Always forwards, never backwards? The reinvention of the Democratic Women’s League of Germany during German reunification (1989-1990)

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (DFD), the state women’s organisation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), faced an existential challenge as the state it belonged to crumbled, thereby dismantling the organisational structures that had sustained it for forty years. Many East German women, ostensibly represented by the DFD, began to voice their dissatisfaction towards the women’s organisation through angry public protests. While this could have marked the end of the DFD, this article explores how the organisation’s magazines ( Lernen und Handeln and Frauen-Initiative’90: Die Zeitung des DFD) reveal a strategic reinvention during the Wende (Turning Point) of 1990. The magazines illustrate the DFD’s adoption of second-wave feminist practices, though it avoided explicitly identifying itself as feminist. Concurrently, the DFD maintained the socialist anti-fascist rhetoric characteristic of the GDR, thereby appealing to a specifically East German subjectivity. The article ultimately argues that the ideological practices developed during the Wende served as a template for the DFD’s survival, enabling its continued existence in modern day Germany.