Andrea Rottmann’s exploration of “queer lives across the wall” takes readers from the immediate post-war period, past the border closure in 1961, to just beyond the liberalisation of paragraph 175 – the law prohibiting sex between men – in West Germany’s criminal code. It is therefore a book that explicitly looks to explore queer lives before the gay liberation movement.
Rottmann uses “queer” as an umbrella term, “to describe people who found themselves outside the sexual or gender norms of their time because of their same sex desires or practices” (p. 6), or because they were perceived, or perceived themselves, to be gender non-conforming. Rather than concentrating solely or predominantly on male homosexuality, she examines various queer subjectivities during the period under examination, giving space to lesbian lives, histories of gender non-conformity and trans history. She views these together, not because they were always subject to the same legal repression, or social exclusion, but because, she argues, “they were put together in the same space of criminalization, medicalization, or stigma because of their same-sex desires and/or gender identities at other times” (p. 6). “Queer Lives Across the Wall”, both through its inclusion of a wide scope of queer subjectivities and experiences, and through its consideration of them in relation to one another, represents a valuable addition to German queer history, as well as to wider histories of sexuality and urban space.
Rather than structuring the book chronologically, Rottmann’s study is divided into spaces. She begins with the home, where she considers the impact of the housing shortage in the post-war period on queer lives, alongside queer practices of homemaking more generally. Rottmann then continues with queer bars, public spaces – in particular how the presence of queer people in public space was perceived and policed – and ends with the prison as a queer space. The order with which she presents these spaces mean that the reader is taken from the most private – the home – to the most surveilled – the prison. Readers would be right in ascertaining from this structure that “Queer Lives Across the Wall” does not privilege or overly focus on criminalisation, but rather takes a much wider view of queer lives between “desire and danger”. As Rottmann illustrates in the final chapter, even the prison offered space for the exploration of queer identities and relationships.
“Queer Lives Across the Wall” shines through its rich portrayals of individual characters, their lives and loves, as well as the precarity and threats to security that they faced. The profiled lives are underpinned by Rottmann’s nuanced source work. The consulted sources are varied and include homophile newspapers, oral histories, personal papers including correspondences and diary entries, as well as police and other state files. Alongside the breadth of the sources, it is their careful reading that is most impressive, as Rottmann indicates how even the slightest notation can contain suggestions of intimacy. For her depiction of Hilde Radusch, Rottmann draws on Radusch’s personal papers. Notably, she suggests a possible reading of the frequent “x” markings in Radusch’s calendar, which she suggests “likely documented their sex, possibly their orgasms” (p. 53). Rottmann’s attention to photographs as sources, from both private and state sources, is a further strength of the book, as she considers both the contents and the afterlife of the images.
Rottmann’s analysis of Radusch’s housekeeping book, particularly the gendered terms of endearment (such as “Mutti” and “Vati”), is just one case in which she explores gender roles in lesbian subcultures, moving away from English terminologies of “butch” and “fem” and all their specific associations. In the chapter on prisons, Rottmann considers the terminology of “Bubi” and “Mäuschen” as she looks to disentangle the meaning of these terms in that precise context, be that a “gendered organization of prison subculture” or styles of femininity or masculinity in lesbian subculture more broadly (p. 144). Considerations of gender are central to all chapters, as Rottmann explores how gender presentation could determine whether individuals could live free from harassment, for instance when walking the streets or entering queer bars.
The book’s subtitle draws attention to the geographical and temporal focus of Rottmann’s exploration: divided Berlin. Despite the political division into East and West, cemented by the Berlin Wall from 1961 onwards, Rottmann offers her readers a different story of the Cold War capital: she expertly shows how queer lives in East and West Berlin remained intertwined. West Berlin queer bars, for instance, could offer a (costly) haven for lesbian couples living in the East. Yet they could also be a site of Stasi police surveillance. When the border was closed in 1961, Rottmann notes how this cut off access to queer bars in the West, but also that West Berlin’s isolation was in part responsible for the creation of the city’s famed subculture (p. 69). The Cold War context resurfaces throughout the book, with SED officials, for instance, East German worrying homosexuals would connect with those from the West. Perhaps most impactful is Rottmann’s consideration of Günter Litfin, the first person to be shot dead by GDR border troops, whose queernesss remains unacknowledged in official commemorations of his death.
Rottmann gives space to many facets of queer experiences. Public spaces, for instance, contain both the desire and danger of the book’s title. As Rottmann states, “[t]hey are spaces not only of seeing and being seen, of flirting, cruising, and sex, but also spaces of slurs, name-calling, and assault, of surveillance and arrest” (p. 105). Such examples illustrate how Rottmann reframes criminalisation. This is clear through her exploration of a set of photographs taken in the Bohème bar in Kreuzberg, which depict “scenes of buoyant sociality” (p. 65) and yet which ended up in a police album. Rottmann explores this tension between “sociability and surveillance” (p. 68), arguing that it was central to the queer bar. In her consideration of the prison, the criminalisation of sexuality resurfaces once again, through her focus on the crime of “asociality” and through the practice of isolating gay and lesbian inmates. Yet, here also, the chapter goes beyond that to explore the space that prisons provided for intimate same-sex relationships, if only for a time.
In conclusion, this book convincingly showcases the benefits of viewing queer lives and subjectivities together in their variation. Rottmann’s treatment of her subject and the sources available offers a model on how criminalisation can be viewed alongside, and not counter to, intimacy and desire, while her clear, engaging writing style makes complex concepts accessible. “Queer Lives Across the Wall” therefore makes a significant contribution to contemporary German history as well as queer history more broadly, and deserves a wide readership.