Friends of the Revolution

What female role models are there? In a joint film evening followed by a discussion, we want to explore just how necessary it is to give these voices a platform, to listen to them once more and perhaps to take up their cause again.

What can we learn from the courage of these women – who, as founding members of the Neues Forum, were powerful voices in the citizens’ movement – and from their commitment to the opening of the Stasi files? And what significance do their experiences hold today, at a time when political ideologies are once again playing on notions of loyalty and betrayal?

In the discussion that follows, three women who engage with the GDR, its upheavals and their aftermath from different perspectives will share their views.

Samirah Kenawi was involved in the social upheavals of 1989. She founded the GrauZone Archive, which has been documenting the work of non-state women’s groups in the GDR since the mid-1980s.

Since 2024, Juliane Meckert has been developing the long-term performative-documentary project VERRAT (working title). In it, she works with contemporary witnesses to examine how the Stasi’s apparatus of power functioned, how the fall of the Berlin Wall transformed people’s lives, and how perpetrators and victims carried on living afterwards. The stories of women such as Bärbel Bohley, Katja Havemann and Irena Kukutz are just as relevant as the questions of loyalty, betrayal and personal responsibility.

Alexandra Finder is an actress and artistic director of the site-specific play SEID DOCH LAUT, which tells the story of the GDR opposition group ‘Frauen für den Frieden’ (Women for Peace) and is set in the former Stasi headquarters (with further performances from 18–22 November 2026). She will moderate the discussion.

Together, they aim to discuss which of these women’s experiences and attitudes can provide guidance today – and what their stories teach us about resistance, responsibility and dealing with authoritarian power structures.