Continued Silence

The commemoration of the East Berlin-based group Lesbians in the Church at Ravensbrück

Abstract

Abstract: The 1980s mark the rise of the homosexual and lesbian rights movements in the German Democratic Republic. This article discusses attempts publicly to commemorate lesbian victims of Nazi persecution at the memorial site of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the mid-1980s by the East Berlin-based group Lesben in der Kirche (Lesbians in the Church). They aimed to make lesbians and their history more visible. For the self-declared antifascist state, the commemorations of victims of the Nazi persecution were central to its political self-understanding. To make visible that there were more victims to the Nazi persecution than the communist resistance fighters was for the activists a way to seek public attention. At the same time, it was a strategy to form a shared collective memory as part of their identity politics that went hand in hand with an understanding of homosexuality as a political identity.