficulties women face! But there isn’t any (or hardly any) help.’⁷

The lecture ended with Walter and the head of the Arbeitskreis Homosexualität, Karin Dauenheimer, calling for the creation of a ‘Place of Protection’. Much like a women’s shelter, this would be a space where women experiencing domestic abuse would be taken seriously and supported to make their own decisions. They also envisioned it as a place where women could find information on their options and legal rights and where they would be ‘encouraged to value their bodily autonomy more than prevailing–and mistaken–norms’.⁸

Such an engaged approach to domestic abuse contrasted starkly with the SED’s official position. Rather than blame bourgeois capitalist gender norms or a failed socialist consciousness, the Dresden Frauenfest saw violence against women as a systemic problem that was reflective of broader issues of gender inequality present throughout East Germany. This clearly resonates with feminist work against gender-based violence; just as West German feminists sought to draw attention to the connection between gendered power imbalances and violence against women, so too did activists in the GDR. But in the context of state socialism, such an approach carried a very different weight. By questioning the official narrative of violence against women, the Dresden Frauenfest were doing more than just criticising the state’s approach to domestic abuse. In a state built on claims of gender equality and support for women and the family, Walter’s exposé challenged the very legitimacy of SED rule.

Historians have typically linked this kind of grassroots activism to the snowball of social and political shifts that culminated in the collapse of socialism and the end of the Cold War.⁹ Similarly to Alltagsfilme, events like the Dresden Frauenfest were evidence of a growing disillusionment that was spreading across the GDR and the Communist Bloc more generally. Much of this dissent within Eastern Europe was driven by the worsening economic position of the socialist states, problems of material deprivation and popular frustration at the lack of social and political freedoms. In the GDR, Honecker’s authoritarian-style leadership and refusal to adopt the key Soviet reforms of glasnost and perestroika only further heightened tensions. For many East Germans, the SED seemed increasingly antiquated and out of touch with the changing times, especially following the start of reform efforts in Poland and Hungary.¹⁰ Throughout the 1980s, what began as a small dissidence movement slowly grew into mass protest and, along with mounting international pressure and internal crises facing the SED, culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.

But what would happen if we shifted our focus? What different kind of insights would there be if we saw women’s activism not as a history of the Cold War, but rather as a history of feminism? This chapter examines this question and asks what East German activism against gender-based violence tells us about the development and practice of feminism in Germany. This means that instead of concentrating on how activists challenged and questioned the state, we ask how they thought and spoke about violence against women and how they sought to address it.

By approaching the topic this way, it is clear that East German activists drew from, translated and even developed ‘western’ feminist approaches to violence against women. They read from key western feminist texts, hosted influential West German female politicians and maintained contact with activists from across the Iron Curtain. While some historians have questioned whether feminism or a women’s movement ever really existed under socialism, by examining activism against gender-based violence, this chapter clearly shows that it did. In many ways, the story of this activism, both in East Germany and later in the new federal states of a reunified Germany, is a testament to feminism’s success.

Feminism gave GDR activists a language and a framework for thinking about violence against women at a time when critical discussion on the topic was strictly controlled. Moreover, feminism provided East German activists a platform to call for greater support for women’s rights and protection for women living with violence. While there was little time for these activists to create change before the collapse of socialism in 1989, this work took on renewed importance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that time, the delegitimisation of the SED and the integration of the GDR into the Federal Republic paved new avenues for activists tackling violence against women. Indeed, domestic violence projects in eastern Germany quickly received financial and political support from the new authorities and women’s shelters spread throughout the states of the former GDR. The years of work that West German feminists spent getting domestic violence on the liberal political agenda were paying off. The fact that activists in the new German states could move relatively seamlessly from grassroots organising under socialism to publicly funded service in a newly reunified state shows how feminism, and feminists, had successfully transformed Germany’s political landscape.

However, this is not just a history of the success of West German feminism. Drawing primarily from grey literature (for example, activist materials and publications, non-state magazines and journals), as well as novels, women’s writing and three oral history interviews, this chapter also explores the differences between East German approaches to violence against women and those developed in the West. In West Germany, feminism, the women’s movement and activism to address domestic violence were intimately connected. Domestic abuse was a formative issue for women activists in the 1970s and it was out of this movement that the first shelters and services for women living with an abusive partner were developed. Feminism not only infused the very way in which domestic violence was understood in West Germany, but it also shaped how it was addressed.

This was not necessarily the case in East Germany, where activism against gender-based violence often emerged out of the dissidence movement. While there were feminists working to address gender-based violence within the women’s movement in the GDR, there were also activists who did not take a feminist or even a gendered approach to violence against women. What united these different groups was their opposition to the state, which in turn infused the way they understood gender-based violence. For these activists, it was not just a gender issue. Instead, they conceived of it more broadly: as one of a litany of social problems that the SED were failing to address. This approach was reflective of a broader shift happening within women’s rights, as they slowly came to be considered human rights. As such, this chapter uses activism against gender-based violence in the GDR as a way of exploring the changing meaning and practice of feminism in the late 20th century.

Typically, discussions of feminism in East Germany begin with women’s literature. From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, an increasing number of women writers began to assert their voices and experiences of womanhood under socialism. Novels like The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatriz as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura (1974) by Irmtraud Morgner, Franziska Linkerhand (1974) by Brigitte Reimann and The Quest for Christa T. (1968) by Christa Wolf were some of the first works written by women in the GDR that focused on women’s lives. In contrast to other novels from the time, male characters took a backseat, with the narratives revolving around heterosexual women’s experiences, including single motherhood, sexuality, marriage and advancement in the workplace.¹¹ Centring women–their lives, struggles, thoughts and feelings–not only marked an important expression of women’s subjectivity, but was also a radical change from the idealised heroines of socialist realist literature.

