6 The Possibilities of Feminism After Reunification

‘Many still say that the best day of their life was 3 December 1989’, wrote the journalists Ulrike Helwerth and Gislinde Schwarz in 1995.¹ On that day, a small group of women activists known as the Initiativkomitee zur Gründung eines unabhängigen Frauenverbandes der DDR (Initiative Committee to Found an Independent GDR Women’s Association), organised a women’s meeting and celebration at the East Berlin Volksbühne. Unsure how many women would attend this grassroots event, the group feared the space would be too large. Their worries quickly proved unfounded, as nearly 1,200 women arrived at the theatre; the fire brigade even sought to shut down the gathering over fears of overcrowding. Women came from all over East Germany, many already belonging to one of the women’s activist groups formed in the late 1980s. There were even some ‘curious’ women from the West.² But what brought them all together was a desire to share their experiences, feelings and thoughts: about the GDR, the future of East Germany and socialism and simply about being a woman.

This meeting was both a response to and yet also enabled by the democratic awakening and rapid political transformation facing East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Within a month, SED-leader Egon Krenz was replaced by the moderate–and popular–socialist Hans Modrow, who promised major reform. The Central Round Table in Berlin brought members of the SED and other Socialist organisations together with representatives of the many citizen’s initiatives in an effort to work collaboratively towards reform. However, despite these attempts to rework socialism in East Germany, the SED was unable to keep hold of the reins, reforming as the Party of Democratic Socialism in December 1989. At the same time, the vision of western prosperity offered to East Germans now able to cross the Cold War border, alongside Helmut Kohl’s Ten-Point Plan and visit to Dresden in late 1989, only encouraged an intensifying drive towards reunification.

This deeply concerned the organisers of the women’s meeting. ‘In the current state of radical social upheaval’, their flyer pronounced ‘the interests of women have, till now, played a subordinate role.’³ They feared both a ‘further worsening of the social position of women’ and a ‘renewed exclusion of women from important political and economic decision making’.⁴ In response, they called on women to take the initiative: ‘Let’s organise ourselves! We will represent our own interests!’⁵ This is what the meeting was for: to bring East German women together so that their voices would be heard.

On a stage decorated with hanging laundry, women gave speeches, performed skits and sang together (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). There was also a reading of Ina Merkel’s manifesto ‘Without Women there is no State!’–a call to arms for the women of East Germany to create a democratic women’s movement. As Merkel argued, ‘we must see that women’s issues aren’t peripheral social problems, but fundamental existential issues … if we women want to ensure that our particular interests–developed as they have out of our specific life-situation and experiences–aren’t just taken into consideration, we must develop our own strategy.’⁶

This is precisely what happened. The women at the Volksbühne that day formed an association, bringing together independent women’s groups, initiatives, clubs and even the women’s factions of the SED and its affiliated organisations from around East Germany. This new association was not aimed at replacing these groups, but was rather to act as an umbrella organisation, advancing and representing women’s political interests at the state level. This is how the Unabhängiger Frauenverband (UFV or Independent Women’s Association) was born.⁷

For all of these reasons, 3 December 1989 and the women’s meeting in the Volksbühne is remembered as a pivotal moment for women and women’s rights in the GDR. It represented a hope for change and the belief that together women could be heard and their concerns taken seriously after decades of SED rule. For UFV founding members Christina Schenk⁸ and Christiane Schindler, it was ‘a very euphoric time, in which many women activists thought that this “Wende” was–or rather could be–a revolution. That now there was a real possibility that feminist politics could be incorporated into the upcoming restructuring of the GDR society.’⁹ Or, as Helwerth and Schwarz put it, the meeting was ‘a high point, a hope for women in the East, but also in the West’.¹⁰

But almost immediately after the meeting, it became clear that the UFV’s vision of a ‘different, reformed GDR’ was not going to be realised.¹¹ Instead, a rapid reunification with West Germany was becoming increasingly inevitable and would be confirmed in the Volkskammer election of March 1990 where the Alliance for Germany won over 48 per cent of the vote, campaigning on the promise of reunification. According to Schenk and Schindler, ‘from one day to the next, a fundamental shift in the political self-understanding of the UFV was required’ as they again found themselves in the political opposition, fighting to protect the few gains that had been made. Attempts to find common ground between feminists across the former Cold War divide were also a struggle, as they viewed each other with suspicion. This change in mood is perhaps best revealed by a cosmetologist in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, who argued that ‘this is not what we went to the street for, not for a capitalist society. No one took to the streets for that. We wanted more justice, more equality. We wanted an economic system that functioned reasonably well.’¹²

Reunification certainly has a complicated place in the histories of gender and feminism in Germany. At once a moment of hope and the possibility of feminist solidarity, it quickly became a time of intense concern and anxiety for the gains women had already won. And ultimately, it was a time of loss and confrontation with the divisions that remained between women from across the Iron Curtain. Indeed, much of the scholarship on reunification and the end of the Cold War frames it as a patriarchal and nationalistic process that curtailed women’s rights and opportunities.¹³ In this vein, scholars have typically labelled East German women as the ‘losers’ of reunification.¹⁴ A bibliography on women in the GDR before and after reunification compiled by Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin even has an entire section on the ‘Women as Losers Thesis’, listing 32 different German texts written on the subject between 1989 and 2000.¹⁵

One of the key issues that scholars of gender and reunification point to is the failure to reform Paragraph 218 and ensure women’s access to abortion in the new German state. While free, on-demand abortion was available to women in the first trimester of pregnancy from 1972 in East Germany, in the West, the implementation of the Indikationsmodell in 1976 meant that abortion could only be performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if a doctor certified that there was a valid reason for an abortion. This could include medical danger, social difficulties for the mother, eugenic concerns or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.¹⁶

This discrepancy between a liberal socialist law and a much more restrictive West German Paragraph 218 led to abortion becoming a flashpoint for women’s activism across reunification.¹⁷ Whereas East German women fought to protect their reproductive rights, women in the West saw it as an opportunity to enact reform and revitalise the abortion campaign that had stagnated since the mid-1970s. Yet the two groups struggled to find common ground and craft a shared platform. As such, scholars have positioned abortion reform as a symbolic reflection of the transformation of women’s rights over reunification: from the hope for change, to the inability of feminists to come together and the ultimate loss of rights, as the East German provision was replaced with a much more limited version of the West German law.

