further signifying that the fall of the ussr was a tragedy for human rights.
The GDR was much better on queer rights than any other western nation
In 1985, however, the media began an open, albeit government-ordered, discourse on homosexuality that is unparalleled in other Central and East European countries.9 The new openness concerning homosexuality was evident not only in literature and scientific publications, but also in print and broadcast media. In 1984 the popular monthly health magazine, Deine Gesundheit (Your health), began printing a series of readers' letters on homosexuality; soon after, several other major publications published substantial articles on sexual orientation.'0 More than two hundred articles on the subject appeared in the GDR during the 1980s, but, despite the openness in the press towards male homosexuality, lesbianism received only marginal coverage.
The television health program Visite was the firsto break the taboo against the discussion of homosexuality on that medium with its broadcast of a report in September 1987 that described homosexuality asan entirely natural variation of human sexuality. Under contract with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (German hygiene museum) and in conjunction with gay and lesbian activists, the state-controlled film production company, DEFA, produced the GDR's first documentary on homosexuality, Die andere Liebe (The other love), in 1988. The next year DEFA released a feature film about a homosexual teacher, Coming Out.
The most important signal that the state was interested in accepting homosexuals into GDR society and in preventing them from organizing outside of state control was the establishment of gay and lesbian clubs within state and party institution.
tfw you can no longer go to the state run gay bar in germany :ooooooooooooooh:
I'm straight and an anarchist but a tankie gay bar sounds like it would be a fun time.
Didn't have to click the link to know what that was... but I clicked it anyway for this classic jam.
Not only transgender, but also women's rights as well. The USSR required something like a third of the legislature to be women and I imagine East Germany was similar
Me, in my teens, clueless: The Berlin wall is the ultimate symbol of communist totalitarianism and repression.
Me now: Berlin Wall? Should have been the Hamburg Wall. Frankfurt if only things had gone better...
Has anyone seen the Deutschland (83, 86, 89) series? It's about a stasi agent.
In the second season, 86, the GDR is trying to make a much money as it can, and is selling art for instance, and also blood, to the west. This did happen. There's a couple gay characters, and this is during the height of the AIDS crisis.
So the character in charge of finding all these revenue streams, and who decides to sell East German blood, is watching TV where AIDS and gay people are being discussed, and she says she's not worried about testing their blood for AIDS because they don't have gays there. In 1986.
No surprise I guess but yeah, a big budget, highly rated German TV show about the GDR is painting it now as being backwards on homosexuality. Cool.
the right-wing coups of 1989 were an unmitigated disaster for the world
Many of those students were Maoists/Marxist book club members. They were upset with Dengist reforms. There was some noise maybe 2-3 years ago about similar student groups raising their hackles again but nothing came of it. Maybe Xi is more reassuring.
Same thing applies to HK - many of the early protestors in the last few years were trade unionists, anarchists and communists. There are legitimate reasons to criticize China and some of their labor policies, at least among friends. But then it got co-opted by empire, like it always does. Really sucked.
glad we dont live in the bleak timeline where every socialist project was wiped off the earth just in time for the 90s
I think it's reductive to try and lump the June 4th Protests under any sort of tendency when it was more a broad umbrella movement that just included everyone who was sort of dissatisfied with Deng, from MZT who thought he was going too far (which is a fair assessment to make, given the events of the intervening decades) to liberals who thought Deng wasn't going far enough and Nationalists who disliked detente with NATO. Because so many tendencies were represented, it's easy for anyone of any political standing to point to x part of the riots and say they stood for y - they sang 'The Internationale', so they must have been true communists, they wanted bourgeois democracy and free markets, so they were liberals, so on and so forth. The TLDR is that it's complicated and the reason why you'll hear so many conflicting opinions on what the June 4th Protests stood for, when the protestors themselves probably didn't even know, making it very easy to project one's own beliefs onto the movement.
I think it's all goods to speak your mind on a subject, and I don't believe it to be fair to consider yourself as having 'spoken out of place'. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to be perfectly knowledgeable on everything, and I'm sure everybody on this sight knows more about stuff like US labour movements, for instance, so it's cool to share information with fellow comrades.
Damn. All the fucking anti communist propaganda made it seem like GDR was some highly surveillanced police state.
I literally had no idea before today about any of this. Been living with :brainworms: and didn't even know it
The one good thing about the West German annexation of the GDR was how it kind of pressured West Germany to remove the last criminalisation of homosexuality as it would otherwise have looked really weird and outdated to roll back gay rights in the east at that time.
Why do I always read the comments.
"Yes, the GDR was better on gay rights, trans rights, women's rights, did far more to prevent "former Nazis" from being in leadership roles and was far more economically fair, but you have to understand it was far more oppressive."
I mean, it seems like that's what they mean.
Oppressive to the Nazis, and to people who wanted to overthrow society and reestablish capitalism.
Nah libs don't like defending Nazis so they hide behind euphemisms and indirect language. They will occasionally engage in a narrative about how :freeze-peach: means tolerating Nazis but they're loathe to actually go to bat for them explicitly.
The comment referenced by parentis in the style of, "but at what cost?", for eexample, and is putting scare quotes around the Nazis to imply that they weren't actually Nazis (they were though).
Also imagine a world where the government had been paying for transgender surgery/medication since the 80's. Almost impossible to think of as a possibility tbh
Brilliant cosmonaut did kick out the reactionary holdouts Bavaria and Württenberg splendid move ! no internal opposition ..
Shame that the industrial capacity is going to be wasted on bougie-ass cars :sicko-wistful:
