Christian Pulz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christian Pulz (center) and Eduard Stapel, 2011

Christian Pulz (born December 14, 1944 in Plauen ; † April 15, 2021 ) was an activist of the peace, environmental and human rights movement of the GDR , a bookseller, social welfare worker and, after the Peaceful Revolution, a member of the Berlin House of Representatives and social education worker.

Life

From 1951 to 1961 Pulz attended high school in Bad Elster , then to 1963 the preschool for church service in Moritzburg and from 1963 to 1967 the theological seminar in Leipzig . From 1967 to 1970 Pulz completed an apprenticeship as a bookseller and then worked for 14 years in various publishing houses and bookshops. After a distance learning social welfare in Potsdam, Pulz worked as a social welfare worker until 1990 .

Pulz was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives from 1990 to 1995 , spokesman for youth policy for the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen parliamentary group and responsible for minority and gay policy. During this time he studied social pedagogy . Most recently he was a co-founder of the Gay Church Berlin . He died in April 2021 at the age of 76.

Foundation of "Gays in the Church - Homosexual Self-Help Working Group"

In 1982 Eduard Stapel , Matthias Kittlitz and Christian Pulz founded the first homosexuality working group at ESG Leipzig . The emergence of this first public group was preceded by a self-awareness group lasting about a year, which exclusively homosexuals came together in private apartments. The group's first meeting took place in Christian Pulz's apartment. Inspired by Martin Siems ' book "Coming out: Help for homosexual emancipation", he proposed to other Leipzig homosexuals to organize a group for homosexual self-awareness. Shortly before that, C. Pulz had met the then theology student Eduard Stapel. Stapel was immediately interested in working in such a group. Two of the principles mentioned in Siems' book were that only those affected come together and that there is no hierarchy within the group, everyone is his own "Chairman". It was about creating a space in which homosexuals learn to define themselves without heteronormative dominance or influence; a group in which heterosexuals do not talk about homosexuals and their sexuality, but homosexuals about themselves and their sexuality. The participants began to ask about the causes of their fears and difficulties in dealing with their own sexuality. The result of this group experience was that it was decided now to become public and to form a self-determined homosexual group in the Protestant church, which should become effective in terms of emancipation in the GDR. The groups around Pulz and Stapel received their politically emancipatory impetus from this self-awareness of homosexuals based on the Western model. At the same time there was an official church meeting of the Evangelical Academy (East) Berlin under the direction of Elisabeth Adler and Manfred Punge in January 1982, which suggested the establishment of another discussion group in Berlin.

In 1982 Pulz moved to East Berlin , where he founded an informal gay group in 1983 and looked for meeting rooms in various parishes. In the spring of 1983 he turned to the peace working group of the Samaritan community . There the cause was supported by some members, but no separate gay working group was founded. The reason for this was the burden of the already existing peace working group and the blues fairs . The connection to this community remained intact. In April 1984 the first employee meeting of the GDR's gay and lesbian working groups took place here.

In Berlin, Pulz organized the first Christopher Street Day in the GDR on May 21, 1983 . Thirteen people who were temporarily disabled by employees of the Ministry for State Security took part in the meeting at the Sachsenhausen Memorial . It was the first known commemorative act of the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism by individual gays and lesbians in the GDR.

They left the following entry in the guest book:

"Today we commemorated the homosexual prisoners murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . We were very saddened not to find out anything about their fate here."

In 1983, at the peace workshop of the Samaritan community, the group around Pulz appeared in public for the first time under the motto “Better a warm brother than a cold warrior”. This is where contact was made with Pastor Walter Hykel of the Philippus Chapel in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen , where the working group's first event took place in the same year. There the group gave itself the name Gays in the Church - Working Group Homosexual Self-Help . During this time, Ulrich Zieger also wrote the group's policy paper “On Gay Reality in the GDR”.

Mediated by Bärbel Bohley and Pastor Christa Sengespeick turned full circle to the commitment community in Treptow. The spatial conditions there were good, the congregation was close to the city and the parish council had confirmed the group as the official working group of the congregation. The parish pastor Werner Hilse was a committed companion of the circle.

Public relations work of the working group

After appearing at the peace workshops of the Protestant Church, contacts with groups in the FRG , West Berlin and in western countries developed. The basic text “On Gay Reality in the GDR” from 1983 was handed over to a journalist from Canada and published in West Germany in the magazine “Torso” under the title “Coming out in a vacuum”. This text was also disseminated in other working groups throughout the GDR. The subject of this text is the question of the causes of antihomosexuality and its internalization in homosexuals themselves. On the one hand it is about the tension between homosexuality and antihomosexuality and on the other hand about the liberation of the homosexual from the internalized judgment of self-condemnation. This liberation could become possible if the mechanism of one's own self-hatred could be seen through. This mechanism is described as a social phenomenon. From this knowledge, socio-politically relevant theories and demands such as the formation of self-determined homosexual groups are derived, which were particularly explosive in GDR society, since groups were only allowed to be formed by state institutions.

From 1983 to 1989, events under the responsibility of Pulz were held at regular intervals in the premises of the denominational community in Plesserstraße. As a rule, artists, scientists or church representatives were invited and lectures and discussions were held on the subject of gay and lesbian emancipation.