By focusing on the failed abortion campaign, other trajectories of women’s activism after 1989 have been rendered invisible by a scholarship centred on the loss of women’s rights and the failure of feminism. This chapter challenges that narrative. Specifically, it uses the post-reunification development of activism against gender-based violence as a counterweight to the centrality of abortion in the scholarship on gender and reunification. Although abortion reform failed, gender-based and domestic violence activism were revitalised after reunification. As the previous chapter showed, almost immediately after the fall of the Wall, activists in Leipzig and Berlin started work on opening domestic violence shelters and throughout the 1990s, a network of shelters and services opened throughout the former Democratic Republic. These activists were not only able to take advantage of the delegitimisation of socialism and the SED, but they could also capitalise on the extensive work that feminists in the West had done to place domestic violence on the political agenda.

Even more than this, some of the most significant developments in domestic violence activism to take place since the opening of the first shelter in 1976 came about following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since reunification, responding to domestic violence has only become more and more entrenched in the German political landscape. In particular, the creation and ongoing support for the intervention project Berliner Initiative gegen Gewalt an Frauen (BIG e.V. or Berlin Initiative against Violence towards Women), the introduction of the Gewaltschutzgesetz in 2002 and the criminalisation of rape within marriage in 1997 have made Germany into a European leader in the protection of women’s rights to freedom from violence. These developments not only reflect a renegotiation of some of the most fundamental tenets of feminist approaches to domestic violence, but they came about as a result of successful collaboration between activists from across the Cold War divide.

Comparing the experiences of abortion rights activists with those working to address domestic violence, this chapter asks what happened to the hopes of 1989 as a moment of reform and change for women’s lives.¹⁸ Its aims are twofold. Firstly, it complicates the typical characterisation of women as the ‘losers’ of reunification and narratives of the failure of (East German) women’s activism. Although women may have struggled to work together to reform abortion, the same cannot be said for domestic violence. By decentring abortion from the history of women’s activism in reunified Germany, this chapter reveals the legacies–if not successes–of East German approaches to feminism and domestic violence activism.

The second aim of this chapter is to ask why some women’s issues, like domestic violence, found political traction, where others, in this case reproductive rights, did not. What was so special about domestic violence? Certainly, abortion reform was a very different struggle to domestic violence work. Alongside religious concerns and questions surrounding the rights of the foetus, feminists were also fighting to protect a right granted by what was increasingly seen as an illegitimate, if not totalitarian, state. Reforming Paragraph 218 was also much more time sensitive–it was only a matter of months between the Volkskammer elections and the eventual reunification of Germany in October 1990. More generally though, abortion reform clashed with the broader reinscription of patriarchal gender norms taking place during reunification. Ensuring women’s sexual autonomy and reproductive choice simply did not fit with the Kohl government, which had been chipping away at abortion law in West Germany since the 1980s. In contrast, domestic violence activism–with its emphasis on women’s vulnerability and victimhood–resonated more fully with the new political landscape of reunified Germany.

This distinction is telling. Ultimately, this chapter argues that only those rights that fit most closely with gendered ideals and norms, such as protecting women from domestic violence, have made inroads in the Federal Republic. This suggests that women are protected from male violence because they are women, not because they have a right to personal security or self-determination. Such a limited vision of women’s rights was, in part, enabled by the institutionalisation and deradicalisation of feminist practices throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The 1980s were a relatively quiet time for the women’s movement in West Germany. After the flurry of activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by 1980 the women’s movement was fragmented, often along political lines and divided into various issue-based groups and projects.¹⁹ Sociologists Ilse Lenz and Myra Marx Ferree have gone the furthest in detailing the different periods of activism in the New Women’s Movement in Germany. For both Lenz and Ferree, whereas the years up to 1975 were marked by a convergence around consciousness raising and the articulation of women’s needs and issues, from 1976 onwards there was an increasing pluralisation of women’s activism.²⁰

What is particularly striking about this periodisation is that it reflects the divergent trajectories of reproductive rights activism and the work to address domestic violence. As the first chapter showed, reproductive rights were a crucial battleground for feminists in the early 1970s and the Paragraph 218 campaign brought women together as never before. Although feminists developed a mass movement, bringing women, men and the legal and medical communities together in protest against the criminalisation of abortion, their reform agenda was ultimately defeated. Despite a 1974 reform allowing unrestricted abortion in the first trimester, by February 1975 the Federal Constitutional Court had determined that this law was incompatible with the constitutional guarantee of the right to life. The reform was revoked in early 1976 and replaced with the Indikationsmodell, permitting abortion only when certain, strict, criteria were met. While protest against this law continued after 1976–including the bombing of the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe by militant feminists and underground trips to abortion clinics in the Netherlands organised by the Frankfurt Women’s Centre–the court’s decision more or less brought an end to mass abortion activism in West Germany until the late 1980s.

This was, of course, the precise time that domestic violence was starting to find political traction in West Germany. Indeed, the changes evident within the feminist movement from the 1970s to the 1980s echo the developments of reproductive rights and domestic violence activism. Speaking at a conference on 20 years of domestic violence work in Germany, psychologist Sabine Scheffler argued that the women’s shelter movement emerged precisely in response to the disappointments of abortion activism. After the initial ‘euphoria’ of having reformed Paragraph 218, feminists turned away from legal change, instead wanting to find different ways of helping women.²¹ This also reflects the periodisations of Lenz and Ferree, who both see the mid-1970s as a moment of transition for the New Women’s Movement. From the initial articulation of women’s concerns emerging out of 1968 and the flurry of protest and campaigning of the early 1970s, the mid-1970s and 1980s were, by contrast, a time of consolidation, professionalisation and institutionalisation.²²

