Käthe Reinhardt

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Käthe "Kati" Reinhardt (exact life dates unknown) was an organizer and organizer of lesbian clubs, balls, meetings and operator of lesbian bars in Berlin from the time of the Weimar Republic until the late 1970s. In the 1920s she ran the largest clubs for the lesbian movement with up to 2000 people and worked with Charlotte “Lotte” Hahm , with whom she founded East Berlin's first lesbian pub in 1945 .

Weimar Republic

Nothing is known about Reinhardt's origins and her past life. There are different spelling variants of her name, such as Käthe, Käte and Kati, for the surname Reinhardt and Reinhard and Kati R. Reinhard. She appeared for the first time with the “Klub Monbijou”. It was founded in 1928 by the women's group of the German Friendship Association , one of the major homosexual organizations of the Weimar Republic. Reinhardt was the head of the club that took place in the “Magic Flute” at 72 Kommandantenstrasse . In addition to regular large balls, there were smaller events, bowling and hiking groups were founded (led by Herta Laser), lectures were organized and a steamboat excursion took place. According to its own statements, after one year of existence, the club had almost 2,000 members and over 15,000 visitors during the first year. From the Christmas and New Year's Eve balls in 1928 it was reported: “The events of the women's club 'Monbijou', in the 'Magic Flute', Kommandantenstrasse 72, on the Christmas holidays and New Year's Eve were rarely very successful. On Christmas Day, around 300 women came to give Christmas presents [...]. The New Year's Eve party of the 'Monbijou' club was surprisingly well attended. Well over 400 women wanted to celebrate the New Year with like-minded people. Many left again because there was no prospect of getting a chair. [...] It was full operation until 6 am. "

The club's first foundation festival was scheduled for August 31, 1929. Two days earlier, the announcement came that Kati Reinhardt and the club would leave the German Friendship Association, merge with the club Violetta, which is also part of the DFV, under Lotte Hahm, and join the larger rival organization of the DFV, the Bund für Menschenrechte under Friedrich Radszuweit . According to Lotte Hahm, the background was that the president of the DFV and at the same time head of the women's group, Carl Bergmann, was a heterosexual man who founded the women's club “only for his personal use”. Since Reinhard made this move without considering the club's anchoring with the DFV, it is assumed that she also ran the club from a commercial point of view and had both the naming rights and the lease of the club in the Magic Flute. Selli Engler , who was still part of the DFV at the time, but also switched to the BfM shortly afterwards, reported on an encounter between her and Reinhardt on the evening of the foundation festival, at which Reinhardt immediately insulted and insulted her, which was probably related to Engler's previous publications in which she accused Reinhardt and Hahm of treason and low motives.

The 1929 association of the Violetta and Monbijou women's clubs organized three evenings a week in the Magic Flute with up to 200 visitors each, at special events such as B. New Year's Eve balls could be around 500 women, men were not allowed in. Outside of the evenings in the Magic Flute, however, the two clubs operated independently of each other. In addition to her organizational function, Reinhardt performed regularly as a singer, contemporary reports emphasized the quality of her singing. Their events were probably not viewed entirely uncritically, Gertrude Sandmann said in a cautious retrospect in 1976 and characterized the nature of the events as bourgeois, narrow-minded, with a "preference for schnulzen music and hearty dancing in the great hall".

In contrast to prominent representatives of the first lesbian movement such as Hahm or Engler, Reinhardt appeared neither as an author nor as an activist, but limited herself entirely to her work as an organizer. Reinhardt was nevertheless extraordinarily popular, in 1931 the magazine Die Freund wrote about her that “as a splendid person and artist she knew how to win the hearts of all members”.

time of the nationalsocialism

With the closure of the Magic Flute by the National Socialists, Reinhardt's involvement ended; unlike Lotte Hahm, there was no evidence of Reinhardt's organizing activities between 1933 and 1945.

The only report about Reinhardt from this time comes from police and Gestapo files from October 1935. At that time, Reinhardt was sublet at Motzstraße 79 and denounced a ball of lesbian women in Friedrichshain to the police , organized by the club “The Funny Nine” . On this occasion, the approximately 150 participating women were monitored by the Gestapo; the denunciation probably had no direct consequences. The reasons why Reinhardt reported the event to the police is not known.

post war period

Immediately after the end of the war, Reinhardt began to become active again in 1945 together with Lotte Hahm . In the Magic Flute they tried to organize balls again, later they turned to Oranienstrasse 162. In the same year Reinhardt and Hahm opened a pub for lesbian women near Alexanderplatz , the name and exact location are unknown. The bar existed from 1945 to 1947 for around a year and a half, making it the first lesbian bar in East Berlin.

From 1951 to the 1970s, Reinhardt ran a dye works and laundry on Winterfeldtstrasse. Until the early 1980s she organized lesbian clubs and hosted balls, including in the egg shell in Dahlem. The historian and activist Ilse Kokula , who was able to attend one of these balls in the 1970s, described that he B. with regard to dances still followed patterns of the 1920s, which seemed strange to her.

Reinhardt withdrew from later research inquiries and refused Ilse Kokula interviews in the 1970s. When Claudia Schoppmann first met her in the 1980s, she was "unfortunately too senile to say anything".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Jens Dobler: From other banks: History of the Berlin lesbians and gays in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. 2003, ISBN 978-3-86187-298-6 , pp. 104-115
  2. ↑ Anonymous: Rundschau. In: Frauenliebe. 4th year, 1929, issue 2, p. 5.
  3. ↑ a b c Heike Schader: Virile, vamps and wild violets - sexuality, desire and eroticism in the magazines of homosexual women in Berlin in the 1920s. 2004, ISBN 3-89741-157-1 , p. 79 ff.
  4. ↑ Denis Barthel: Selli Engler (1899–1972): publisher, activist and poet - addenda to her biography In: Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft No. 64, 2020, pp. 26–34.
  5. ↑ Jens Dobler: From other shores: History of the Berlin lesbians and gays in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. 2003, ISBN 978-3-86187-298-6 , p. 183
  6. ↑ Christiane Leidinger: Lesbian Existence 1945–1969: Aspects of research into social exclusion and discrimination of lesbian women with a focus on life situations, experiences of discrimination and emancipation in the early Federal Republic (= publications of the department for the interests of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans and Intersex People (LGBTI). Volume 34). Ed .: Senate Department for Labor, Integration and Women. Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816391-5-5 , p. 45.
  7. ↑ a b Monika Richrath: Pioneering work (interview with Claudia Schoppmann) In: lespress, 4/98, 1998, online
personal data
SURNAME Reinhardt, Kathe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reinhard, Kate
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German activist of the lesbian movement
DATE OF BIRTH 19th century or 20th century
DATE OF DEATH 20th century