As head of department at the Central Institute, I joined the SED very late. And I didn’t leave in 1989 because I was convinced, and I said so, that it wasn’t the base that had failed. Rather, I had long recognised the widening gap between the party base and the party leadership. I could also prove this empirically. As the Central Institute, we also took a direct stance, for example on Egon Krenz’s statements when he was in Beijing and threatened Chinese conditions for the GDR if something similar were to happen here. Or the Sputnik ban. We thought it was beneath contempt that this magazine was banned, and we spoke out against it. Even as a party group. […]

At the time, Kohl claimed that we would have achieved unity in five years, that we would have “blossoming landscapes” and be “a united nation of brothers”, so to speak. And if you’re a sociologist or a political scientist, then you knew full well that this was the only thing that wasn’t going to happen. After forty years of different political culture, family culture… including, of course, the completely different position of women. At the time, I was working at the KSPW (Commission for the Study of Social and Political Change in the New Federal States) on individual processing of transformation processes, especially among young people, women and so-called young old people, i.e. those who were taking early retirement and did not want to return to the labour market. Of course, this brought me to a point where I was swimming against the tide with gender relations, because in ’93 I claimed in a publication that – in contrast to other transformation debates based on modernisation theories – the position of women in the GDR was more modern and more equal than in the FRG..

I’m not saying that everything was fine. I also recognise the critical points. But they were more equal, and you can prove that not only by the legal abortion. You can also see that in education. Since ’73, we had more female students and academics in the GDR than male ones. The economic situation of women was also more independent. So women could get divorced regardless of their economic situation. And of course I was wrong when I publicised that the GDR had more modern gender relations. That was a bit too early. You quickly came under suspicion of being an eternally antiquated person who wanted the GDR back, which of course wasn’t true for me at all. Today that is undisputed. Now it’s part of everyday knowledge. But back then it was still politically risky to claim something like that in academia.

Read more: in „Mother, don’t worry. Everything is fine here. Everyday life from 1989“. Publication of Frauenkultur Leipzig, 2009; 2nd edition in 2021. click here->