In Berlin, shelter activists’ focus was on maintaining public financial support for domestic violence projects. This was a particularly important question because the model phase of the first shelter in Grunewald was coming to an end in 1980. As a model project, the Grunewald shelter was primarily financed by the federal government; only 20 per cent of its costs came from the Berlin Senate. In order to keep this shelter open, an additional 360,000DM needed to be sourced. At the same time, a new feminist initiative sought to open a second shelter, as reports on the constant overcrowding and poor living conditions of the first shelter circulated in the media.²³ Although the building’s maximum capacity was only meant to be 70 people, an open-door policy meant that by autumn 1978, the Grunewald shelter was averaging 50 to 60 women and 50 to 60 children taken in per month. With only 15 bedrooms, this often meant there were up to 12 people sleeping in one room.²⁴ On 12 October 1978, at a meeting between the Senator for Family, Youth and Sport and the Governing Mayor of Berlin, it was agreed that the need for a second shelter was ‘indisputable’. What remained at issue was how to finance it alongside taking on the full financial support for the Grunewald shelter.²⁵

The Senate Office for Family, Youth and Sport was strongly in support of using Paragraph 72 of the Federal Social Welfare Act to fund shelter work.²⁶ This paragraph maintained that individuals who ‘face particular social difficulties preventing them from participating in society’ are entitled to assistance to overcome these difficulties if they are unable to do so themselves.²⁷ According to the Senate Office, this financial support could then be channelled towards the shelter’s running costs. However, from summer 1978, feminists in West Berlin and throughout the Federal Republic pushed back against proposals to use Paragraph 72 as a source of funding.²⁸ As Bernhard Gotto shows, feminists in West Germany saw the use of this provision as putting shelters into the position of the ‘long-arm of the welfare state’, as almost two-thirds of their work would be taken up by bureaucratic administration associated with Paragraph 72. Not only would shelter workers have to sign up women for welfare support, but they would have to distribute weekly cheques to residents, setting money aside from each resident to put towards the shelter. Alongside keeping meticulous records of these transactions, the shelters would also have to submit ledgers to the Welfare Office every three months.²⁹

Certainly, as Gotto argues, this kind of bureaucratic work challenged the very foundations of the autonomous women’s shelter movement to remain apart from the state and for women to help women. Much like the criticisms of volunteers at the mundane and often trivial realities of shelter work in Hamburg discussed in Chapter 3, as an article in Sozialmagazin highlighted, funding through Paragraph 72 represented the ‘systematic destruction of the original concept of the women’s shelter movement … Leaving an abusive husband becomes increasingly less an act of self-liberation and ever more an act of subjugation. But this time to the real-terms of bureaucracy.’³⁰

What is striking though, is that a very different approach was taken by shelter activists in Berlin. The shelter movement in Berlin was already largely integrated into the bureaucracy of the state due to the oversight imposed on the model-shelter project in Grunewald. As such, rather than reflect on feminist principles of autonomy and self-administration, Berlin activists instead emphasised women’s vulnerability and victimhood.³¹ For those activists associated with the proposed second shelter in Berlin, the use of this paragraph was tantamount to victim-blaming by suggesting that it was the women themselves, not the violent men, who were incapable of living in society. In newspaper articles, shelter residents spoke out about feeling ‘branded as a fringe group’ by the welfare provision, arguing that using the paragraph went against the core values of feminists, who had worked to get domestic violence understood as a widespread issue facing all women. Further still, shelter workers had serious concerns regarding women’s privacy and whether courts would come to ‘false conclusions’ in divorce and custody cases, with respect to former residents’ abilities as mothers.³²

This tactic not only resonated within the media, but also politically.³³ From late 1978 into early 1979, members of the Berlin State Parliament raised numerous information requests, inquiring into the state of the second shelter and how it would be financed. Sitting FDP member Jürgen Wahl raised the general question of financing in October 1978, followed by a more pointed enquiry by SPD parliamentarian Gisela Fechner in March 1979, who asked whether the second shelter could be financed through the state budget.³⁴ At the same time, the Berlin FDP pledged their support for the shelter projects and called on state financing to be made available for the second shelter.³⁵ By April, the Berlin-branch of the German Trade Union Confederation was also calling for the immediate establishment and financing of a second shelter in Berlin.³⁶

Although the Senate Office for Family, Youth and Sport maintained that the Federal Social Welfare Act was not discriminatory, the mounting pressure led them to make concessions.³⁷ In March and April 1979, they offered some funding for the second shelter’s furnishing, on the basis that the rent and any additional costs be capped at 120,000DM per year. The living costs, meanwhile, would have to be covered by the shelter residents themselves. They even supported the potential reformulation of Paragraph 72 to address the concerns of shelter activists.³⁸ While the shelter group agreed to consider this alternative, the finance ministry maintained its reservations with respect to these suggestions, preferring instead to wait for the official results of the evaluation of the model shelter project to be published by the federal government.³⁹

By summer 1979, however, the matter had reached crisis point. Not only did calls for the creation of a second shelter continue, but the ongoing capacity issues in the first shelter increased the urgency of finding a resolution to the financing question. The final nail in the coffin came after the German Association for Public and Private Welfare withdrew their support for using Paragraph 72, arguing that women escaping abuse did not meet the conditions of being unable to ‘participate in society’.⁴⁰ In June, then, the shelter initiative was offered the use of a former clinic in Spandau and the budget for both the first and proposed second shelter were written in to the 1980 Berlin state budget.⁴¹ Given the ongoing demand, by early July the Berlin Senate had promised a further 400,000DM for the furnishing and internal repairs of the building in Spandau, so that the second shelter could open as soon as possible. On 1 September 1979, the second shelter opened with space for 40 women and children. Further money for the shelter’s extensive renovation was then made available in 1980 as the shelter’s financing entered the state budget.⁴²

For most of the 1980s, feminist domestic violence activists in West Berlin sought to maintain the concessions they had won and focused on developing and professionalising their work with women leaving abuse. It was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989 that two further autonomous women’s shelters were opened in Berlin. By that time, domestic violence activism was in a very different position to abortion rights. Women’s shelters were an established part of the West German welfare system. The shelter movement had spread throughout West Germany and the federal government launched a further pilot project, this time in Rendsburg, Schleswig-Holstein, evaluating how to address domestic violence in rural areas. Although domestic violence work was still firmly enmeshed in feminist politics, as we have seen in Chapter 3, it had gone through an extensive process of professionalisation. Shelters were staffed by social workers, medical professionals and lawyers trained to work with and help women living with violence. Increasingly specialised projects addressing issues of sexual violence or violence against children and girls opened throughout the 1980s. Even religious social welfare organisations were getting involved in combating violence against women, with organisations such as Caritas and Diakonie opening shelters in West Berlin in the 1980s.⁴³ While the FDP and SPD had long supported the cause in Berlin, by the early 1980s, the CDU was also on board and women’s projects aimed at ongoing counselling for abuse survivors received cross-partisan and popular support.⁴⁴ The anxieties of the 1970s surrounding feminism had ebbed.

