Andrea Rottmann is postdoctoral research fellow in the project “Human Rights, Queer Genders and Sexualities since the 1970s” at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut at Freie Universität Berlin. Her dissertation, “Queer Home Berlin? Making Queer Selves and Spaces in the Divided City, 1945-1970” (University of Michigan, 2019), won the 2020 dissertation prizes of the Coalition of Women in German and the Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung. It came out with the University of Toronto Press in May 2023 under the title Queer Lives Across the Wall. Desire and Danger in Divided Berlin, 1945-1970. Andrea has researched and published on queer spaces, on sexuality and gender in museums, on the politics of queer history and the LGBTIQ movement in Germany and the US. With Martin Lücke (FU Berlin) and Benno Gammerl (EUI Florence) she coordinates the network “Queer Contemporary Histories of German-speaking Europe,” which brings together queer history scholars from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s.
Andrea Rottmann explores how certain spaces – including homes, bars, streets, parks, and prisons – facilitated and restricted queer lives in the overwhelmingly conservative climate that characterized both German postwar states. With a theoretical toolkit informed by feminist, queer, and spatial theories, the book goes beyond previous histories that focus on state surveillance and the persecution of male homosexuality.
