From Weimar to Berlin: Queer Democratic Citizenship Through Hilde Radusch’s Five Lives
Hilde Radusch experienced most of the political upheavals of the 20th century in Germany. Born in 1903, she was raised in a conservative family and trained to serve as a good wife in Weimar, but instead moved to Berlin at age 18, became a communist, a union organizer and a representative in the city council, and found her first, and then her second girlfriend there. These are two of the “five lives” she described in a 1979 letter to feminist historian Annemarie Tröger – the other three being the Nazi years, the postwar period, and a new beginning starting in the 1960s. Indeed, with the feminist and lesbian movements of the 1970s, Radusch again turned to political activism, this time as an out lesbian whose political and personal experience of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship was cherished by younger women such as Tröger. In their talk, Andrea Rottmann will examine chosen documents from Radusch’s expansive personal papers to trace the shifting discursive and embodied practices of democratic citizenship in this extraordinary life.
This event will be held both in-person and over Zoom. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Andrea Rottmann
Andrea Rottmann is a historian of gender and sexuality with a focus on German queer history. Her book, Queer Lives Across the Wall: Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945-1970 (University of Toronto Press, 2023), won the first book prize of the Waterloo Center for German Studies. She is also co-editor, with Benno Gammerl and Martin Lücke, of the open access Handbuch Queere Zeitgeschichten, the first German-language handbook on queer history and the collaborative product of the Network Queer Contemporary Histories of German-Speaking Europe. Andrea currently leads the Volkswagen Foundation-funded transdisciplinary research project, “LGBTIQ* Movements as Agents of Democratization,” at Freie Universität Berlin.
About the Tobin Lecture
The Tobin Distinguished Lecture Series was inaugurated in 2024. It brings international scholars working at the forefront of queer and trans German studies to UBC to share their scholarship with students, staff, faculty, and community members. The aim of the series is to support queer and trans German studies scholarship and teaching at UBC and to recognize important contributions to and advancement of queer and trans German studies. To find out more about the lecture, visit the Tobin Lecture page.
