Why Does Charlotte von Mahlsdorf Curtsy? Representations of National Queerness in a Transvestite Hero

For Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite, 2004 was a significant year. Clad in her trademark simple black dress and a string of pearls, she and her controversial queer life swept into unexpected and triumphant visibility to theater audiences in the United States. North American playwright Doug Wright's dramatization of her life in his one-person Broadway show I Am My Own Wife received both a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play. Jefferson Mays, the actor who embodied von Mahlsdorf, was likewise awarded a Tony, for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play. The commercial and critical success of the staging of such an obscure East German character is surprising and raises this question: what aspects of Wright's representation of von Mahlsdorf's all-but-normal life made it successfully safe for mainstream consumption in the United States, a country that—although purveying queer identity globally—is conservative in its official recognition of nonnormative sexuality and even sexuality in general?

Wright's play is one of the most visible and culturally successful representations of East German gay or lesbian identity available to a North American audience.¹ Thus my discussion of I Am My Own Wife addresses how queer bodies and sexuality have been not only nationalized and moralized but also exoticized as a marketable site for audiences' gaze. This in turn allows me to look at issues of globalization and the erasure of national specificity through an export of dominant paradigms of queer identity from North America. Such interrogations have been done—namely, in this journal—for contemporary national identities that are often labeled postcolonial, as well as for several Eastern European countries. However, there is a surprising absence of scholarship on German gay and lesbian identity—both East and West German—after World War II.² The first part of this essay rectifies this situation, charting significant developments in East German gay and lesbian culture through von Mahlsdorf's approach to minority identification.

Yet it is also necessary to discuss East German approaches to the politics of sexual minority identification in relation to the hegemonic North American queer identity. This comparison enables an analysis of nationally specific developments in sexual identification and serves as the driving principle for the essay's second part. Despite a history of minorities' limited access to the rights of citizenship, the United States displays a remarkably unified nationalism. Because a potent emphasis on individualism supports this nationalism, minority resistance to national systems of state power has tended to create and rely on strong community identifications, such as civil rights or gay and lesbian movements. In contrast, East German citizens experienced a serious abuse of national identity and community in Nazi Germany and under the socialist regime. These experiences created a strong suspicion of group identifications and an emphasis on individuality for resistant acts. Von Mahlsdorf's performance throughout her life illustrates one individual approach to minority resistance, suggesting the possibility of tactics that can operate as alternatives to the increasingly corporate queer North American export.

I Am My Own Woman: Strategic Avoidance of a Fixed Identity

Von Mahlsdorf's unusual life story seems almost to mirror last century's German gay history.³ Born male as Lothar Berfelde in 1928, her abusive father tried to raise his son according to Prussian and fascist male standards.⁴ Von Mahlsdorf rebelled not only against him but also refused to join the Hitler Youth. Motivated by a lesbian aunt (who caught von Mahlsdorf off-guard dressed in her clothes), von Mahlsdorf read Magnus Hirschfeld's book The Transvestites at the age of fifteen. This encounter with Hirschfeld's writing encouraged von Mahlsdorf to consciously resist society's demand for stable and oppositional gender definitions. While working for a secondhand furniture store in Berlin...