Tamara Multhaupt is an ethnologist who left the university in order to create the cultural program of the thriving feminist organization BEGINE in Berlin. The BEGINE Women’s Center is an important place for Berlin and German feminism. Its origins date back to the time when the Berlin Wall still existed, and the old tenement houses in which nobody wanted to live were destroyed. A group of women took over one of these tenement houses, renovated and arranged flats in it, and on the ground floor created a women’s center with a spacious bar area and two large workshop rooms. Despite many difficult moments, thanks to the involvement of many women, BEGINE still exists today and two more of the interviewees are associated with it. First, Barbara Hoyer, a Germanist interested in “the other side of the wall,” runs the institution BEGINE with a strong hand as its director. Manu Giese is at BEGINE almost every day. She was a trade union activist, a spokeswoman for women’s affairs, and was on the front line when the idea of taking over the tenement house and creating a women’s center appeared. She cleaned the basement of debris, removing old plaster, and taking away mountains of rubbish.

When the women’s movement was relatively well-established in Germany, lesbians took the initiative. Dagmar Schoenfisch was the one who first, together with two other people, and then alone, created the first lesbian pub in Berlin. The oldest lesbians still smile as they talk about an energetic girl with red hair riding her bicycle to open the les-bar. Eva Maria did not organize the place, but the people. For over twenty years on the same day of the week, at the same time, one could sit at the lesbians’ table, where Eva Maria was always sitting.

Gudrun Koch became involved in fostering contacts and building mutual understanding between feminists from Western Europe and Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall. She belonged to a minority which, unlike the “besserwessi” (those who think West Germans know best), tried to understand the women’s movement east of the “iron curtain.” Heidi Meinzolt-Depner co-founded the Green Party in conservative Munich, was active in it, and eventually broke up with it, engaging only in the women’s movement. For years, she has been running the German section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one of the oldest feminist and pacifist organizations established in the early 20th century. Katharina Oguntoye is African-German and is committed to women and lesbians of color. She is the author of the most famous and influential book about the situation of Afro-German women. Marion Schmidt made a revolution in the field of dance. In her youth, dance schools were heteronormative. Marion turned to dance theory and founded Germany’s first female-only dance school.