The question of abortion, however, returned in West Germany throughout the second half of the 1980s. At this time, under Helmut Kohl’s conservative government, Christian Democrats, Catholic and religious officials and right-to-life advocates began work to undo the rights offered by Paragraph 218 at both a federal and state level. In 1982 alone–the year Kohl became Chancellor–Heiner Geißler, the CDU-Family Minister formed an Inter-Ministerial Working Group on the Protection of Unborn Life and the Catholic Bishop Conference began work on a ‘Choose Life’ programme. Mass right-to-life marches were held in Bonn in 1984 and 1986, and in summer 1984, the federal foundation ‘Mother and Child. Protection for Unborn Life’ was created to provide pregnant women with ‘unbureaucratic financial advice to make the decision to continue pregnancy and for the life of the child easier’.⁴⁵

Feminists immediately responded. During the 1983 election campaign, feminist magazine EMMA used its editorial to call on women to once against take up the ‘fight for what should already be common sense’.⁴⁶ At the same time, the independent reproductive and sexual health counselling service Pro-Familia, developed a federal action plan to protect Paragraph 218 and feminist activists called for a national protest in Karlsruhe on 26 February 1983. This date marked the eight-year anniversary of the Constitutional Court decision that struck down first-trimester abortions in 1975.⁴⁷

But efforts to limit women’s access to abortion continued, culminating in the 1988/89 trial of gynaecologist Dr Horst Thiessen in Memmingen, Bavaria. Thiessen, who came to the attention of authorities after his records were investigated on suspicion of tax evasion, was charged with violating Paragraph 218 and performing illegal abortions. Over the course of the investigation, the records of all of Thiessen’s patients who had received an abortion since 1980 were reviewed. The court then subsequently also brought proceedings against 279 women and 78 men, of whom 156 received fines for having either received or helped someone obtain an illegal abortion. The ‘Memmingen Trial’, as it became known, was subject to allegations of judicial prejudice and widespread criticism from women’s groups, Social Democrats, the Greens and even the media, all of whom framed it as a ‘witch-hunt’.⁴⁸ In particular, both the feminist and national press criticised Bavarian prosecutors for requiring witnesses to provide intimate and personal details of their sex lives and their decision to have an abortion, while others were ‘dragged up before the court like criminals on a conveyor belt of punishment’.⁴⁹ In spite of this, on 5 May 1989, Thiessen was found guilty and sentenced to two-and-a-half-years in prison and a three-year suspension from practicing medicine. This was reduced to one-and-a-half-years’ probation on appeal.

By the time the Wall fell, then, abortion was on the minds of West German feminists. Moreover, the experience of Memmingen had left women both mobilised and angry at these attempts to curtail their reproductive rights. In comparison, domestic violence initiatives were well embedded in the Federal Republic’s social system. While abortion rights activists fought against long-standing gender norms and religious ideals, the work of domestic violence projects fit more closely with gendered images of women as vulnerable and as victims. This distinction would play out in the divergent trajectories of feminist collaboration across reunification.

The early 1990s were a difficult time for women. Reunification, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc more generally, brought social and political upheaval to Germany and Eastern Europe and had a major impact on women’s lives. Unemployment soared with the disappearance of 3 million jobs, as the introduction of a free market economy forced unprofitable East German businesses to close.⁵⁰ Although both men and women faced unemployment in East Germany, women were the fastest growing unemployed population. By September 1990, 53.2 per cent of women in the former East were unemployed, a figure which had risen to 70 per cent by the end of 1993.⁵¹ Women’s employment was also affected by the withdrawal of the socialist support network that had facilitated so many women to combine paid employment with motherhood. Many women were required to take on increased childcare duties and either move to part-time employment or leave the workforce altogether, as socialist kindergartens and childcare centres closed and paid maternity leave was reduced.⁵²

At the same time, the growing conservatism of western democracies, including the FRG, the US and the UK, during the late 1980s, combined with slowly creeping nationalism throughout Germany and the Eastern Bloc, also affected women, most devastatingly in the Yugoslav Wars.⁵³ There is also anecdotal evidence from the time that reunification brought with it an increase in domestic abuse.⁵⁴ Reflecting this, Annette Niemeyer, an East German activist from the UFV, argued that reunification took ‘the direction of convincing women to accept exclusively the role of mother, homemaker and appendage to men’.⁵⁵

Within this context, women’s issues came to the fore, as East German activists attempted to create a space for women’s voices and rights in the new state. The UFV, in particular, actively contested the gendered impact and process of reunification. From its founding on 3 December 1989 until its dissolution in 1998, the UFV represented (East) German women’s political interests.⁵⁶ They were one of the most public and outwardly visible feminist organisations in the GDR, and were the major representative of women’s rights over the course of reunification. According to their programme, they sought to ‘liberate the word feminism from prejudice’ and ‘abolish gendered hierarchies and power relations’.⁵⁷ As an umbrella organisation for women’s groups in the GDR, the UFV represented and supported women’s issues and activism at a local and national level. Much of their early work, however, focused on attaining political representation for women and women’s rights. The UFV were a key voice for women on the Central Round Table in Berlin; in this role, they secured women’s rights through the creation of a social charter in early March 1990.⁵⁸ This charter was designed to guide the East German government’s position in its negotiations with its counterparts in the West.⁵⁹

By upholding principles of welfare, equality and fairness, as well as including strong provisions on women’s rights, the social charter sought to protect the welfare and social rights of East Germans during the transition. Similarly, the UFV ensured the protection of women’s rights in the draft East German constitution of April 1990, including women’s right to equality at work, public life and education and to ‘self-determined pregnancy’.⁶⁰ They also pushed for women’s political involvement and representation, most notably in their document the Essential Features of Equality between the Sexes. This included calls on the Berlin Round Table to appoint a Councillor for Gender Equality to the East Berlin Magistrat and more broadly for the creation of women’s equality representation at all levels of government, including the creation of a Ministry for Equality and equal opportunity legislation.⁶¹ They even fielded candidates as the sole women-only party in the first democratic elections in East Germany in March 1990, where they ran in an electoral alliance with the Green Party and Bündnis 90.

