My research project deals with three Berlin exhibitions on the history of homosexuality in Germany: “Eldorado – the History, Everyday Life and Culture of Homosexual Women and Men 1850-1950” at the former Berlin Museum in 1984, “Goodbye to Berlin. 100 years of gay movement” at the Akademie der Künste in 1997 and “Homosexuality_ies” at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in 2015.

My aim is to analyze the impact of the exhibitions on these three Berlin heritage institutions and to trace the representation of (queer) objects and the sedimentation of queer knowledge. I ask if and how these exhibitions lead to a change in collection and exhibition policy and examine their potentials to question institutionalized heteronormativity and to form a discourse beyond the tropes of persecution and decriminalization. By redrawing the conflicts surrounding these exhibitions as well as the disputes within the LGBTIQ community about the different degrees of visibility of lesbians, trans *people, bisexuals, gays and Queers of Color I will highlight the importance of these exhibitions for the development of a specific discourse on the LGBTIQ history of Berlin and Germany. My theoretical framework is informed by recent discussions within Queer Studies on queer temporality. I analyze the way in which LGBT history was presented in the exhibitions and ask how the recourse to and desire for history contributed to the formation of a unified narrative of LGBT history and the notion of a singular community across time.

I earned my Master’s degree in Gender Studies and European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität. Currently, I am a research associate at the Research Center for the Cultural History of Sexuality where I am responsible for a collection of erotic art. My responsibilities entail documenting the collection, organizing exhibitions and teaching courses on the history of sexuality and material culture. Previously I worked at Schwules Museum* in Berlin, where I co-curated exhibitions, worked on the digital registration of the collection and the archive and organized the museum’s education programme.