Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002)

(this text can also be heard in the audio clip)

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born in Berlin-Mahlsdorf on March 18, 1928, still with a male first name and the surname Berfelde. Her violent father harassed the family and the tender boy, who realized early on that he wanted to be a woman. When her father caught her in women’s clothes, he shouted at her and demanded that she become a soldier instead. She found help from her great-uncle, who supported her and gave her a sense of security and affectionately callws her “Lottchen”. He bought her the girl’s apron Charlotte had been longing for. It is also astonishing that she found Magnus Hirschfeld’s book “The Transvestites” in her aunt’s household and began to make sense of her feelings and identity. She also used the term transvestite for herself, as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf did not use the word trans* but rather  referred to herself as a transvestite, a woman, a girl or a female.

In 1944, the situation at home escalated and Charlotte beat her father to death with a rolling pin in his sleep and was then sentenced to four years in juvenile detention as an “antisocial youth”. She was released from prison at the end of the war.

Her passion for collecting was already evident at this time. “My desire to preserve is stronger than anything else,” she claimed  and began collecting  old furniture and furnishings in the post-war period. She took over a manor house in Mahlsdorf that was threatened with demolition, which she slowly renovated on her own.  She opened her Wilhelminian-style museum there in 1960, which grew steadily over the following years and became an insider tip. In 1974, the authorities announced that the museum was to be nationalized, whereupon Charlotte von Mahlsdorf began to give away her museum pieces to visitors. Nationalization was prevented and she ran the museum until 1995.

Charlotte liked to visit the Berlin gay bar Elli’s Bierbar in Kreuzberg. When the music machine didn’t work once in 1960, she went home to get her gramophone and records and started playing there regularly, making her one of the first Berlin DJs. However, this career came to an end in 1961 when the GDR border was closed.

In 1964, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf saved the last completely preserved Berlin pub in the Scheunenviertel, the Mulackritze, from demolition. It was a famous artists’ pub in the 1920s, frequented by prominent queer people such as Gustav Gründgens, Claire Waldoff and Marlene Dietrich. Charlotte herself transported the entire interior to her manor house by handcart and set it up in the basement in its original state. Meetings and celebrations of the Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB) take place in the relocated pub, giving the gay and lesbian scene a communal retreat in the vicinity of the museum. The manor house became an important unofficial meeting place for queer people in the GDR.

Charlotte also worked at the Märkisches Museum as a curator, but her contract was not renewed after she appeared at a festive event in a dress. Throughout her life, she confronted this and other forms of discrimination as a matter of course as a woman. Charlotte also had to come to terms with the system in the GDR, so it is also part of her story that she was listed as an IM, an unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security, also known as Stasi.

In 1989, she published her biography “I am my own woman.” She writes about herself in summary: “Even in GDR times, I didn’t fit into any box, and even today I am still a weird character for some people.” Rosa von Praunheim made the book into a film in 1992, the same year Charlotte was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In 1991, around 70 neo-Nazis attacked her spring festival of lesbians and gays on the estate. Partly because of this attack, she immigrated to Sweden in 1997, where she opened a new turn-of-the-century museum.

She died unexpectedly during a visit to Berlin in 2002.

Her legacy is still visible, the Gründerzeit Museum with Mulackritze are open to the public as a museum, with the street “Charlotte-von-Mahlsdorf-Ring” that is located nearby. her grave in Mahlsdorf is maintained as an honorary grave.