Helga Goetze

In her diverse and extensive art, Helga Goetze explored topics such as sexuality, physicality, and the deconstruction of traditional gender roles, while advocating for a better, more peaceful society. Her work comprises of more than 3,000 poems, drawings, paintings, embroideries, and protests in public spaces.

Born on 12 March 1922 in Magdeburg to the lower middle-class Troch family, Helga Sophia Goetze was a curious and inquisitive child. She and her brother Harald grew up in the interwar period, a time characterised by catastrophe and political changes that would soon be overshadowed by the Nazis’ rise to power and the Second World War. Helga Goetze first met her future husband Curt Goetze when she was eleven years old. The two married in 1942 and had their first child two years later. Six more children would follow.

Helga Goetze spent the first half of her life in a marriage with a traditional division of roles: her husband worked as a banker while she worked as a housewife taking care of their seven children. Photos from the early 1970’s show Helga Goetze standing in the kitchen, neatly coiffed and wearing a smart dress. It wasn’t until she was in her mid-forties that she broke out of this traditional role. The turning point she cites were sexual experiences she had with a man called Giovanni, whom she met on holiday in Sicily in September 1968 on the occasion of her silver wedding anniversary. A short time later, Helga Goetze embarked on a new phase of life characterised by female self-determination and freely lived sexuality, during which she also discovered activism and art.

After separating from her husband, Helga Goetze initially lived and worked in Hamburg, where she founded an institute for sexual information in 1972. In 1974, she moved into a communal flat that practiced free love, came into contact with the commune run by the Viennese performance artist Otto Mühl (1925-2013) and became actively involved in the cultural centre Fabrik in Hamburg. Her first performances in Berlin paved the way for her move to the then divided city in 1978. It was there that she began her almost daily “vigils for the sexual liberation of women” in front of the Technical University of Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. After moving from Kreuzberg to Charlottenburg in 1983, she founded the “geni(t)ale Universität” in her flat.

With such statements, Goetze encouraged her audience to question their reactions to certain words and actions. In addition to her actions in public spaces, she created numerous poems, drawings, paintings, and embroideries in which she dealt in particular with the deconstruction of classic societal roles and socially taboo topics like sexuality and physicality as an act of liberation. Her work often depicts paradisiacal landscapes in which the figures are primarily preoccupied with one thing: having sex.

Goetze used her work to envisage her utopian ideal of a peaceful and communal coexistence characterised by love and desire. She brought this message to the public through her performances, protests and her embroidered clothing.

During her lifetime, Helga Goetze’s public image was largely shaped by the German media landscape, which is why her work as an activist, educator and artist was only marginally recognised and appreciated. Critics tended to belittle and sometimes even pathologize her. In the 1980’s, however, there were already voices who spoke positively of Goetze’s political activism. One was director Rosa von Praunheim (born 1942), who used interview sequences with Goetze in his 1982 film “Rote Liebe” (Red Love). Even back then, Praunheim described her as an important and radical pioneer who had something to say on the subject of free sexuality.
 
Author Katja Lewina also recognised this many years later. In her book Sie hat Bock (She’s up for it) (DuMont, 2020) in which she examines female sexuality and desire, the author cites Helga Goetze as an example of a woman who openly addressed taboo topics in public. Lewina thanks Goetze at the end of the book’s introduction.

In the 1990’s, in addition to holding her vigils in public spaces in Berlin, Helga Goetze regularly invited people to her Märchenstunde (fairytale hour), where she read her poems. She was also a guest on other talk shows. In 2000, together with like-minded people and friends, she founded the Metropole Mutterstadt e.V. association, which is committed to preserving, managing, and publicising her work.

In 2020, the dependent foundation Helga Goetze Stiftung was established at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin to preserve her artistic legacy. Her documents such as diaries, letters and poems are kept by the Feministische Archiv – FFBIZ.

The activist and artist died on 29^th January 2008 at the age of 85 in Winsen (Luhe). She did not live to see her work gain increasing recognition.