The People's Chamber abolishes Paragraph 151
The GDR abolished its anti-gay paragraph five years before West Germany and shortly before the fall of the Wall.
On 14 December 1988, the GDR's People's Chamber passed an inconspicuous package of legislation. The Fifth Criminal Law Amendment Act covered many things, but one deletion carried historic weight: Paragraph 151 was abolished without replacement. From then on, homosexuality in East Germany was no longer treated differently from heterosexuality under criminal law.
The background goes back a long way. As early as the end of the fifties, the GDR in practice no longer prosecuted consensual contact between adult men. The new 1968 criminal code abolished the old Paragraph 175, but with Paragraph 151 introduced a higher age of consent for same-sex acts. Because the text was worded in gender-neutral terms, women could now be punished for the first time too. Until its abolition, around three hundred people were convicted under this paragraph.
The turning point came with a ruling by the Supreme Court in the summer of 1987. The judges held that homosexuality, like heterosexuality, was a variant of sexual behaviour. Homosexuals did not stand outside socialist society. At the same time, pressure from below was growing. In the eighties, gay men and lesbians had organised mainly under the umbrella of the Protestant church.
The change took effect in the summer of 1989, a few months before the fall of the Wall. West Germany needed another five years for the same step. After reunification, the law was therefore initially split, because the Unification Treaty exempted the new federal states from Paragraph 175. Only in 1994 did it disappear completely.
Freedom in the statute book was not, however, freedom in everyday life. Socially, homosexuality remained largely taboo in the GDR. And yet 14 December 1988 marks a rare moment when the East was ahead of the West on a question of equal rights.