The results of this election, however, sent a clear message to the UFV: reforming the GDR was no longer an option, as reunification with the Federal Republic loomed. The UFV quickly set aside their visions of the future and the promises of the social charter and draft constitution, and instead turned their attention to developing gender policy. In particular, they took up the key women’s issues of female unemployment, childcare, violence against women and abortion. They called for former Stasi buildings to be made available for women’s shelters, criticised employment offices for pushing women out of the workforce and, in Berlin, they successfully used their representative in the city council, Gabi Zekina, to press for support for the development of women’s projects.⁶²

This was also a time when the UFV sought to broaden their platform by working with West German feminists.⁶³ As founding UFV member and Minister without Portfolio in the Modrow government, Tatjana Böhm argued,

The chances and possibilities to start on the road to civil society, which would have incorporated the democratic order of the FRG, the experiences of the fall revolution of the GDR, and the experiences of the [East German] women’s movement could not be used. But the questions of legal fundamental rights of women opened up a new discussion in the women’s movement in East and West Germany. It provided the possibility for a joint East-West German women’s discussion.⁶⁴

Coming less than a year since the Memmingen decision, abortion was one of the primary issues that brought this coalition together. However, the expectation of a mutual collaboration of women from East and West–suggested by Böhm–would not quite come to fruition.

From the very beginning, the UFV and abortion rights activists faced an uphill battle. One of the biggest difficulties was the speed of political developments. The UFV was only officially constituted as a political association on 17 February 1990, giving them less than a month to prepare for the March elections.⁶⁵ Furthermore, the decision to unify through Article 23 of the Basic Law, a provision that allowed for the incorporation of German territory into the Federal Republic without needing a referendum or a renegotiation of the Constitution, meant that the whole process moved incredibly quickly.⁶⁶ Indeed, the first step towards official reunification–the First State Treaty–was finalised within a month after the March elections and it was only five months later that the two German states, divided for 40 years, would be united as one.⁶⁷

The speed of transformation meant that political discussions were largely focused on major economic, security and electoral questions. Women’s issues and women’s rights were marginalised from this process.⁶⁸ There was only one mention of women in the First State Treaty and this was in the context of providing vocational education and retraining, where the ‘interests of women and the disabled’ should be taken into account.⁶⁹ This was particularly shocking for East German feminists, including the UFV, for whom the ‘view “over there”’, as Christina Schenk and Christiane Schindler put it, was increasingly taking on new meaning. If they were to forge a platform for women’s rights across reunification, not only would women from both Germanies have to work together, but East German activists would have to learn more about the way politics operated in the West.⁷⁰

After not being included in the First State Treaty, feminists set their sights on the negotiation of the Unification Treaty, where abortion would become a key issue. Already in late April 1990, women from across the Berlin Wall had formed an Ost-West-Frauenkongress (East-West Women’s Congress). This Congress, constituted by the UFV, the West Berlin women’s network Goldrausch and autonomous feminists from Munich, was vocal in criticising the social market economy as a system that inherently relies on women’s unpaid labour and had submitted demands for the inclusion of women and women’s issues in the negotiation process to all governments in East and West Germany.⁷¹ Women associated with the UFV also formed a Frauenpolitischer Runde Tisch (Women’s Political Round Table) in Berlin. Like the other round tables and citizen’s groups established during 1990, this was intended as a forum to give women a platform to address their concerns about reunification. Alongside a working group on the consequences of economic and monetary unification, the Frauenpolitischer Runde Tisch had a working group on ‘self-determined pregnancy’, which proved particularly important for creating a coalition to address abortion. This working group was formed out of representatives from various women’s groups, political parties and citizen’s initiatives from both East and West, including the West Berlin Feminist Women’s Health Centre, the DFD, Neues Forum, the SPD, Green Party and even a representative of the GDR Women’s Minister, Christa Schmidt (CDU).⁷²

The proliferation of these groups led to widespread action on abortion throughout the summer of 1990. On 16 June 1990, women’s groups from both East and West organised mass demonstrations in Berlin and Bonn, respectively. In Berlin, UFV activists even blocked the former East–West border strip between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz in symbolic protest against the imposition of Paragraph 218 on the former GDR.⁷³ The UFV also gathered 50,000 signatures from people in favour of retaining women’s access to first-trimester abortion. The working group on self-determined pregnancy similarly ran letter-writing campaigns, teach-ins and demonstrations.⁷⁴ On 29 September–the week prior to official reunification on 3 October–they also organised a mass protest under the banner of ‘Against the Take-Over of the GDR. For a Self-Determined Life’.⁷⁵ As the announcement in the Berlin daily, Die Tageszeitung made clear, ‘For months now, Herr “Reunifiers” have been tearing a woman’s most personal decision to shreds. Paragraph 218, introduced at the founding of the German Empire in 1871, shall once against be slipped over the heads of women in the GDR.’⁷⁶

However, even at this peak of protest against Paragraph 218, there were tensions between women from the East and West. In a report on the Ost-West-Frauenkongress, Ulrike Helwerth called the ‘low’ level of participation (some 500 participants) ‘disappointing’. Moreover, the event showed that ‘the sisters are still somewhat alien to one another. The rapid merging of the [feminist] family did not work as well as it did with political parties.’⁷⁷ While the two sides found common ground on the topics of pornography and violence against women, abortion proved especially divisive. The very different experiences of women from East and West and the impact this had on their activism shaped how they envisioned reproductive rights reform. In particular, the presentation on abortion from Leipzig activist Karin Raab symbolised the chasm between East and West German feminists. Raab, who favoured keeping the East German abortion law, advocated mandatory counselling for women prior to receiving an abortion. For Raab, this was a response to the ‘cold’ and clinical way abortions had been carried out in the GDR.⁷⁸ Although many East German attendees were not convinced by Raab’s plan, the West German participants were ‘horrified’. For women from the West, Raab’s presentation raised the spectre of pro-life counselling and the efforts made in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg to restrict women’s access to abortion. What had started as an attempt to develop a common strategy and platform for women’s rights over reunification ended as a ‘malicious dispute’ between feminists.⁷⁹