But what has made these works such an important starting point for feminism is the way they asserted a deep longing for more out of life and questioned the very ability of socialism to fulfil women or even to allow for their self-realisation.¹² In different ways, each author gave voice to what they saw as a broadly felt sentiment of frustration and dissatisfaction among women in East Germany. They used their writing ‘as a forum to probe the question of whether the emancipated socialist woman was in fact living a fully human life’.¹³ Gerti Tetzner’s 1974 novel Karen W., for example, begins in medias res with the protagonist, Karen, lying awake thinking, while her partner, Peters, snores in the bed beside her. ‘Before, I used to need him breathing beside me’, she reflected, ‘… before all this brooding started.’ No longer fulfilled by her life with Peters, Karen longed for something more: ‘with every remaining day, I become more restless than the week before: my life is passing me by, strength and youth seep away unused and irretrievable.’¹⁴ At this moment, and within the first few pages of the book, Karen decides to leave her life and moves back to her childhood village with her daughter. Four years later, in 1978, Christa Wolf similarly wrote that for women in the GDR ‘what they have achieved and take for granted is no longer enough.’ Instead, women’s ‘first concern is no longer what they have, but who they are’.¹⁵ In what has been labelled Wolf’s first discussion on feminism, she underscored that women under socialism were ‘signalling a radical expectation: to be able to live as a whole person, to make use of all their senses and abilities’.¹⁶

Such expressions of unhappiness and dissatisfaction were commonplace among feminists and within the transnational women’s movements of the 1960s.¹⁷ Both Wolf and Tetzner’s revelations of East German women’s internal struggle closely echo those made by American feminist Betty Friedan 15 years earlier when, in the first paragraph of The Feminine Mystique, she asked ‘is this all?’¹⁸ West German feminist Helke Sander similarly wrote in 1968 that ‘every thinking woman is emotionally fed up with this system, even if she can’t articulate it. she’s fed up because she senses that this system will never be ready to even slightly fulfil her desires.’¹⁹

In other historical contexts, these moments of feminist awakening are seen as the starting point for a women’s movement borne out of identity politics and shared experiences of gendered oppression.²⁰ Yet this has not been the case in studies of women’s activism in East Germany. For many scholars, feminism in the GDR was something that only ever existed in literature; it never translated into a fully fledged women’s movement.²¹ Instead, Wolf, alongside the other writers, is presented as a feminist avant-garde without popular support. Going even further, Christiane Lemke has argued that one of the reasons women’s literature was so popular was precisely because there was no women’s movement in the GDR.²² This is only thought to have changed in 1989, when political conditions enabled the mass mobilisation of women and the formation of a women’s movement.²³

Such an interpretation is particularly striking because, between 1982 and 1989, there were nearly 200 different non-state women’s groups across East Germany. Although women’s organisational life in the GDR had long been controlled by the SED, things were starting to change in the late 1970s. Since its founding in 1947, the official socialist women’s group, the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (Democratic Women’s League of Germany or DFD), had monopolised women’s organising. However, the 6 March 1978 agreement between representatives of the Protestant Church in East Germany and the SED awarded relative autonomy to the Church. From this point on, the Church, which had long been a safe haven for opposition voices in the GDR, took on the role of ‘ersatz-public sphere’ as it gave shelter to an increasing number of non-state dissident groups.²⁴

It was from this milieu that women’s organising emerged. Focusing on issues as varied as feminist theology, sexuality and the environment and sheltered within the Church, they held meetings, hosted events like the Dresden Frauenfest, took part in dissident activities and worked to create networks between women, men and other activist groups. While some may only have attracted a handful of members, the largest non-state women’s group, the Berlin-based Frauen für den Frieden (Women for Peace), had chapters throughout the country and acted as an important hub of women’s activism.²⁵ Even though some groups, like Frauen für den Frieden, outwardly refused the label ‘feminist’, by holding political discussions in women-only spaces and challenging the SED state, their work ‘furthered the potential for emancipation of GDR women as a whole in the 1980s’.²⁶ In addition, many of the women involved in these groups read and drew inspiration from East (and also West) German feminist writers. Given this activist work, why have scholars been so hesitant to acknowledge the existence of a women’s movement in East Germany before 1989?

One key reason lies in the fact that many studies of women’s activism and dissidence in the GDR are framed around the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.²⁷ Scholars have sought to understand how socialism came to collapse and the role ordinary men and women played in ending the Cold War. Moreover, in light of reunification and the integration of East German states into the West German political system, there has been intense interest in citizens’ political engagement under socialism and how this impacted democratic participation after 1990. Women and women’s roles have played a particularly important part in this scholarship, as reunification and the collapse of socialism brought women’s issues to the fore. Across the former Eastern Bloc, women were hit hard by unemployment and many of the new nationalist regimes implemented pronatalist and patriarchal reforms.²⁸ In Germany, abortion reform was a key issue in the reunification process, as East German women and West German feminists fought to have the liberal GDR abortion law enacted in the newly reunified state.

