Women in the GDR – bring the waste bucket down!

Respect: 153 readings, Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district have contested the GDR (L) Tig (L) Tig (l) tig “. And they actually managed to realize their plans to travel all federal states, as they proudly announced at an event at the Hellen Panke in Berlin. The last of them delighted with their contemporary witness surveys was also the smallest of the Federal Republic: Saarland. The most surprising, incredible experiences for them made the Berliners in southwestern Germany.

It did not take twenty minutes, they remember until someone was upright (mostly women) and the report of the two of the more advanced equality of the genders in the GDR with the question or defiant claim were interrupted: “But they were raven mothers, the East German women?” Whether in Straubing or Ulm, some did it know better than those in the GDR Publicists: The children would certainly have suffered from being left to the children’s facilities so early; Love and marriage also determine. Just because the woman in the GDR on her right to work was economic independence? Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district also heard the lawsuit from West German gender comrades: “It is unfair that the East German women received higher pensions than we received.”

The authors asked an older male visitor who expressed particularly strange over the east: “Do you know the east?” – “Yes.” – “Are you already a)” no. But we had a mentality. ”An antiquated term for domestic help. And this observation was also one of the revealing trips of the two East women to the west: »In the evening we were invited to a beautiful restaurant. It was only 6 or 7 p.m. Only men were sitting there. ”Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district asked the waitress, who answered puzzled, that she had never noticed. The women of the place had to take care of the children.

Of course, the double burden, household and work was hard for the women in the GDR. They used to be born as women in the Federal Republic. “The GDR woman had an average of two to three children, quite a few also four or five,” says Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district during the reading in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. “The children used to be self-employed, older people brought up.” Many GDR women had vocational training with a high school diploma. “Like Gysi, who learned cattle breeders before studying law.” 36 percent was the number of women in management positions in the GDR, “but only at lower and medium level”. Among the East women interviewed by Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district in higher positions, women such as Christa Luft, former Rector of the University of Economics in Berlin-Karlshorst and Minister of Economics in the penultimate GDR government under Hans Modrow, as well as Annelies Kimmel, last head of the FDGB, the Free German Trade Union Confederation, and two general director.

Some Eastern women had several professions, one episode of the profound 1990 average. They did not put their hands in their laps and did not defend their fate like many East men who “sunk in a deep hole with the elimination of their workplace”. In their interviews with East German men, Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching districts noticed that they always compared themselves with their counterparts in the West and found their professional end or professional relegation as a personal defeat.

The Eastern women did not resign, looked around after new work, inevitably moved to the West, be it to get there as a overqualified “merchant”. The interviewees also reported the author duo about experienced patriarchal impositions. And it probably speaks for himself when an East man speaks to the interviewers when asked how he thinks the emancipation of the woman, he replies that he holds it up: “When my wife says: ‘Take the trash can down!’ I do that.” After all. “After all.

Ultimately, the solution to Lotte Ulbricht is still to be redeemed in East Germany: “The patriarchy can only be eliminated by the re -education of the man.” The former First Lady of the GDR had also strongly made it to support the working women and mothers in the GDR in the GDR. became. Later the household day was added – also for single men. In any case, the author of these lines has personally got to know the tough lady in her modest home in “Pankoff” and can listen to their criticism of emancipation turned back in new, larger Germany.

The book “The GDR is sustainable” is the summary of the two predecessor books by Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching district: »Interchanged Eastern women. Traces of life in two systems «(2019) and» Problem zone Ostmann? Life experiences in two systems «(2021). It also deals with experienced collectivity, direct democracy, social security and many other, now East German still important values.

In the end it should be noted: On their reading trips through West Germany, Ellen dealers and Uta Mitsching districts of course also had many pleasant, edifying and encouraging experiences.

Ellen dealer/Uta Mitschin district: The GDR is subsequently (L). A pamphlet for the East Identity. Ibidem. 180 p., Br., 10 €; As an e-book € 7.99.