Herta Leistner

That hurt. Clearly it still hurt in 2009 when Herta Leistner quoted it in her acceptance speech at an award ceremony.

There is perhaps no other Protestant churchwomen in Germany who has come under such sustained attack and been so distanced by senior elements within the Evangelical Church simply on account of lifestyle choices. It was at least in part a belated recognition that some of the more intemperate attacks on Herta Leistner were far more damaging to the church itself than to their intended target (or any other individual church member) that in 2009 The "Open Church of Württemberg" awarded Leistner the "AMOS prize" for civil courage in church and society.

For another eight years Herta Leistner continued to work at the Women's Study and Training Centre at Gelnhausen. She retired in 2004 after which the facility was closed and the operation was replaced by a smaller EKD study centre in Hanover. She is characteristically reflective about these developments: "We created and ran the Women's Study Centre at Gelnhausen for more than ten years, and were also able to use it to bring to fruition the 'Distance-learning feminist theology' which has flourished. Everything has its time. You only have to look to see how much progress has been made, but of course there is still much that remains to be done. The old days when we launched the project, even back when we were still at Bad Boll, cannot be brought back. If I were still at that stage today, I would do things quite differently".

Herta Leistner retired in 2004 and settled with Kathrin, her partner of long-standing, in a small village in Thuringia where her Swabian accept attracts a measure of incredulity and they acquired an agricultural property. Katrina is both a pastor and a homeopathic vet, but for Herta Leistner it was important that when she retired she should make a complete break from her church career: there were already, she observed, enough scars from those times. In 2018 a visiting interviewer recorded that the women share their well-kept smallholding with their dogs, two horses and two prize-winning Shetland ponies. The barn contains a hay mower and a large tractor, as well as a cart small enough to be drawn by a single pony.

In 1996 Leistner was awarded the German Order of Merit ("Verdienstkreuz am Bande"). Her award hit the headlines and the high-profile theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, an uncompromising critic of homosexual practice, returned his own Order of Merit in protest.

Another orchestrated media storm blew up in 1996 after Leister was awarded the German Order of Merit ("Verdienstkreuz am Bande") for "services to the perception and emancipation of lesbian women in the church and society". She was the first German to be honoured with that citation. The critics evidently caught the ear of President Herzog (CDU) whose office distanced itself from the citation, insisting when pressed that the award reflected not just Leistner's engagement in respect of lesbians, but the entire body of her social commitment in her work for young people and for women. That did not prevent one professor of theology from return his own Order of Merit as a protest against Leistner's award.

Herta Leistner remained at the Bad Boll Evangelical College (near Göppingen) for almost twenty years: these were the years when her public impact was at its greatest. When she moved on, in 1993, she was able to leave the college uniquely equipped to work through many women's issues from a church perspective. Initially her areas of particular responsibility included adult education and "group dynamics".

A location for the new institution was found at Gelnhausen in the hills east of Frankfurt. Only two directors of study were appointed. One of them was Herta Leistner, who had worked so tirelessly to bring the project to this stage. In the middle of all this she completed a dissertation, receiving a doctorate jointly with Monika Barz from the University of Hannover in 1993. The title of their work suggested that it owed much to personal real-life experiences: "Aus der Nichtexistenz auftauchen… Der Beitrag der Tagungsarbeit zum Identitätsbildungsprozess lesbischer Frauen in der Kirche" ("Emergence from non-existence... The contribution of Conference Work to the Identity Development Process") of Lesbian Women in the Church").

Construction of the Anna Paulsen House began in 1993. This had the effect of unleashing a renewed volley of media criticism, more strident and more personally hostile than ever, from the evangelical conservatives. Critics railed against the "Power of false teaching" ("Kräfte der Irrlehre") and "feminist extremists" who were threatening the very sacrament of marriage because they wanted to promote "lesbian partnerships" that propagated "group sex" and ridiculed the death of Christ as "sadomasochistic": in short, these feminists dragged sinfulness into the church. In the estimation of one commentator, all that was missing from the witch hunt was the call for burnings at the stake. It seems clear that Herta Leistner by now had attained a heightened public profile which made her something of a hate figure for evangelical conservative campaigners. They organised a petition demanding that her appointment as director of studies at the new institution should be rescinded. This attracted 12,000 signatures, but failed to persuaded the EKD (church) hierarchy to their point of view. Necessary building works having been completed, the "Frauenstudien- und -bildungszentrums der Evangelischen Kirche" at the Anna Paulsen House was inaugurated in the summer of 1994 with a small celebration at the premises. On the edge of the ceremony were grouped 150 demonstrators carrying banners with messages such as "Frauenzentrum oder Hexenkessel?" ("Women's Centre or witches cauldron?"). One enraged conservative pastor marked the occasion with a sermon:

Leistner's cause was helped by her stubbornness, but also by the wider social currents of the times. She never lost her belief that change from within was a possibility for the church as an institution. After long negotiations the Evangelical Church agreed to create its own "Frauenakademie" ("Women's Academy") study centre as a contribution to the Decade of Women ("Frauen-Dekade") proclaimed by the World Council of Churches. (The decade was to run from 1988 till 1998.)