But in trying to link women’s activism and protest with the broader political transformation of East Germany, the scholarship has often focused on questions of size, impact and public engagement. Given the limited public sphere and small size of women’s groups in the GDR prior to 1989, this has inevitably led scholars to doubt the existence of a women’s movement and to question the impact of dissidence on political developments. However, there are some significant shortcomings with this approach. Firstly, it diminishes the much longer history of protest and dissent in the GDR to a single moment of collapse.²⁹ Secondly, and most importantly, it also draws from interpretations of social activism based on experiences in western democracies, where social and political conditions enabled much larger protest movements to develop. In this way, much of the existing scholarship on feminism and women’s activism in East Germany comes close to concretising a normative model based on the trajectories of western women’s movements.

In Eva Maleck-Lewy and Bernhard Maleck’s chapter on the women’s movement in divided Germany, for example, they argue that the East German women’s movement did not develop until 1989, when political conditions finally enabled women to organise autonomously.³⁰ From this perspective, groups that had existed prior to 1989 are seen merely as precursors, whose significance is only made clear following the ousting of Erich Honecker as the SED leader in October 1989. Similarly, Christine Schenk and Christiane Schindler say that given the ‘lack of democracy’ in the GDR, only a rudimentary women’s movement was able to develop.³¹ In making these arguments, the authors implicitly underscore a way of thinking where women’s emancipation has been exported to the wider world from the West and is only possible under the conditions of a capitalist, liberal democracy. This is something that has long been critiqued by postcolonial historians exploring feminism within the developing world. As Kumari Jayawardena has argued, this Eurocentric vision of feminism only reifies racial and colonial hierarchies.³² It also misses the possibility that forms of feminism can originate and develop differently outside of the western, liberal context.

Certainly, there were key differences between women’s rights activism in East and West Germany. The SED’s work to address women’s inequality meant that many of the rights that feminists in West Germany fought for were already implemented in the GDR. East German women had legal access to first trimester abortions from 1972 and contraception was covered by public health insurance. Although access to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy was legislated in West Germany in 1974, the reform was declared invalid by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1975 and a more restrictive law introduced. The liberalisation of this law remained one of the women’s movement’s most active campaigns. Similarly, while male-breadwinner households remained the norm in the Federal Republic, female employment was much higher under socialism. Various SED social policies and extensive childcare provision also enabled mothers to work in paid employment. Although East German women worked predominantly in traditionally female sectors, such as the service industry and education, and remained responsible for the majority of housework and child rearing, the issues most fundamental to West German feminism simply did not preoccupy East German activists.

But this does not mean that there was no feminism or women’s rights movement in the GDR. Following Jayawardena, in order to understand what East German activists against domestic violence achieved, we must examine their work in the context of the GDR and not just as a precursor to 1989.³³ None of the people attending the Dresden Frauenfest in 1987 knew that in only two years’ time socialism in East Germany was going to collapse, so why should that frame our historical analysis? Adopting this approach, it becomes apparent that much of what East German activists did to combat violence against women drew from and built on West German feminism. At the same time, their work also challenged it and moved feminism in different directions.

The most important group to address violence against women in the GDR was the Weimar Frauenteestube or Women’s Tea Parlour. The group first formed in 1983 after two Weimar women attended the second annual Peace Workshop in Berlin. At the time, this was one of the most important events for dissidents and activists in East Germany and it inspired the Weimar women to form a local chapter of Frauen für den Frieden.³⁴ Although they may have started as a peace group, they soon turned to other issues. After receiving access to rooms at the Johanneskirche in Weimar in 1984, the group–now able to meet regularly and hold events–began to focus more on women’s issues. They got involved in other women’s activities throughout the GDR, meeting with activists in Berlin and hosting various talks on pedagogy, feminist theology and motherhood.

As the group continued, their work increasingly engaged with western feminism. According to founding Weimar activist Petra Streit, her ‘A-Ha! moment’ came after reading her first feminist book from the West. She describes it as a moment where ‘suddenly the lights were switched on’. From this moment, Streit read widely on women’s issues, saying that she knew ‘more about the situation of women in Western Europe, America and Asia’ than she did about women in the GDR.³⁵ But this interest in women’s lives was also driven by a creeping awareness that her understanding of womanhood did not match the vision being sold by the SED. As she put it, ‘I read in the newspaper (if they even bother to report on women) that we are equal, that everything is great for us, that everything is being done for us, etc. But the experiences of women and the GDR-women’s literature say something different to those few newspaper articles. How is it really for women in the GDR?’³⁶

This question proved decisive. Exploring women’s lives and experiences was central to developing an independent approach to violence against women. The paucity of critical discussion in East Germany meant that one of the first tasks facing women’s groups seeking to address gender violence was the creation of a language capable of expressing shared experiences of violence. Finding common ground between women was no easy task though; as one member of the Eisenach women’s group remarked ‘it is very difficult to create something like a formula or definition [for violence against women], since each one of us have experienced and evaluated their surroundings (workplace, family) differently.’³⁷

This interest in the position of women in the GDR led Streit and the Frauenteestube to investigate violence against women more fully. Following meetings with notable Berlin activist Ulrike Poppe in 1986 and early 1987, the group began to focus their work on rape and sexual violence under socialism, a topic otherwise largely neglected by the SED. From this point, up to the summer of 1989, the group took on various projects aimed at increasing awareness of sexual violence and reforming the law of rape in the GDR. In their own words, they examined ‘the contempt of women, concepts of male ownership of women’s bodies, [and] male sexuality as a demonstration of power and aggression’ in incidents of rape.³⁸

From 1987 onwards, the group initiated numerous activities in their campaign against sexual violence. One of their major projects was a grassroots survey examining women’s experiences of rape and sexual violence, but they also created a reform agenda to revise Paragraph 121, the Criminal Code provision on rape in East Germany and presented lectures on the subject of sexual violence to other women’s groups across the GDR. It was at these lectures that the group distributed copies of the survey for the audience to complete, handing out some before and after the presentation. They also allowed women to take copies of the survey home to distribute among their circle of friends and acquaintances, with the explicit instruction that they should hand it out to women from different age groups to increase the diversity of respondents. Once completed, women could then mail their survey back to the Frauenteestube for collation.