After the arrests of some members of the environmental library at Berlin's Zionskirche in 1987, there were intense internal differences within the working group's management team. Christian Pulz advocated involving the working group in solidarity campaigns for the arrested and increasing the pressure on the GDR leadership. Other members of the management team distanced themselves from political actions and emphasized the risk of persecution by state authorities. In particular after the arrests the following year during the Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration , the fronts within the working group intensified. The Ministry for State Security also specifically deployed unofficial employees in the leadership of the working group in order to prevent its public solidarity with the arrested.

"Orion" operational process

The regular meetings and events on the premises of the Treptow denominational community were observed from the beginning by the Ministry for State Security (MfS). The MfS collected information about the group under the "Orion" operational case , which was created for the person Christian Pulz. The aim was to obtain incriminating material for the criminal offense of an association for the pursuit of illegal goals (§ 218 StGB-DDR ) in connection with treasonous communications (§ 99 StGB-DDR). On Pulz several were informal collaborators recognized in his apartment a listening device (Measure B) was set up, one in the house safe house entertained and front of the house one equipped with infrared technology Barkas positioned. The basic text "On Gay Reality in the GDR" was perceived by the Ministry for State Security as a program and source of inspiration for the gay groups.

At the end of the 1980s, the Ministry of State Security installed unofficial employees in the leadership of the working group in order to prevent public solidarity with the environmental movement and the peace movement.

Reception of the working group after 1989

The gay and lesbian movements in the GDR were largely ignored by academic research in the first 30 years after the end of the GDR. In particular in the well-known series of the processing facilities such as the BStU or the few university-based research institutes, there were no further publications for the research work - neither in the thematically nor in the biographically oriented series. In view of the numerous events and panel discussions that took place on the subject of political resistance in the GDR, it is also noticeable that almost none of the protagonists of the time appeared in public. This lack of theming is itself an indication of the ongoing antihomosexual mechanisms that are characteristic of repressive forms of society, but are by no means restricted to GDR society. It is indicative of the fact that the nonconformity of gay and lesbian emancipation, especially in the form of the self-determined group formation of people who have become politically active not because of a special qualification, but because of their personal concern, has so far not been a core element of political and resistant movements among the additionally aggravating movements Conditions of a dictatorship has become a fundamental social criticism and theory using the example of the GDR. In the main publishers of these series such as Ch.Links Verlag, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Edition Temmen, LIT Verlag or Peter Lang Verlag, not a single academic publication on the gay and lesbian movement in the GDR has appeared so far. In 1999 Eduard Stapel published a personal examination of his involvement in the gay movement and the measures taken by the Ministry of State Security.

The film “Out in East Berlin” by Jochen Hick and Andreas Strohfeldt was released at the 2013 Berlinale . It documents the political work of gays and lesbians in the GDR. The Berlin working groups around Christian Pulz and Marina Krug “Gays in the Church” and “Lesbians in the Church” as well as Eduard Stapel play a central role.

Publications

  • Homosexuality and antihomosexuality as a challenge to the social diakonia of the church. In: H. Elliger / Hegermann (eds.): Biblical help for church youth work 1987 , Berlin 1986.
  • The Berlin AG KJHG. Amendments proposed by the Bündnis 90 / Greens (AL) / UFV parliamentary group. (with Manfred Günther and Oliver Schruoffeneger ), Berlin 1994.
  • Better a warm brother than a cold warrior, in: Horch und Guck Heft 57/2007, 27-30.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b mize: Mourning Christian Pulz. queer.de, April 16, 2021, accessed on April 18, 2021 (German).
  2. ^ House of Representatives, 12th electoral term. Handbook II, ed. vd Pres. d. House of Representatives v. Berlin, Berlin 1991.
  3. ↑ Alexander Zinn: Success story from the east. About the roots of the LSVD. In: Respekt 01/05 April 2005, p. 14 (PDF; 1.7 MB)
  4. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d44nW6XSHTU Interview with Volker Gasser on the creation of the "Discussion Group on Homosexuality"
  5. ↑ Markus Löffler: The rise of lesbians and gays in the regional church of Saxony in the 80s. Retrieved on October 2, 2019 (German).
  6. ↑ BStU, MfS - HA XX 9962, Bl.188a-188b, HA XX 12398, Bl.35 see also Bl.34 on wearing the "pink triangle" in public as a sign of homosexual resistance
  7. ↑ Linke, Dietmar, Stroking until the muzzle is finished, Berlin, 1993, ill. On p. 73.
  8. ↑ Horch und Guck , Issue 57/2007, main topic: Peace workshop in East Berlin ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ^ Peaceful Revolution 1989/1990 - Revolutionary Steles in Berlin
  10. ↑ BStU, MfS - AIM 16471/91, Part II Vol. 1, Bl. 182f, 273; MfS - HA XX 5193, Bl. 27f and v. a.
  11. ↑ BStU, MfS - HA XX 5190, p. 44.
  12. ↑ cf. Engelmann, inter alia, Das MfS-Lexikon, 2. durchges. and exp. Ed., Berlin, 2012, 29f.
  13. ↑ BStU, MfS - HA XX 5190, Bl. 54f, 61f, 66, 78, 86f, 111-113, etc. a.
  14. ↑ BStU, MfS - HA XX 5190, p. 31.
  15. ↑ Eduard Stapel: Warm brothers against cold warriors. The State Security is targeting the gay movement in the GDR. (= Those affected remember , vol. 10), ed. from the LStU Sachsen-Anhalt, Magdeburg, 1999 ( online (as a zipped PDF; 1.5 MB) on the LStU Sachsen-Anhalt website ).
personal data
SURNAME Pulz, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German LGBT activist and politician (Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen)
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Plauen
DATE OF DEATH April 15, 2021