Dear Minister President Manuela Schwesig, dear Minister of State Carsten Schneider, dear guests!

Incidentally, the word 'guest' has been in the Grimm Brothers' dictionary since the 19th century. When the online dictionary included it in 2021, it caused a storm of indignation.

Also because it was pointed out in the preliminary discussion not to talk too much about the past, I would like to emphasize the point that is important to me right at the beginning: We block our way into the future if we exclude the past... or as the writer Judith Schalansky writes: that contrary to popular belief, it is not the future but the past that represents the true space of possibility[1].

In other words: in the past we can recognize what actually happened in practice of all the bold claims about what needs to be done in the future. And past practices can be changed.

We therefore need practices, lived action, joint action, in order to make something like transformation - understood as a change in structure and orientation - possible. In Hannah Arendt's words, we need to act in public, i.e. to act in such a way that the uniqueness or even transformative nature of our actions can be perceived and become a reference for social issues and, ideally, decisions.

Who could not have experienced it more impressively than we - children of a lost republic who, despite all the promises of modernization and prosperity, first became East Germans, then belonged to the crisis-ridden society without work that had become lost and superfluous, to the avant-garde and new territory. What all these diagnoses have in common is that they not only asserted social resistance, but also practiced it. How long this can be sustained and how it can become routine is what interests me in the question: Shaping East Germany/ transformation.

In the spirit of the future past, I would like to thank you very much for your courageous invitation and the opportunity to speak here. So I would like to take the pompous title for this evening ... no longer as a provocation, because the BMBF has also invited us under a similarly bold title on the occasion of International Women's Day:

Tell me where the women are - What to do for the visibility of innovative women in Germany?

Either things are going really badly for this country, which otherwise never runs out of ideas, or the shortage of skilled workers makes it possible ... erh necessary to address the "silent reserve of women".

It's like deja vue - when I moved to Görlitz 10 years ago, the Saxon newspaper ran the headline: "Where have the young women gone?". Is the province here a pioneer for a social issue that is now also beginning to interest you at a national level?  

I am here today because you are addressing me as an academically qualified woman, a social scientist, who also lives in this very rural society that she is researching and, to top it all off, is an activist.

That attracts national attention. At this point, rural areas promote the visibility of the - statistically speaking - few (younger) women who want to proactively take on responsibility.

I would like to tell you briefly about the past, in which I am still involved today, in the search for opportunities to influence the practices of women for the future of Lusatia in structural change:

Once upon a time there was an equal opportunities officer called Ines Fabisch, and she met a female sociologist in East Saxony - me. They started a revolution through interpretation!

They met where they were no longer expected: in rural, peripheral regions like the one they lived in. They both decided when they found each other there and each of them knew how to name other women, so that the impression was reinforced that no one seemed to notice the women who were there: Where was the f... red carpet? So they decided to ask this species that was thought to be missing: How do you stay in peripheral East German regions?

Women are already undergoing structural change here, according to our steep thesis, which we reconstructed empirically, albeit against the grain: without resilient structures - rather as lone fighters - as marginalized women. The schoolgirl and the equal opportunities officer as well as the entrepreneur or volunteer. Structural weakness at the level of representation of the public action described at the beginning. At the same time, I noted in my research diary: how amazed I am that I constantly encountered and continue to encounter those beings who were thought to be missing: they are bubbling over with ideas about the potential to be leveraged in the region, accepting precarious employment, caring for children and animals, rebuilding farms and houses, and incidentally networking whoever and whatever can be linked  - all those who did not know about each other, and keeping many a store running that would hardly have learned to walk without them.

Speaking of walking - women also influence the transformation processes in East Germany because they walk, have walked: ... their "collective" departure leaves emptiness, causes fractures, damages cohesion, prevents people from staying, reduces opportunities, shrinks population, laments being abandoned, the loss of grandchildren, shames and unsettles those who remain!

Those who stayed - male leaders with a few exceptions - had not become heroes, but tragic figures who reflexively flinched when we invited them to talk about the opportunities for women in rural areas. They were the wrong people, they couldn't judge that at all, they sent the (only) female colleague (who deals with women's issues).

But we want to talk about regional development, education and conditions for staying, I insist.

Hello?

Already hung up.

Of course, not everyone was so reticent, there were also those who were busy claiming that there was no problem at all. In general, there seems to be a connection between the claim that you could start anything here if you wanted to. Equal opportunities have long since been achieved since GDR times, and it's not one's fault if women don't want to or don't want to have children .... We don't know any women who are unhappy here.

And the often more critical experience of many women. They don't want to contribute to the promotion of economic castles in the air or follow the employment prospects in the STEM sector that have been prepared for them. This contradiction between the mostly male control ideas: We're preparing the field for you, why aren't you entering it? And the indignation of women: They won't even let us do what we can and want to contribute - this leads to decoupled practices. Some left. Others stayed, with the feeling that they had done everything and were not aware of any shared responsibility. Those women who tried it with responsibility in established leadership positions migrated partly disillusioned, back to the metropolitan areas or close to them, or they seek retreat, if house or farm allow it.

In order to be able to talk about this appropriately and take action, we founded a platform with numerous women: F for strength. We wanted to draw attention to a compelling connection: the M (the male mass) must be accelerated so that strength can emerge: F wie Kraft is therefore not a career portal, not a political NGO, but feeds on the topics, and actions from the lifeworlds of women from all the areas of life they occupy in a rural society - showing their actions and practices was the first step.

The second was to discover the moment of self-organization. In other words, to move from program to action. To support each other, to become representatives of their and our "ways of staying", as my colleague Melanie Rühmling describes it in her dissertation.

What I have learned: It only works locally and in concrete relationships that we enter into and build and try to create routines. This is a complex undertaking. We didn't expect how long it would take, nor how exhausting this process would be for our own resources. But there's no other way and it's so much fun!

After all, we now have an alliance of municipal equal opportunities officers in Lusatia who are organizing themselves to find out how they can act in the face of structural change and what this actually has to do with equal opportunities. They are organizing themselves when the new Gender Equality Act underestimates the conditions for action in rural society and we have a visible platform through which we have become an important strengthening of structures, indeed a socio-political voice that you will continue to hear from. I ask for your understanding if we are sometimes unavailable - the countryside is also our retreat and recreation area so that we don't have to move to Berlin or Leipzig!

Thank you very much, I look forward to our conversation!

[1] Schalansky, List of some losses. Suhrkamp, p. 19.