The survey itself consisted of eight key questions and was designed to allow respondents to remain anonymous. The first questions focused on rape, asking the respondents whether they had been raped or had survived an attempted rape. The survey then broadened this focus, asking about experiences of other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, flashing and childhood sexual abuse. The final questions asked about the longer-term impact of abuse and violence–whether, for example, it had changed the respondent’s relationships with men.³⁹

Between 1987 and 1989, the group collected 151 completed surveys and the results clearly indicated that sexual violence was a widespread phenomenon in the GDR. Twenty-two per cent of respondents said they had been raped and of this 73 per cent said it happened once, 9 per cent twice and 3 per cent four times. A further 44 per cent said they had survived an attempted rape, the majority for whom it only happened once. Experiences of sexual harassment were very high, with 70 per cent of respondents reporting that they had been flashed and a further 66 per cent stating they had experienced another form of sexual harassment, including unwanted physical touching or verbal harassment. It is also clear that these experiences had a lasting impact on women: 51 per cent of respondents stated that they were either experiencing or had experienced mental health issues because of violence and harassment. For the vast majority this was anxiety, but women also listed feelings of insecurity, changes to their physical health and a change in their attitudes towards and relationships with men.⁴⁰

Alongside these important findings, the survey clearly shows that the Weimar group drew inspiration from feminism. Not only did they use grassroots feminist methodologies that privileged women’s voices and experiences, but the way they conceptualised violence also reflected contemporary feminist discussions. Like their counterparts in West Germany, the Weimar group understood violence against women as something that ran much deeper within the fabric of society than mere physical assault. Instead, it was bound up in myriad actions against women’s personhood and was something that had a long-lasting impact on women’s emotional and physical well-being and sense of self. For example, although the survey was ostensibly about rape, it also asked women about their experiences of sexual harassment, assault and even child abuse, thereby connecting violence to broader gendered oppression and inequality. Furthermore, by asking about the long-term impact of violence, the Weimar group acknowledged the way in which acts of violence can reverberate throughout a woman’s life. It is also noteworthy that the survey asked about ‘sexual harassment’. While rape and assault had legal definitions, sexual harassment was still a relatively new concept at this time; American feminist Catherine Mackinnon’s ground breaking work on the topic had only just come out in English in 1979 and was not available in German translation.

But while they drew from feminism, these activists did not simply replicate western feminist thought and practice. Whereas West Berlin activists seeking funding from the state and political legitimacy had to make violence against women legible, this simply was not the case in the GDR. The Weimar Frauenteestube did not have to create clearly defined distinctions between rape, assault, domestic violence and harassment because they were working outside of, and against, the state. This allowed them to develop a much more amorphous and holistic understanding of violence against women. Indeed, the survey enabled women to define their own experiences and often in ways that challenged feminist politics. In several survey responses, women listed non-consensual sex with an intimate partner as sexual harassment and not rape. In one case, a 25-year-old woman listed ‘sex that I didn’t want or didn’t feel like having’ with her boyfriend as a form of sexual harassment. Similarly, a 35-year-old woman, who, although she had not reported being raped, said that she had frequently been forced into sex during arguments with her husband. While we do not know what the Tea Parlour made of such assertions, in the context of a state where women were not encouraged to speak openly about abuse or sexual violence this survey gave women a voice and a language to define their experiences. It also gave weight to the activists’ critiques of the SED’s failure to address violence against women, as they had hard proof that it was more than just a few ‘bad men’ who abused women.

The other projects of the Frauenteestube also reflect an attempt to translate feminism for life and politics under socialism.⁴¹ This is most clearly visible in the group’s work to challenge the law of rape in the East German Criminal Code. Paragraph 121 defined rape as ‘whoever forces a woman through violence or through threat of violence to life or health into extra-marital sex, or coerces a defenceless or mentally ill woman into extra-marital sex will be punished with a sentence of between one and five years.’⁴² In their critique, the Frauenteestube took issue with three key aspects of this law: the restriction of rape to non-marital relationships; the standard of consent, in particular the requirement that the woman be threatened with violence; and lastly, the limitation of rape to women.

With respect to rape as limited to non-marital sex, the Weimar group’s critique clearly echoed the ideas of 19th-century German socialist leader August Bebel, whose pioneering work Woman and Socialism linked women’s oppression by men to the broader class struggle.⁴³ Specifically, the Weimar women argued that by excluding rape within marriage, the legal system was upholding bourgeois values, in particular ‘the traditional view of rape as an injury to a man’s property rights over women’.⁴⁴ Similarly, the restriction of rape to vaginal penetration, they argued, was based on an outdated and equally bourgeois view that criminalising rape is about preventing unwanted children and protecting the virginity of young women.