Nevertheless, this activism echoed in political circles. For many in the West German CDU, reunification was not only a chance to solidify pro-life politics in West German law, but also to extend them to the East. For the SPD and the Greens, however, it was a renewed opportunity for liberalisation. Even the FDP, the CDU’s coalition partner, wavered in their support of the CDU.⁸⁰ Political parties in the former GDR, meanwhile, overwhelmingly supported protecting East German women’s right to first-term abortions. Christa Schmidt, the CDU (East) Minister for Women and the Family, organised a postcard action with the UFV. In August 1990, the East German Parliament received 26,500 postcards, the vast majority of which supported carrying over East German abortion laws. Indeed, abortion was an issue that proved to be so contentious that it threatened to derail the entire process of reunification, with the popular German magazine Der Spiegel arguing that ‘the fight over abortion is dividing the nation just before its unification.’⁸¹ While CDU politicians debated the meaning of abortion–whether it was a woman’s right or legislated murder–the overall trend was to back away from a clear decision on the matter.⁸² Due to this ongoing conflict, the Unification Treaty provided for a transition period, where separate abortion laws would continue for East and West, with a final decision on the matter to be made by the end of 1992.⁸³

Although this delay gave activists more time to rally support, as time wore on, the collaboration between East and West German activists dwindled, as did the strength of the UFV. While East German feminists and the UFV continued to advocate for women’s right to first-term abortions, many West German feminists backed away from this demand, instead looking to settle for a compromise to protect the rights they already had.⁸⁴ The tensions apparent at the Ost-West-Frauenkongress only deepened furthered. At the 1991 conference on abortion organised by the Frauenpolitischer Runde Tisch, one UFV representative complained that the conference was ‘too West-heavy’ and there was little representation of East German women.⁸⁵ As a result of these difficulties between the two groups, the monthly working group meetings were mainly attended by UFV women and other East German activists.

At the same time, as Birgit Sauer notes, the political debate on abortion was dominated by a discourse of life and the protection of life.⁸⁶ Christian Democratic parliamentarian Claus Jäger even argued that, should the West German law be reformed, abortions would reach ‘Holocaust numbers, which, in the face of German history, would weigh heavily on the conscience of politicians if we did not stop this avalanche of death’.⁸⁷ In this context, by evoking the spectre of the industrialised mass murder of millions by the Nazi government, even those politicians seeking to decriminalise abortion had to frame their platforms in the terms of protecting life.

Finally, after a marathon 16-hour debate, the German Federal Parliament passed the new abortion law on 26 June 1992. In this Compromise Agreement, abortion was decriminalised and permitted within the first trimester on the basis that the woman receive counselling and go through a three-day waiting period prior to the procedure. A late-term abortion could also be performed if the woman’s physical or mental health was endangered.⁸⁸ Importantly, Christina Schenk of the UFV and Petra Bläss of the Party of Democratic Socialism–the only two parliamentarians to vote against the new law on the grounds that the law did not respect women’s right to self-determination and that the pro-life counselling was designed to influence women’s decision–were from East Germany.⁸⁹ Much like the 1974 reform, however, this law was subject to a legal challenge and the Constitutional Court again determined that it went against the constitutional guarantee of the protection of human life.⁹⁰ In 1995, an amended law was introduced. While similar to the Compromise Agreement, under this new law abortion was recriminalised and the pre-abortion counselling requirement was to be explicitly pro-life.⁹¹

As early as February 1990, UFV member and representative on the Central Round Table Uta Röth succinctly captured the journey of women’s activism over reunification: ‘Women’s awakening–that’s how we started. Then came the upheaval. And then the collapse.’⁹² The hopes of protecting East German women’s reproductive rights and liberalising West German law never came to fruition, as feminists across the East–West divide struggled both to have their voices heard and to work together effectively. Certainly, the systems present in each state shaped expectations and visions of feminism and emancipated womanhood. A particular sticking point in collaboration was the question of autonomy and working with the state. East German feminists sought out political participation and wanted to change ‘the state’.⁹³ While they supported women’s projects, they were wary of retreating into ‘niches’. They also worked alongside men. As an article in the formerly official socialist women’s magazine Für Dich so succinctly captured, ‘Feminism, in our understanding, does not mean the total exclusion of men. If equality is to be actually viable, actually effective, then male self-understandings must develop in parallel with female self-understandings.’⁹⁴ Much of this flew in the face of West German feminist practice, based as it was on autonomy, separatism and project work. Although these differences were decisive in hampering cooperation on abortion, they may explain why domestic violence work, particularly in reunified Berlin, fared better.

The years following reunification saw the beginnings of one of the most significant domestic violence projects in Germany: the Berliner Initiative gegen Gewalt an Frauen (BIG e.V.). One of the largest domestic violence projects in Germany, this initiative represented the successful collaboration of activists and anti-violence workers from East and West. Drawing from international examples of domestic violence intervention, alongside the work of the West German shelter movement and East German approaches to reform, BIG brought about legislative action against violence in the home. While abortion rights activism may not have succeeded, the work of BIG e.V. highlights the successes of post-Wende women’s rights activism.

The Berliner Initiative gegen Gewalt an Frauen began life as a working group of men and women from both West and East Berlin. Comprised of members of the women’s movement, shelter and crisis centre workers, counsellors and activists from anti-violence projects, this group’s focus was to create a different strategy for assisting those living with abuse; one that did more than just provide services for women and that actually tackled the root causes of violence itself.⁹⁵ Examining anti-violence work and best practices for addressing domestic abuse within Germany and abroad, the initiative concluded that ‘effective protection for women and children who are being abused can only be achieved when domestic violence is firmly condemned by society, which includes the criminal justice system.’⁹⁶

According to the group, the best way to achieve this kind of societal change was to follow the example of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project pioneered in Duluth, Minnesota. What was particularly important for the working group was both the Duluth model’s overall success and its stress on the importance of collaboration between projects, social services and state institutions.⁹⁷ If the working group wanted the criminal justice system to take domestic violence seriously, they knew they would need the help and cooperation of the police and the courts. Further still, they believed that any reform could not just offer increased services to women and children, but also needed to address the perpetrator and hold them accountable for their actions.⁹⁸ Supported by the Berlin Senate Office for Employment, Education and Women and the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth, the group began working with the police, the legal system, the Foreigner’s Office and youth and social services to create a broad and long-lasting alliance against domestic violence. In 1994, this working group formally became the Berliner Initiative gegen Gewalt an Frauen and, starting in 1995, they received four years of federal and Berlin state funding as a model project for domestic violence intervention.⁹⁹

