I Am My Own Wife (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Berlin, 1930s – 1990s

Berlin is the capital of Germany and its largest city, with more than three million inhabitants. Before World War II, however, more than four million people called Berlin home. Adolf Hitler planned to reconstruct most of the buildings in Berlin during his rule (1933 – 1945). He found Berlin ugly and had visions of creating an entirely new city that he wanted to call Germania. When Allied Forces bombed the city, Hitler thought it was a good thing. It would save Germany the cost of demolishing the old buildings that he so disliked.

Most of Berlin was destroyed by the Allied Forces. In 1944, the city was divided four ways with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union taking control of different zones. Governance was maintained in West Berlin by the Western countries, while the Soviet Union controlled East Berlin. As the relationship with the Soviet Union deteriorated, tensions mounted in the city. At one point, the Soviet Union blocked the passage of goods to West Berlin, and food and other supplies had to be airlifted in. Then, in 1961, in an attempt to keep East Berliners (as well as people from East Germany) from escaping, the Soviet Union began to build the Berlin wall. The Berlin wall was ninety-six miles long and was first made of barbed wire. By 1975, the concrete version of the wall was fully in place. Over the years, almost two hundred people were killed trying to escape beyond the wall, but it is estimated that about five thousand people made it out successfully. In 1989, most of the wall was torn down, except for sections that remain as memorials.

Stasi

The term Stasi is taken from the German word Staatssicherheit, which means "state security." Stasi were East Germany's notorious secret police and were stationed in East Berlin. The group was founded in 1950 under the leadership of Wilhelm Zaisser. The Stasi, often referred to as one of the most effective security police forces in the world, was fashioned after similar forces in the Soviet Union. Many members of the Stasi were former Nazi S.S. officers. When the Stasi was dismantled in 1989, the police hastily attempted to destroy all their files. Their files were either shredded or torn by hand. However, these torn documents (sixteen thousand bags of them) were discovered by the new German government, which commissioned a group of people to restore them. By 2001, only three hundred bags of files had been put back together again.

Homophobia

Wright has stated that it was hard being a homosexual in the southern United States, where a fear of homosexuals is often based on a deep-seated belief that homosexuality runs counter to the teachings of the Bible. Homophobia, or the fear of homosexuality, is not limited to the South, of course, but that is where Wright grew up. When Wright, raised in a climate of homophobia, came across the story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, he became fascinated with it. Here was a man who dressed as a female for most of his life, and who did so under the oppressive and repressive regimes of Nazi and Communist governments. Both governments persecuted homosexuals and transvestites. It has been estimated that, during the Nazi reign, there may have been more than 100,000 homosexuals and transvestites who died in the concentration camps. Homosexual and transvestite prisoners were forced to wear pink triangle badges to identify themselves in the camps, a practice that has since been converted to a positive symbol: the pink triangle has been adopted by gay men and women as an emblem of solidarity.

Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was a real person, who was born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 and lived most of her life in Berlin. Physically, Charlotte was a man, but she considered herself to belong to what she called a third sex, as described in the introduction to the published version of Wright's play about her. Charlotte felt that she was a "female spirit trapped in a male body" and always referred to herself as "she." She lived in a "mammoth stone mansion" in what would eventually become East Berlin after the division of the city following World War II. It was in this mansion that Charlotte gathered the bounty of her passion for collecting old furniture and other relics. In a review of Charlotte's autobiography, with the same title as Wright's play, Thom Nickels, writing for the Lambda Book Report, states that Charlotte's philosophy about life was this: "Antiques and furniture before love, before sex, before sufficient food to feed her own face, even."

Charlotte is often described as an unusual kind of transvestite. Nickels sums up this difference: "There are no glamour wigs in her closet, no makeup in her medicine cabinet, no saucy gowns to wear in gay bars or outrageous drag queen antics or caustic comments while camping it up." Rather, Charlotte was more easily compared to a cleaning woman, dressed simply and most frequently in a very plain black dress. She did not dye her hair, and, in her later years, it was completely white. Her only extravagance was a simple pearl necklace.