When the staff of the Schwules Museum’s archive returned from their winter vacation, they were delighted to find a collection of material from California on their desk. The donation from Renate Stendhal consists of 16mm film reels, DVDs, documents and photos documenting the first European lesbian-feminist multimedia show In the Beginning…of the End: A Voyage of Women Becoming. It premiered in 1980 at the Berlin Summer University for Women, and a year later the Canadian “Studio D”, a publicly funded women’s film production program of the National Film Board of Canada, produced a film version of the show, which has now found a new home in the Schwules Museum’s archive on 16mm film prints and DVD.
The authors of the show, Renate Stendhal and her partner Maj Skadegaard, were activists of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement, they went on tour with their multimedia show between 1980 and 1983, gave workshops in artistic and erotic self-empowerment, and the film version was shown at festivals in Europe and the USA.
Renate Stendhal’s extraordinary biography includes school years in Berlin and Hamburg, literature and ballet studies in Hamburg, Munich and Paris, engagements as a dancer and in experimental theaters in Berlin and Paris, texts about dance and theater for international and German media under her artist name Renate Stendhal, work as a personal assistant to Meret Oppenheim (until 1980), and translations of central feminist texts into German (including those by Gertrude Stein, Susan Griffin, Audre Lord and Adrienne Rich). She moved to California with her partner Kim Chernin in 1982, they published together until Chernin’s death (2020) and founded the women’s publishing house “EdgeWork Books”. Several of Stendhal’s books and translations are already part of our library.
“We are very pleased about this exciting addition to our holdings,” says Julia Hartung, Head of the Schwules Museum Archive. “The donation will now be archivally packaged and indexed. We invite researchers and interested parties to explore these aesthetically and historically rich materials.”On her decision to send the material for In the Beginning…of the End: A Voyage of Women Becoming across the Atlantic to the Schwules Museum, Renate Stendhal explained: “As an ex-Berliner, I would be particularly pleased to have an anchor in Berlin with you.”
Photography: Romain Pinteaux, Archive of Schwules Museum