1979 and Revolutionary Horizons: Queer–Marxist Afterlives in West Berlin

This paper examines how the defeat of the 1979 Iranian Revolution reshaped queer, feminist, and anti-imperialist political cultures in West Berlin through the lived experiences of Iranian leftist and feminist exiles and their alliances with West German lesbian and women’s collectives. Focusing on Iranian communist women, queer dissidents, and feminist exiles in 1980s West Berlin, the paper traces how revolutionary defeat generated new infrastructures of endurance: prisoner solidarity campaigns, feminist print cultures, autonomous meeting spaces, and transnational anti-imperialist networks rooted in Kreuzberg and Schöneberg.

Drawing on oral history interviews, feminist and lesbian archival materials (flyers, newsletters, posters, internal correspondence), and select declassified intelligence files, the paper reconstructs specific case studies of exile organizing around Iranian political prisoners and anti-imperialist feminist collaboration. It argues that 1979 functioned as a hinge moment in which queer and feminist politics in Berlin shifted from insurgent, internationalist praxis toward forms increasingly regulated by visibility, identity, and neoliberal governance. By centering migrant and exilic actors rather than Western LGBTQ+ movements, the paper reframes Cold War Berlin as a site where counterrevolution was lived and contested through everyday practices of solidarity, intimacy, and survival.