As their discussion continued, they drew increasingly from feminist critiques to challenge the standard of consent in East German rape law. In particular, the Frauenteestube criticised the way that according to the law a mere ‘no’ did not prove lack of consent, but rather that a woman had to show signs of having physically resisted her rapist. They further argued that this had the effect of disregarding women’s right to sexual self-determination and also ignored the way society socialises women to be passive.⁴⁵ By maintaining these laws, they argued, the courts were protecting women only to safeguard their reproductive capabilities and not because women had a right to bodily and sexual integrity. In making this claim, the Weimar group was able to use both socialist and feminist frameworks to make a radical claim for women’s rights.

What is most striking is the fact that the Weimar group’s reform agenda on rape explicitly included men as capable of being raped.⁴⁶ Primarily, including men in their critique of Paragraph 121 was a way of highlighting just how unfair it was to confine the definition of rape to vaginal penetration. ‘How can lawmakers think, for example, that oral or anal rape are any less dehumanising and brutal than vaginal rape for the victim, either female or male?’, the group argued. The inclusion of men also had a broader resonance. On the one hand, including men may have been a way of appealing to the importance of gender equality in socialism. By showing how both women and men were affected by the law, the activists could make a larger claim for reform.

On the other hand, it also spoke to a solidarity between men and women dissidents in East Germany. Not only were they both victims of sexual violence, but, more importantly, they were victims of the regime. This is one of the most unique aspects of the development of feminist politics in East Germany.⁴⁷ While West German feminism emerged out of antagonism with male-dominated organisations like the SDS and the APO, in East Germany the relationships between male and female dissidents were not as contentious.⁴⁸ The Weimar Frauenteestube grew out of and in cooperation–not conflict–with the broader dissidence movement. As such, it was the state, not men, which was the target of their critiques.⁴⁹

Questioning and challenging the state was fundamental to the work of women tackling gender-based violence. This is not only evident in their work to reform Paragraph 121, but also in the survey, which was positioned in direct contrast to the state’s approach to gender-based violence. ‘Over the course of our research into the topic of rape’, the survey began, ‘we have discovered that there are no available statistics in the GDR. According to the police, sexual crimes are very rare in comparison to other criminal acts. We want to create an overview for ourselves and ask for your support.’⁵⁰ Similar sentiments were echoed in the keynote address of the Dresden Frauenfest. According to speaker Ines Walter, ‘it is striking that there are no statistics or research on woman abuse (both within and outside of the family) and that such a dangerous phenomenon has not been seen as worthy of study.’⁵¹ This approach also meant that women’s rights activism was more open to men. Not only did the reform agenda of the Frauenteestube include men as victims of rape, but the keynote lecture of the Dresden Frauenfest was open to both women and men. It also meant that responding to gender-based violence was not only thought of as a women’s issue, enabling men to get involved in activism against domestic violence.

Indeed, one of the earliest responses to domestic violence emerged not out of a women’s group or even out of a grassroots activist organisation. As early as 1981, Caritas, a Catholic welfare organisation, was attempting to open a crisis shelter in Berlin.⁵² Initially opened in 1984, the shelter was set up in a former vicarage on the edge of Berlin, where counsellors and residents lived side-by-side. In 1986, it moved to Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen neighbourhood. This new shelter, named Caritas-Haus. Wohnen für Menschen in schwierigen Lebenssituationen (Caritas House: Accommodation for People in Difficult Circumstances), started taking in clients in 1987 and consisted of a staff of male and female volunteers, social workers and a psychologist.

Significantly, this project was not planned exclusively as a women’s shelter; rather, it was designed as a general crisis shelter to address the myriad issues of homelessness and drug and alcohol addiction that existed in the GDR. However, the broad mandate of ‘difficult circumstances’ meant that women escaping violence in the home soon arrived at the shelter looking for support. This came as a ‘total surprise’ for the Caritas workers, who had never considered domestic violence as an issue and yet were increasingly faced with women in need of help and protection from their abusive partners.⁵³ To what extent then can we compare this work to that of the Weimar Frauenteestube? Is it really feminist?

Whether planned as a domestic violence support service or not, the Caritas shelter certainly represented an important intervention in protecting women’s rights and tackling gender inequality in the GDR. It enabled women to leave abusive relationships and gave them access to support services that were not invested in the socialist mission of the state. In addition, the Caritas House had links to the growing East German women’s movement and was even taken up as a model for future feminist action. The Hohenschönhausen house was actively promoted among women’s groups as a refuge from domestic violence. Following the 1987 Dresden Frauenfest, gay rights activist Marinka Körzendörfer advertised the new project in the magazine UNION. Similarly, Christine Dietrich, one of the festival’s organisers, wrote an article on the subject of violence against women for the Protestant magazine Glaube+ Heimat. In this piece, Dietrich drew attention to the Caritas project as ‘the first place in the GDR where affected women could turn to for help’.⁵⁴ She further called for the construction of other refuges and for readers to ‘search for other potential support services for abused women in municipal and protestant bodies’.⁵⁵

Moreover, the Caritas House was embedded within the same dissident networks as women’s feminist activism against gender-based violence. For these activists, addressing domestic violence was about more than just helping women: it was about challenging SED rule and compensating for the failing regime. Much like grassroots feminist organising, Caritas’ work originated from the same desire for more out of socialism. They were keenly aware that significant social problems were simply being swept under the carpet by the SED and, like the various women’s groups, they attempted to fill the gaps in the crumbling ‘welfare dictatorship’.⁵⁶ Indeed, for one former Caritas volunteer, creating a service outside of the auspices of the state was about ‘doing something different’ from what the system expected.⁵⁷

Taken together then, the Weimar Frauenteestube and the Caritas shelter reveal the diversity and unique nature of GDR feminism. Emerging as it did out of the nexus of western feminist politics, ‘real-existing socialism’ and the dissident movement, women’s rights activism in the GDR was not only more open to men and less separatist, but it was also much more invested in partnerships with welfare organisations and legal reform. In West Berlin, by comparison, Caritas only opened a shelter in 1983–seven years after the first model shelter–and many activists remained reluctant to engage with the state up until German reunification. Although groups like the Frauenteestube took up West German feminist literature and approaches, they also pushed it in different directions, translating feminist politics to fit a dissident socialist context.

