Writing a queer history from a basement in East Berlin

Queer politics face many challenges in contemporary Western society. With ongoing struggles to ensure legal and social equality, the right to self-representation, and freedom from institutionalized oppression, queer identity politics have become a hyper-visual subject in recent years. Within this field of debate, increasing attention has been given to the writing of a queer history as a crucial step towards establishing a communal identity. I Am My Own Wife, the moving must-see production currently at the Leanor and Alvin Segal Theatre, is a giant leap in the direction of forging a queer history.

I Am My Own Wife is a true story that stages the history of German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as it was disentangled by playwright Doug Wright. In 1960 von Mahlsdorf opened the Gründerzeit Museum, in which she preserved a microcosm of the German Empire of the late 1800s – what she refers to as “the gay nineties.” Her old mansion – stacked high with chairs, tables, dressers, desks, miniatures, gramophones, and clocks – becoming an encyclopedic inventory of the material artifacts left over from a period in German history that was wiped out by the rise of Nazism.

However, the importance of von Mahlsdorf’s personal history for queer politics vastly outstrips the significance of her mansion-museum. Beyond her absorption in German history and her efforts to preserve it, her very existence is an artefact of queer history. This play’s broader project becomes that of documenting von Mahlsdorf’s survival through two ultra-repressive regimes, and how she single-handedly carved out space for a queer community in East Berlin.

As Wright remarks to his editor over the phone – his research process is included in the text of I Am My Own Wife – von Mahlsdorf “doesn’t run a museum, she is a museum.” She dedicated her life to preserving the queer history of East Berlin as successive Nazi and Communist regimes sought to erase it from the city’s landscape. Salvaging the whole interior of a gay cabaret the day before its scheduled bulldozing, von Mahlsdorf’s basement became the epicenter of East Berlin’s queer scene from the 1970s onwards, after it was forced underground by the repressive Stasi – the East German secret police. As she recounts to Wright the people who spent evenings in her basement – actress Marlene Dietrich and playwright Bertolt Brecht among them – the safe haven von Mahlsdorf fostered for queer Berliners takes on even greater significance. She was not just the proprietor of a seminal queer hang-out, but the keeper, patron, and historian of an entire queer community.

Portraying all of I Am My Own Wife’s three dozen roles, Brett Christopher gives an incredible performance. Using a broad range of accents, postures, speech patterns, and movements, Christopher moves seamlessly from one character to the next, causing no confusion in the captivated and receptive audience. The impressive lighting system helps differentiate between characters, creating varying moods and glows from one moment to the next. In fact, that Wright’s play should call for only one actor makes all kinds of sense. As a text concerned with solidifying a sense of queer identity, I Am My Own Wife demonstrates that categories of gender and sexuality are completely fluid, malleable, and ultimately based on convention and performance rather than hard fact.

The play is very aware of its significance to the writing of queer history. During its second half, I Am My Own Wife addresses the media attention von Mahlsdorf’s story has recently garnered in Germany and in queer communities worldwide. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, files kept by the Stasi were found suggesting that von Mahlsdorf had been a collaborator, naming several members of the queer community she had preserved, and receiving immunity and payoffs in return. By including these snippets, Wright makes clear what is at stake in the story of von Mahlsdorf. In a particularly vulnerable moment, Wright breaks down on the phone to his editor, admitting his personal stake in the truth and honesty of von Mahlsdorf’s story.

Rather than ignore this problematic aspect of von Mahlsdorf’s life, I Am My Own Wife draws our attention to the importance of honesty in the recording of history. She was not a wholly benevolent queer messiah, but had to bend to the oppressive rules of her time in order to stay alive and free. Whether or not this required that she collaborate with a repressive state police force will never be clear, and this uncertainty in her personal history is a testament to her humanity. Von Mahlsdorf’s answer to Wright’s questioning testifies to this need for honesty rather than embellishment; using her antique furniture collections as an analogy for her life story, von Mahlsdorf explains: “Nicks, cuts, scrapes…these things, they are proof of their history, and so, you must leave it.”

Note: This article was published on 19 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.