On the night of November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, opening the border between East and West Germany. As the Wende Museum marks the passage of twenty-five years since this monumentous event, we are also highlighting the anniversary of a lesser-known milestone that occurred on the very same night: the debut at East Berlin’s Kino International of Coming Out, the first and last queer feature film produced in East Germany. We hope you will join us as we co-present Outfest’s special screening of this groundbreaking piece of Cold War LGBTQ cinematic history.

Directed by Heiner Carow, Coming Out offers an intimate view of the lived experience of gay men in late 1980s East Berlin. Homosexuality had been outlawed in Germany since 1871 under Paragraph 175, and the systematic persecution of the German LGBTQ community continued through the twentieth century and after World War II in both East and West Germany, even once the law was eased in the late 1960s. For the majority of East Germany’s forty-one-year existence, the presence of gays and lesbians in literature and media was kept to a minimum, consigning the lives of homosexuals to silence and solitude. 

Coming Out is co-presented with Outfest and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives. The film screening will be followed by a discussion with the Wende Museum’s Manager of Collections and Associate Curator, Patrick Mansfield, and Audiovisual Archivist, Kate Dollenmayer; Outfest UCLA Legacy Project Manager Alice Royer; and guests from ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.