In this way, the history of domestic violence activism in the GDR is more than just a part of the history of feminism. It is also part of a history of dissidence. However, the historiography has highlighted one important limitation: for most of the 1980s, dissidence in the GDR was a small affair. Although the achievements of the groups examined here are significant, it was only after 1989, with the implosion of the SED and the fall of the Berlin Wall that a mass movement against domestic violence developed in the East. From this point on, activism against domestic violence changed radically. While both the Weimar Frauenteestube and the Caritas shelter continued their work beyond 1989, the impetus for addressing violence against women shifted to new projects that much more closely fit the western model of feminist activism. But this did not mean that the patterns and relationships established in GDR activism disappeared entirely.

In the months before and after the collapse of socialism in East Germany, there was an explosion of protest, as popular discontent became increasingly vocal across the GDR. Groups formed at this time like the Unabhängiger Frauenverband (UFV, or Independent Women’s Association) and Neues Forum (New Forum) allowed women to come together as never before. Just like the independent women’s groups under socialism, these new spaces allowed women to forge connections and engage in issues that mattered to them as women.⁵⁸ From this point on, a movement against domestic abuse and violence against women was able to grow in the East. Reunification saw the start of many projects aimed at assisting women in violent living situations and throughout the early 1990s, shelters spread across the former GDR.⁵⁹

However, unlike the struggles to get domestic abuse taken seriously in West Germany, shelters and projects were taken up with much less fuss in the former East.⁶⁰ On the one hand, this was due to the do-it-yourself grassroots approach that had dominated activism against gender-based violence in the GDR. Activists were used to compensating for the state’s failings and this served them well after 1989. Indeed, when one activist asked UFV founder Ina Merkel whether there were any plans to open a women’s shelter, she was told ‘you have to do it yourselves.’⁶¹ Encouraged by this attitude, this activist would go on to organise the first independent women’s shelter in former East Berlin.

On the other hand, East German activism’s success was also due to the work of feminists in the West. By the time of reunification, feminists had been working to address domestic violence for almost 15 years. By 1989, the women’s shelter system was not only institutionalised in West Germany, but addressing violence against women was firmly integrated into West German political life. East German activists were certainly able to benefit from this: they could both draw on the experiences and strategies of other West German shelters and they could use these connections as support to legitimise domestic violence intervention as an important political issue.

The stories of two of the earliest shelters to open in the East–the erstes autonomes Frauenhaus (First Autonomous Women’s Shelter) in Leipzig and the Hestia Women’s Shelter in East Berlin–reflect the very different way in which domestic violence projects were taken up in the new federal states. Like the West German shelters, these were organised following feminist principles of self-help and empowerment and they closely followed the western definitions of violence against women and models of intervention. Interestingly though, both these shelters emerged as new projects beginning in 1989. They did not develop out of the women’s or dissidents’ movements, but rather out of the context of the collapse of the socialist regime.

One of the Leipzig shelter’s founders, Jennifer, worked as a nurse in a women’s ward in the GDR. During this time, she saw many young women who, seeing no other way out of their abusive relationships, had attempted suicide. Although she believed that the SED would never permit a women’s shelter to be opened, after seeing East German media coverage of domestic violence projects in West Berlin, she started to make plans for a shelter in Leipzig. She even had friends in Cologne send her literature on domestic violence.⁶² By 1989, political developments enabled her to start work on a refuge for women. In the months prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was able to travel to Cologne and meet with shelter workers there. By the time the Wall fell in November 1989, Jennifer and three other women had already begun to map out a support project for women in crisis. The four women had all met at a women’s meeting organised by the political group Neues Forum and, by early December 1989, they had submitted an application to the City Planning Commission demanding that an unoccupied house be made available for the construction of a women’s shelter.⁶³

Following a similar trajectory, Sophie, the founder of what would become the Hestia Shelter in Berlin, was a volunteer with Child and Youth Services under socialism and had encountered many young people and mothers who were experiencing violence in the home. In late 1989, she joined a group of 20 women, all from different social backgrounds, interested in helping women who were living with violence. In comparison to the professional team composing the West Berlin house at this time, none of this group were trained social workers, but they had either had voluntary experience working in the welfare sector, or had first-hand experiences of violence against women. In February 1990, the East Berlin women formed the Association for the Protection of Physically and Psychologically Threatened and Abused Women and their Children, later renamed Hestia. After this, they began contacting various political bodies, such as the town council of Berlin and the regional Round Tables (forums held between the citizens’ movement and government bodies to enable reform), in hopes of being granted one of the many empty properties left behind following the overthrow of the SED.

