Herta Leistner

Herta Leistner is a German is a practitioner of social pedagogy, a teacher and an author. She is a Deaconess of the Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) Church who has come to wider prominence as a pioneer of the lesbian liberation movement inside the church.

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.

Life Provenance and early years Herta Leistner was born at the height of the Second World War in Altensteig, a small town in the Black Forest south of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Her father was close to retirement and probably too old to have been conscripted into the army. He worked as a vet. From him she inherited a love for animals which she has sustained ever since. The more decisive influence came from her mother and maternal grandmother who shared the house, making the family home one in which three generations of women lived together. The family's Protestant faith was an important aspect of family life, but it was practiced without dogmatism. As a teenager she attended a girls' "evangelical circle", while quietly nurturing an ambition to become a sports teacher when she grew up.

Childhood bereavement Everything changed when her mother committed suicide. She was now sixteen and there was no longer any question of completing her school career to the point at which she would pass the Abitur exam which would have been necessary to progress to any sort of teacher training college or other university level educational institution. The suicide had come shortly after the death of her grandmother, and now it was down to Herta to look after her bereaved father and brother while at the same time running the house. 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". For Leistner personally there were ways in which life became ten times easier. "We no longer had to keep anything under cover, and so many good conversations followed". ("Danach war das Leben zehnmal leichter.) Wir mussten nichts mehr unter dem Deckel halten und haben so viele gute Gespräche geführt...."

Progress. And intensified opposition 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. )

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.

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.

Later years 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.

Concluding thoughts Leistner tells of the continuing insults and slander that she experienced with the detachment of a chronicler, rather than as a victim of witch hunts. What made her persist? "I'm fairly true to my principals," she reflects, "I try and see through whatever I start". Many churchwomen - not just the lesbians among them - have much reason to be thankful for that. Leistner herself knows that many of them "felt very encouraged" by the lead she was taking. Invited to sum up nearly a quarter of a century of feminist church education, she refers back to the origins of her work: "Feminist theology re-awakened my enthusiasm for the faith, from which I had previously felt alienated. And together we reaffirmed that we were also a part of the church - another part." She takes pride in the fact that in recent years that other part has found official recognition. "Perhaps I was simply in the right place at the right time".