We bid farewell to Michael Fehlhaber, who volunteered in our archives since 2016 and was able to complete the full review of our holdings on “gay marriage” in 2024. He wanted this work to be understood as “a tribute to freedom and the desire for partnership.”
Michael was born in Berlin in 1941, studied architecture and urban planning in Aachen, and co-founded the first gay student group in Germany there in the mid-1960s. In 1972, although he had not come out in his profession as an architect, he participated in a questionnaire campaign by Martin Dannecker, which ultimately led to the sociological study “Der gewöhnliche Homosexuelle” (The Ordinary Homosexual, 1974). In the early 1980s, Michael met the young art historian Andreas Sternweiler and watched from a distance as Sternweiler and his friends founded the Schwules Museum in 1985 and built up an internationally renowned collection of queer artworks and documents. After German reunification, Michael moved back to his hometown for professional reasons. When he learned that his grandnephew, who lived in the US, had come out, he decided to apply for a volunteer position in the archives at the Schwules Museum: “At the time, I didn’t realize as clearly as I do today that the museum can only exist thanks to its volunteers, but I felt the need to reward my grandnephew’s courage, so to speak,” he later told us.
In 2017, Michael turned his attention to the major project of cataloging the entire collection on “gay marriage.” Although he himself had never been married or in a civil partnership, the experience of a friend who had his apartment lease terminated by his deceased partner’s parents and had to hand over all his valuables to them convinced him of the relevance of legal equality between queer and heterosexual relationships. “Partnership in general, togetherness, choosing to be together for 30, 40, 50 years… I find that admirable and courageous, then as now, regardless of the circumstances, whether formalized or not, whether voluntary or with the seal of marriage,” Michael told us on the occasion of the completion of his project, which, thanks to his years of dedication, now has a finding aid that makes the work of anyone researching the topic today much easier.
We were looking forward to Michael Fehlhaber tackling his next archival project with the same enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he was struck down by a brief but serious illness.
“I miss Michael personally—no other volunteer has accompanied me in the archive for so many years—but also because of his commitment to the interests of the Schwules Museum and the archive,” says Kristine Schmidt, research assistant at the SMU archive, paying tribute to him. “He cataloged the collection on same-sex marriage with such meticulousness, expertise, joy, and deep interest that the regular exchanges between Michael and me included not only delight at such a precisely cataloged collection, but also a tongue-in-cheek fear that Michael was secretly planning to write a doctoral thesis on it. Volunteering supports the work of the archive and library in every way. Michael took his volunteer work very seriously and fulfilled it to a very high standard.”
Photography: Yasmin Künze, 2024