Andrea Rottmann. Queer Lives across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945–1970. (University of Toronto Press)
Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s.
Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces – including homes, bars, streets, parks, and prisons – facilitated and restricted queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that characterized both German postwar states. With a theoretical toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the book goes beyond previous histories that focus on state surveillance and the persecution of male homosexuality. (Description from University of Toronto Press).
Q&A with Andrea Rottmann
If your readers take away only one idea from your book, what would you want that idea to be?
Even in deeply conservative times, queer people have lived self-determined, dignified and erotically rich lives.
What work or idea or thinker influenced you the most in the writing of this book?
Probably George Chauncey’s Gay New York.
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
I’ve always been interested in urban history. In the fall of 2014, I interned at Berlin’s Gay Museum and helped prepare a big joint exhibition with the German Historical Museum, Homosexuality_ies. During the internship, I encountered some people and papers that would accompany me through the years of research and writing: the late, great archivist and historian Jens Dobler, who freely shared his vast knowledge of Berlin collections and his rare combination of no-nonsense archival research and free, creative, out-of-the-box historical thinking, the collections documenting the museum’s early, pathbreaking exhibitions on Berlin’s queer history, and the Feminist Archives FFBIZ with the rich personal papers of communist lesbian activist Hilde Radusch, for instance. It was these captivating sources and the often breathtaking histories they transported, and the brilliance, tenaciousness and friendliness of the people who were collecting and safeguarding them, that made me want to spend many hours in the archives and tell their stories.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
My book raises questions about archival and historiographical absences and imbalances, and how historians can deal with them creatively, thoughtfully and with care for the historical subjects whose history they tell. Why does nobody write about lesbians? How is it that queer urban histories are almost always limited to discussing how cities became homes to gay men? The sources are there to tell queer women’s urban histories. My book also raises questions about continuities of repression that German historiography has not yet dealt with adequately, such as the construction of “asocials” in Nazi Germany and the GDR, and how queer people – people with same-sex desires or non-normatively gendered bodies – could be criminalized through this category.
For those interested in learning more about your topic, what should they turn to next (after having read your book, of course)?
Good news! In both German queer history and queer urban history, a number of excellent studies have come out recently. For queer German history, I’m thinking of previous WCGS winners such as Craig Griffiths’ The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation and Tiffany Florvil’s Mobilizing Black Germany. All of Jennifer Evans’ work is indispensable, and much of it also very Berlin-focused. For recent queer urban geography-histories, I love Jack Gieseking’s A Queer New York for its centering of lesbian, trans and non-binary lives and for its beautiful theorymaking. I also really enjoyed Anita Kurimay’s Queer Budapest, 1873-1961.