Re-centering East Germans in feminist historiography: Women’s and gender studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1970s–present

This article traces the history of women’s gender studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and German reunification. Humboldt-Universität, the flagship university of East Berlin, underwent profound institutional changes as former East Germany was legally subsumed into West Germany, including a marked loss in East German personnel. Temporally, the article begins in the 1970s, first with the introduction of research and teaching in women’s studies and then with a faculty working group on gender studies in the 1980s. Contrary to narratives that feminism and gender studies were Western imports into East Germany, the beginning of the article traces the clear growth of gender studies at Humboldt-Universität as a public university under state socialism. The article then examines the establishment of the Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin only 1 month after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It charts the growth of this center over the 1990s, the emergence of a gender studies degree program in 1997, and the merger of two into the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies in 2003. Contextualizing these shifts vis-à-vis the bureaucratic transformation that accompanied German reunification, a core argument of the article is that reunification had contradictory impacts on the growth and institutionalization of women’s and gender studies in East Berlin. Sources for the article include interviews with early members of the center that the authors and members of our research team conducted between 2024 and 2026; published interviews; and a mix of written and audiovisual documents from the 1980s to the present. The majority of these sources have been produced by scholars who worked in, taught, or studied women’s and gender studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since the late 1970s