The project proceeded in two phases: planning and organising. The planning phase, from 1995 to 1996, focused on building connections between institutions and projects. During this time, round tables and working groups were formed by BIG e.V., not only to bring the various organisations and bodies together, but also to discuss the major issues they faced when addressing domestic violence.¹⁰⁰ As a result, seven key areas were identified where improved work and cooperation was needed. These included: police intervention, criminal law, civil law, support services for women, migrant women, training/education for abusers and children and youth. These issues then became the focus for work during the three-year organisation phase, as the approximately 150 people involved divided into working groups to draft plans for the creation of practical steps for improving the way these concerns were addressed in domestic violence intervention.¹⁰¹

At the end of the organisation phase, the working groups had made significant achievements that were garnering attention throughout Germany. Not only had they drafted a manual for police intervention in instances of domestic violence and a proposed law for improving women’s protection in civil law–which in turn created the impetus for the Gewaltschutzgesetz–but they also developed the first set of guidelines for supporting female migrants who were living with an abusive partner, the first Germany-wide domestic violence hotline and the first video on the situation of children experiencing or witnessing domestic abuse. Finally, they also developed an educational programme for the perpetrators of domestic violence. Labelled by the Federal Minister for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth as one of the most significant pilot projects supported by the federal government, the model of cooperation and intervention established by BIG e.V. has since spread throughout Germany and resulted in both federal legal reform and improved police responses to domestic disturbances.¹⁰²

The work undertaken by BIG e.V. to address domestic violence clearly highlights the success of East/West collaborations to ensure women’s rights in the wake of reunification. But, it also shows the way women’s activism against domestic violence had developed and changed since the opening of the first shelter in 1976. There are certainly several parallels to the initial shelter project: both were model projects that received Berlin state and federal funding and were evaluated by an external research team, and, indeed, many of the researchers involved in examining BIG e.V. had also contributed to the report on the Berlin model shelter. In both cases, the people involved in the shelters were professionals who had first-hand experience supporting those living with domestic violence. Further still, and similar to the connections between the shelter movement and Chiswick Women’s Aid, BIG e.V. drew legitimacy for their work from an established international approach to domestic violence.

However, there are also significant differences between BIG e.V. and the Grunewald model shelter, which suggest an East German influence on contemporary activism. One of the biggest distinctions between women’s activism in the East and the West was the involvement of men: whereas the West German women’s movement was intensely separatist, East German women were open to the inclusion of men in their work.¹⁰³ In a similar vein, by addressing the perpetrators of violence and seeking to rehabilitate and educate them, BIG e.V. has grown away from the women-centred approach of early activism.¹⁰⁴ By including men in their work, whether as activists or as clients, BIG e.V. has deviated from the traditional approaches of West German feminist activism, and, in doing so, acknowledged the limitations of expecting women to bear the prime responsibility for dealing with domestic violence. In addition, the push for legal reform also suggests an eastern influence. As the example of the Weimar Frauenteestube shows, East German groups were far more open to pushing for legal reform, whereas the West German movement was firmly determined to work outside of the auspices of the state.

Indeed, the work of BIG e.V. to bring about greater legal protection for women reflected a broader trend of legislative reform in the late 1990s that sought to address issues of familial violence, pointing to a much more active role of the German state in combating violence against women. Not only was rape in marriage criminalised in 1997, but in 1999 the four-year residency requirement for migrant women living in Germany under a family visa was reduced to two and migrant women living with an abusive husband could use the ‘hardship clause’ to separate from their husband while maintaining residency. Significantly, both these reforms had long been actively fought for by activists and politicians: while much of the work to amend the residency legislation began in the 1980s, the first call to amend West German rape law came in 1972 when the Social Democrats proposed an amendment to the Criminal Code, a call which would be repeated throughout the 1980s by both the Social Democrats and the Greens.¹⁰⁵ In stark comparison to the 25 years of activism calling for the criminalisation of rape in marriage, the legislation drafted by BIG e.V. during its model period from 1995 to 1999, quickly found political traction, with the Gewaltschutzgesetz enacted in 2001 and implemented in 2002.

BIG’s proposal was aimed at ending the contemporary system that required women and children to flee while their abuser remained at home. This meant improving both the law and legal process. For example, prior to the Gewaltschutzgesetz, there were no grounds for the allocation of an apartment in instances of violence within de facto/common-law couples. In cases of married couples, the person seeking the apartment on the basis of abuse had to meet a high threshold of ‘schwere Härte’ (extreme hardship).¹⁰⁶ As a result, the BIG proposal recommended that a basis of claim for abuse be established in the Civil Code, which provided a foundation for claims to the allocation of shared living spaces and for the application of a restraining order. Furthermore, they called for the burden of proof to be placed on the abuser in instances of repeated abuse.

In May 1999, this proposal was presented at a conference organised by the Federal Ministry of Family, Seniors, Women and Youth on the possibilities of improving protective measures for women living with abuse available in civil law. The first action plan on combating violence against women arose from this conference and was closely followed by a draft proposal for a ‘Law for the Improvement of Civil Law Protection in Instances of Violence, as well as the Simplification of the Allocation of Marital Homes’.¹⁰⁷ Although this proposal took up many of the issues presented within the BIG reform agenda, it called instead for the creation of a specific law, rather than an amendment to the Civil Code.¹⁰⁸ This proposal was then passed through the Bundestag in 2001, with the Gewaltschutzgesetz coming into force in 2002. As a result, when police now intervene in domestic disputes in Germany, they are able to take the keys away from the abuser and order them to leave for a certain period of time.¹⁰⁹

Of course, there are several reasons why the Gewaltschutzgesetz was so swiftly taken up. Not only was it initially proposed by a project sponsored in part by the federal government, but the 1990s witnessed an international acknowledgement that violence against women was an issue of human rights.¹¹⁰ In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, which had been on the agenda since the 1985 Nairobi World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women. In this declaration, the Assembly affirmed that ‘violence against women constitutes a violation of the rights and fundamental freedoms of women.’¹¹¹ Two years later, the Commission on Human Rights issued a report on domestic violence, which clearly labelled it as a human rights violation.¹¹² At the European level, the late 1990s also saw several important steps to address violence against women in Europe: in 1996, the first EU policy regarding human trafficking was enacted with the Incentive and Exchange Programme for Persons Responsible for Combating Trade in Human Beings and the Sexual Exploitation of Children and in 1997 an EU resolution called for the creation of a ‘zero tolerance of violence against women’ campaign.¹¹³ Also significant for the German case was the introduction of the Federal Law on the Protection of the Family against Violence in Austria in 1997, which provided a working example for legal reform in the Federal Republic.¹¹⁴ Within this context, it is no surprise that Germany became much more active in creating legislative reform to address gender violence. But this still does not explain why the trajectory of domestic violence activism fared so differently to abortion rights.