Much like the West German activists in the mid-1970s, for both the Leipzig and Berlin groups the second stage of their activism was to break the taboo of domestic violence and create public awareness. The two groups forwarded copies of their shelter proposals to regional newspapers and published statistics and data on violence against women under socialism.⁶⁴ The Leipzig women’s festival also promoted the group’s work, bringing many new volunteers to the shelter project. Similarly, the newly installed City Commissioner for Equal Opportunity in East Berlin hosted a hearing on the issue of violence against women in September 1990, where the film The Power of Men is the Forbearance of Women (1978), based on stories of the Grunewald shelter in West Berlin, was screened.

More generally, the years 1989 and 1990 saw a media boom on the subject of violence against women as the cause of domestic abuse was quickly taken up. Newspaper articles and radio shows, both mainstream and feminist-oriented, revealed how under socialism domestic abuse had been a taboo that ‘contradicted the official ideal of the intact family’.⁶⁵ They further focused on women’s stories of abuse and the task of opening shelters, highlighting the SED’s failure to protect women, repeating popular feminist critiques of domestic violence as a ‘social problem’ based in ‘patriarchal structures and the real discrimination of women in the home and at work’.⁶⁶ At the same time, social researchers began to collect data on violence against women, with the first statistics on rape and domestic violence in the East German criminal justice system published in 1990.⁶⁷ While these stories led some observers to conclude that domestic violence did not exist as widely under socialism, they did not create the same widespread anxieties or questioning of shelter projects as was the case in the West in the 1970s.⁶⁸

This popular support for domestic violence activism was certainly due to the years of groundwork laid by West German feminists. But it was also because activists capitalised on the growing delegitimisation of the SED and socialist rule. Just as the West Berlin shelter initiative legitimised their work by linking their project to the London Chiswick refuge, by emphasising how stigmatised domestic violence was under socialism, East German activists took full advantage of the changing political climate. The proposals of both the Leipzig shelter and the first autonomous shelter in East Berlin underscored that under socialism ‘there were no social or legal regulations’ addressing violence in the family.⁶⁹ Positioning their efforts in this manner allowed these projects to garner support by casting their work in opposition to the illegitimate SED regime. Indeed, the projects in Leipzig and East Berlin were quickly embraced by the new political organisations of the Wende, both receiving funding and property within a year of application. By early 1990, the Leipzig District Assembly concluded that a women’s shelter was needed, after members of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, the successor party of the SED) and the DFD introduced a draft resolution. In the summer of that same year, the District Administration gave the Leipzig group a former Stasi building.⁷⁰ Soon thereafter the group was given a start-up grant of 50,000DM from the last East German Ministry for Family, Youth and Sport after writing to its Minister, Christa Schmidt. The Leipzig shelter opened on 2 November 1990 and, with space for 24 women and children, was immediately full. By 1991, the shelter was funded through the city budget and in 1993 they were granted a larger house to help with overcrowding, which finally opened in 1994.

A similar process took place in East Berlin as the initiative group worked to establish a women’s shelter. Much like the Leipzig shelter, it is clear they received significant political support. Before even receiving funding for the project, the Berlin group was granted a former residence of the National People’s Army (NVA) through the petition of a citizens’ initiative in early 1990.⁷¹ Although possession of this building caused some difficulties, with the title only being passed on to the Municipal Authorities in East Berlin from the former Ministry for Disarmament and Defence in late September 1990, the official backing that the proposed shelter received from political authorities in both East and West meant that the shelter was fully funded. Only a few months after being given the residence, the initiative group met with the West Berlin Senator for Construction and Living, who promised 331,200DM for the renovation of the NVA building, with the money due to come from the 25 million DM fund for the reconstruction of East Berlin. In addition, following a proposal by Eva Kunz, the City Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, by 3 July, the East Berlin Municipal Authorities had agreed to provide 628,800DM over two years for the shelter’s renovation and furnishing. By September 1990, the Federal Ministry for Women had provided enough money to pay the salaries of four shelter workers. Due to lengthy renovations, the Hestia shelter would not open until 19 May 1993, but in the meantime, the group was busy. They organised the Contact Office for Women in Crisis, where women in abusive relationships could find support and legal assistance; they leased 12 emergency apartments throughout Berlin and finally, on 1 January 1992, they took over a shelter in Marzahn, which had previously been supported through the local authorities, all before their proposed project had even opened.

While we might question whether the processes of opening these two shelters was so straightforward, or if it is simply a function of memory and the delegitimisation of the GDR, what is clear is that the shelters received overwhelming support in ways that shelters in West Berlin did not in the early years of domestic violence activism.⁷² Whereas West Berlin activists had to struggle for legitimacy, by the time reunification came, political support for addressing domestic violence had become a part of political life, if not also a cornerstone of West German liberalism. Indeed, when Eva Kunz wrote to the Municipal Chambers in June 1990, urging them to sponsor the East Berlin shelter, she emphasised that ‘we cannot politically afford to have this project die in administrative channels!’⁷³

That domestic violence was a serious issue and that feminist approaches were a legitimate framework for tackling violence against women were simply not questioned in the same way. The relative ease with which many of the early East German shelter projects gained political traction highlights the success of the West German shelter movement in getting violence against women on the political agenda. Of course, this institutionalisation of feminist politics came at a cost. Shelter activism in the West was deradicalised, which, as the next chapter shows, would have important consequences for the ongoing discussion and development of women’s rights over reunification.

