Queer Lives across the Wall by Andrea Rottmann

Author:Andrea Rottmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gays - Germany - Berlin - History - 20th century, Transgender people - Germany - Berlin - History - 20th century, Gay culture - Germany - Berlin - History - 20th century, Homosexuality - Germany - Berlin - History - 20th century, Gender identity - Germany - Berlin - History - 20th century
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter set out to examine how queer Berliners perceived the city’s public spaces, how they moved in them, how their movements and actions were shaped by laws and policing, and how they subverted public spaces’ intended uses, queering them for their own purposes. In gay men’s oral histories, stopping at Klappen for anonymous sex emerged as a beloved routine, albeit one whose thrill came with the danger of violence, arrest, and incarceration. “Streetwalking boys,” many of whom worked in public spaces, appear as ambivalent and contradictory figures in this chapter. Authorities’ desire to cleanse public space of signs of sexual deviance and commercial sex meant that they were heavily policed. At times, a man’s presence in a space known for male prostitution was enough to be arrested. The GDR’s formalized persecution of individuals whose lifestyle did not conform to socialist ideals of work and family through the “asociality” law may have affected streetwalking boys too. But streetwalking boys could be perpetrators as much as victims, robbing, blackmailing, physically hurting, and even killing the men who purchased their services.

Free passage through public spaces was predicated upon a normative performance of gender: to pass as a man, queer Berliners could not be feminine, but had to pick up the gestures, movements, and language of normative masculinity. To pass as a woman, trans women had to perform a seamless version of normative femininity. In West Berlin, police recognition of transvestite subjectivities ended in 1960 at the latest, as the practice of issuing Transvestitenscheine and passports that showed their bearers in their chosen everyday appearance was abolished.

In 1961, the construction of the Wall materialized Berlin’s border and ended the porousness that had characterized the inner-city division since the beginning of the Cold War. It broke apart the queer public that had existed up to this point in the postwar city, despite the economic inequalities and political and legal differences in East and West. When the SED regime’s violent enforcement of the new order hit a gay man as its first victim, and it then leveraged homophobic prejudice to legitimize his killing, the Wall came to signify queer death to queer Berliners.

Even beyond the end of the GDR, the SED’s defamation had lasting effects for the memorialization of Günter Litfin. His portrait on the Chronicles of the Wall website, a project by three major federal institutions documenting the history of the Wall and commemorating its victims, mentions neither his homosexuality nor East German media’s homophobic abuse for propagandistic purposes.113 The website stresses his family’s membership in the CDU and their Catholicism, accompanied by Litfin’s first communion photograph (figure 3.1). His sense of fashion is mentioned too, not without the addition that it “corresponds to his profession” as a tailor.114 This portrayal of Günter Litfin as a Christian, conservative young man whose impeccable appearance was an expression of his professional ethics and his good upbringing continues the efforts of his brother Jürgen Litfin, three years his junior, who until his death in 2017 made it his life’s work to commemorate his older brother.

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