The subterfuge ended in 1987. That was the year of publication for the book "Hättest du gedacht, dass wir so viele sind? Lesbische Frauen in der Kirche" ("Would you have thought that there were so many of us? Lesbian women in the church"). The book was compiled, edited and produced by Monika Barz, Ute Wild and ... Herta Leistner. The authors of the main texts were identified in a subtitle simply as "[die] sanften Verschwörerinnen" ("[the] gentle conspirators"): most had chosen to remain anonymous. They included deaconesses, women pastors, women theologians, women teachers and other women with important links to the evangelical churches. For the avoidance of any residual doubt, Herta Leister now also took the opportunity to "come out".

The taboo was broken, at least within the feminist theology network, not with explosive publicity but with singular gentleness. One day Leistner gave a small reading circle a book to read that dealt with being a lesbian. There was no immediate reaction inside or outside the college. Later there may have been a few whispers in the corridor: "That Herta is most likely a lesbian herself". The matter had been ventilated: there was sign of any wider wish to discuss it, but somehow it was now becoming among one among the various unspoken assumptions underpinning the women's discussions. In 1983 it nevertheless became apparent that there were a number of women, of whom Herta Leistner was one, who were not content to leave things to rest there indefinitely. That year Leistner and a few fellow campaigners drafted up a message, "Are there any lesbian women in the church at all? If so, get in touch!" The message was distributed privately, but then also printed in feminist publications. The response began as a trickle, but in the end around 300 responded. In 1985 the first congress of lesbian church women was held at the Arnoldshain Evangelical Academy facility. Subsequent congresses all took place at Bad Boll. Even at the first of them, the number of participants was unexpectedly large even though the programme spelled out nothing about lesbians and "advance publicity" was restricted to word of mouth and programmes passed by hand. Many of those attending were worried about losing their jobs. The information distributed ahead of the Arnoldshain congress was framed elliptically, under the heading "Lebensformen" ("Lifestyles") and set out topics for discussion such as "How do single women live alone?", "What problems do divorced women have?" and indeed "How do women live together?"

In 1977 she was able to spend six months in Philadelphia to undertake further training. She would later look back on this opportunity as a particular stroke of good fortune. "Where group dynamics were concerned, matters were much further advanced than in Germany", she would later recall. She was particularly impressed by the condition of the women's movement in America, eagerly devouring for herself the much discussed book "Beyond God the Father" by the radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly. "That was my theme, which I brought back to Germany: is a masculine redeemer acceptable for women? I wanted to offer the college something on that, and in Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel I found a brilliant ally for future battles".

The way was now open for a belated return to university level education. Herta Leistner, by now aged 37, moved to Tübingen. A conventional choice would have been to study for a degree in Theology. Leistner chose social pedagogy instead. "Learning Latin and Greek was not really my thing. I thought my value was more as a practitioner than as a theoretician". That would make her a good fit for the Bad Boll Evangelical College where she took a managerial post as director of studies in 1974. Her five years as a student at Tübingen came in the wake of the "events" of May 1968 and coincided with a number of rapid societal changes, often with students taking the lead. The period also marked a new awakening for the women's movement to which, as she later told an interviewer, Leistner owed a great deal. It was also at Tübingen that Leistner had her first love affair with another woman. Even after the romance ended and her lover married someone else, the two women would remain on friendly terms.

After that she undertook an apprenticeship in youth work at Denkendorf, before becoming became district organiser for the Ulm region for girls' youth work with the Protestant churches in the area. Protestants were still outnumbered by Roman Catholics in the region, but ethnic cleansing from Silesia and other parts of central Europe during 1944/45 had reduced the extent of the Roman Catholic preponderance. Protestant youth work remained the principal focus of Leistner's life through the 1960s. Looking back she would later recall that youth work was still strongly divided between boys and girls to an extent that a later generation might find hard to appreciate. Towards the end of the decade, encouraged by a teacher, she resumed her studies for the Abitur, on which she had missed out when her mother's suicide had forced her to leave her schooling incomplete. She undertook the necessary work at evening classes in order to avoid disruption of her daytime responsibilities, passing the exam in 1968/69.