In her book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić recalled her first encounter with some of Western Europe’s most well-known feminists. In 1978, at the first international feminist conference ‘Comrade Women’ held in Belgrade, Drakulić met Alice Schwarzer, together with the French and Italian activists Christine Delphy and Dacia Maraini. Although the conference inspired Drakulić to start a feminist group in Zagreb, the meeting also revealed some key differences between the experiences of women behind the Iron Curtain. ‘We thought they were too radical when they told us that they were harassed by men on our streets … Or when they talked about wearing high-heeled shoes as a sign of women’s subordination. We didn’t see it quite like that; we wore such shoes and even loved them’, reflected Drakulić. Going even further, she remembered, ‘how we gossiped about their greasy hair, no bra, no make-up’.⁷⁴

Clearly then, what it meant to be a feminist woman in Yugoslavia was expressed and understood very differently to how it was in Western Europe.⁷⁵ Whereas clothing for Western European feminists was connected with the dangers of consumerism and the objectification of women’s bodies, in the context of a socialist economy, with limited options for shopping, owning well-fitting, fashionable clothing had a very different political meaning and significance for women. Ready-to-wear items were highly sought after and often required extensive tailoring, taking up much of women’s spare time.⁷⁶ As such, clothing under socialism was as much an expression of a woman’s individuality, as it was of women’s labour and politics.

While this difference may seem trivial, for Drakulić it pointed to a much larger tension between feminists across the Cold War divide. There is a palpable sense of frustration throughout Drakulić’s writing as she constantly pushes back against a western tide trying to dictate the experiences and narratives of women and feminism, under socialism. Similar tensions are also visible in the literature on feminism and the women’s movement in the GDR. Feminism and activism against gender-based violence was practiced differently under socialism. But, significantly, this does not mean it was not feminist.

Writing in 2006, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree highlighted a problematic elision between the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘women’s movement’. She argued that while feminism was ‘activism for the purpose of challenging and changing women’s subordination to men’, the women’s movement was a constituency.⁷⁷ As the history of activism against gender-based violence in East Germany makes clear, this is an important distinction. In West Germany and in many other western countries, there is an intimate connection between feminism, the women’s movement and domestic violence activism. It was women who first broached the issue and it was feminist politics that drove the way it was tackled.⁷⁸

In East Germany, responding to violence against women was certainly a feminist issue. It involved challenging women’s subordination and the patriarchal structures that underpinned and obscured gender-based violence. East German activists also drew from western feminist thought and practice. But, unlike West Germany, gender-based violence was not an issue that was confined to the women’s movement. Indeed, the history of activism against gender-based violence in the GDR highlights the limitation of focusing on the women’s movement as the locus of feminism. In the context of a weakening state and growing popular unrest, domestic violence activism tapped into a much broader movement. It was about more than just men abusing women, it was also about a state that had failed its citizens. This meant that women and men alike could challenge violence against women, just as women and men could both experience gender-based violence. Moreover, as Ferree has highlighted, ‘feminist mobilizations’ can take place ‘in a variety of organizational contexts, from women’s movements to positions within governments’, or, as in East Germany, within a Catholic welfare organisation.⁷⁹

In many ways, the year 1989 brought an end to the unique form of feminism which developed under socialism in East Germany. In the new liberal-capitalist system, activists were required to adopt the definitions and categorisations used in West Germany. The broad definition of violence against women that had evolved in the GDR was replaced with labels of domestic violence, sexual violence, assault and rape. But the SED’s collapse also enabled the growth and support of domestic violence initiatives. The decades of work by West German feminists and domestic violence activists meant that supporting shelters was political common sense in the newly expanded Federal Republic. Shelter proposals were relatively seamlessly picked up and funded in the former East and the western system of institutionalised women’s shelters was implemented.

And yet, at the same time as highlighting the success of the West Berlin feminist movement, East German shelters were also spaces in which women and activists negotiated the gendered process of reunification and the new forms of citizenship brought with it. For East German women, reunification was often synonymous with the loss of rights. They faced higher levels of unemployment and poverty, as former state-owned companies were shut down and many of the rights afforded to women under socialism, such as abortion, were taken away.⁸⁰ In addition, as the Wende progressed, tensions between West German and East German feminists ran high. While West German feminists idealised the formal gender equality granted under socialism, they also saw women from the East as ‘conformist, middle-brow mummies’ who were less emancipated than women in the West. Meanwhile, East German feminists were frustrated by the heavy-handedness of the West, who allowed the repeal of the East German abortion law.⁸¹

These tensions were visible in the shelter system, as activists came to terms with the transition, often pushing back against what was felt to be the steamroller of the West. Although both Jennifer and Sophie recall feeling very supported by the West German shelter movement, for Sophie it was often more a question of needing time and space away from the western movement, so that they, as East Germans, could form their own concepts of shelter organising. Pushing back against the simple transposition of western models into the East, Sophie sought to develop feminist principles for the East German context, resulting in the creation of the Ost-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frauenhäuser (Eastern Working Group of Women’s Shelters or OAG) allowing shelter workers in the former East to separate from the western movement and discuss the peculiarities of their situation.⁸² Over time, this group became increasingly enmeshed with the West German movement and by the end of the 1990s, the OAG was closed and East German shelters teamed up with the Zentrale Informationsstelle autonomer Frauenhäuser or Central Information Point for Autonomous Women’s Shelters, established during the 1980s in West Germany.⁸³

Despite benefiting from the successes of West German feminism, domestic violence activism in the former East Germany after 1990 did not simply replicate western practices. Much like the Weimar Frauenteestube, they adapted them and translated them to their political and social realities. Indeed, in many respects, the approach to domestic violence developed in the GDR would define the shape of activism against gender-based violence in reunified Germany.