As Ilse Lenz argues, the 1990s were marked by a ‘transformation of the women’s movement’, developed out of an engagement with the approaches of East German feminism and international debates.¹¹⁵ This is certainly evident in domestic violence activism. Unlike the fight for reproductive rights, domestic violence intervention and prevention were already a firm part of the West German liberal agenda by the time of reunification. Whereas abortion activists were attempting to protect a right that existed in what was increasingly seen as an illegitimate and inhumane state, domestic violence activism was about building up a system of established and professionalised social service practices in the East. Moreover, the SED’s growing delegitimisation served to support activists working against domestic violence, who could capitalise on the socialist state’s failure to assist women living with a violent partner. Abortion rights activists, however, had to contend with accusations of the immorality of socialism, in particular its exploitation of women’s (re)productive labour. Abortion rights were also complicated by religion and ideas about the rights of the foetus that had been increasingly politicised in West Germany since the 1980s. It is also no coincidence that this new domestic violence initiative took off in Berlin. Domestic violence activists in West Berlin had been working with the government since the mid-1970s, which fit closely with the way East German activists envisioned women’s politics and projects.

The growth of domestic violence support services highlights the successes of one facet of women’s rights activism post-1990. It shows how–on some issues–feminist activists from across the Berlin Wall were able to work together to protect women’s rights. In contrast to much of the scholarship, women were not simply the ‘losers’ of reunification. But, in the context of the failed abortion reform, we might also ask what the different trajectories of feminist activism might tell us about the ways in which women’s rights are negotiated and protected in reunified Germany.

On the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, the New York Times published an article profiling the differences between women of the former East and West Germanies. Despite two decades of living under one state, the piece highlights that division still separates the lives of women in Germany. While the fall of the Berlin Wall had a disproportionate impact on women from the former East, it is these same women who are now better off than their western sisters. Women from the east of Germany, the article argues, ‘are more self-confident, better-educated and more mobile … They have children earlier and are more likely to work full time. More of them are happy with their looks and their sexuality and fewer of them diet.’¹¹⁶ Further still, although wages are lower in the East, the pay gap between men and women is only 6 per cent, as opposed to 24 per cent in the West. Citing examples like now-former Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-Deputy SPD leader Manuela Schwesig–both of whom grew up in the former GDR–the article shows that while ‘West German women wobble … Eastern women have no fear.’¹¹⁷

Given these differences, we might rightfully question the designation of women as the ‘losers’ of reunification. Indeed, it now appears as if East German men are some of the most significantly affected by the long-term transformations shaping Germany after reunification. In the former East German states, male unemployment exceeds female (7.4 per cent as compared to 6 per cent) and there is a smaller gap between male and female education attainment.¹¹⁸ Men in East Germany are also more likely to identify with far-right politics; one-third of male voters in Saxony in 2017 voted for the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. As Petra Köpping, the former State Minister for Integration and Equality and current State Minister for Social Affairs and Cohesion in Saxony, argues, ‘We have a crisis of masculinity in the East and it is feeding the far right.’¹¹⁹ How then should we judge the gendered impacts of reunification?

On the one hand, the failure to gain abortion rights, and the gendered processes of reunification more generally, reveal a reinscription of patriarchal gender norms. As scholars have argued, there are clear parallels between the regulation of gender and family roles in the post-1945 period and across the Wende. East German women returned to the family; they lost their jobs, their access to social services and their reproductive rights.¹²⁰ On the other hand, the success of domestic violence activism challenges this narrative of division and failure. Instead, it reveals a success story of feminist activism and a further cementing of women’s rights and their protection from violence. This is typified by the Gewaltschutzgesetz. Writing in 2012 to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the introduction of the Act, BIG e.V. argued that ‘the achievement of a law, which makes it clear that the abuser must go, was long overdue. It has not only led to better protection for women and children confronted with domestic violence, but also to a change in social perceptions.’¹²¹

But, what exactly are the ‘social perceptions’ that have changed? And what values is this law protecting? Despite the significance of this legal reform for providing protection for women and children living with violence and for taking a political stance against domestic abuse, it is also important to interrogate the values and principles that underpin the legislation. Namely, we must ask what is ‘wrong’ with domestic violence. What is the harm being done and what is the law protecting?¹²² One answer might be that domestic violence represents a violation of women’s rights as human beings to bodily integrity and physical autonomy, and that by enacting the Gewaltschutzgesetz and supporting women’s shelters, the German government has enshrined these principles in law. However, if this were the case, why are women’s reproductive choices limited?

The failure of the Wende abortion reform movement suggests firstly that the recognition of women’s rights to physical autonomy in Germany is limited, and secondly that the legislative action on domestic violence is about more than just providing women with bodily security. The delegitimisation of East Germany was not only about denouncing the control and violence of organisations like the Stasi, but, as the abortion debate made clear, it was also about condemning the vision of womanhood promoted under socialism and replacing it with longstanding heteropatriarchal ideals of stay-at-home mothers.¹²³ Projects that sought to address domestic violence fit more snugly with this model–not only did they speak to the illegitimacy of socialism, but they also reflected images of women as vulnerable and in need of protection that were not present in reproductive rights activism. It would seem then that the cost of the institutionalisation of feminist practices represented in the official adoption of domestic violence activism has been the entrenchment of a limited vision of women’s rights, one that acknowledges a right to bodily integrity only so far as to protect women from male violence, but not one that grants women a right to self-determination.