Interview: Nora Eckert, a transgender life from Chez Romy Haag to Parsifal

With the publication of her memoir, Wie Alle, Nur Anders, in 2021, Nora Eckert brought some Berlin extravagance to Germany’s comparatively conservative society. She arrived in Berlin in 1973 to work at Chez Romy Haag, Europe’s most famous transvestite night club at that time, and has gone on to become a well known opera critic. Through the years she has observed, studied and commented on her life and the life of the city around her as she transitioned from one gender to the other in the unique city of Berlin. She has collected those thoughts in this provocative and fascinating book. The book is, for now, only available in German. There is a Spanish translation planned. Will an English translation follow? 

Nora exiting the subway (U-Bahn) on West Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm, circa 1980.

Berlin’s leading newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, published an interview with Nora Eckert upon the book’s publication. Nora has provided Ferrandina Press with an English translation of the interview for our readers, as well as an English translation of an excerpt from the book. The excerpt, translated by Katy Derbyshire, was provided by the publisher to Nora for press release, and Nora has passed it on to us. We will feature that in a separate post. For now, we would like to introduce our good friend, Nora Eckert, with this interview from Der Tagesspiegel, 14 March 2021. 

First she worked in Romy Haag’s cloakroom, then as a shorthand typist – and only came out as trans just before retiring. Nora Eckert on shocks and serenity 

Interview: Deike Diening and Susanne Kippenberger 

Ms Eckert, transgender people are now allowed to work for the Berlin police force, Joe Biden has appointed a trans woman as assistant secretary for health, Rachel Levine. You yourself have been living as a trans woman in Berlin for decades. Are you a pioneer? 

I am, but there have always been transgender people. We’re born this way. At some point we discover that our identities don’t match our physical genders. The post-war German state, though, simply considered us men in women’s clothes. 

As a trans woman in the seventies, you were denied a respectable profession. Nightlife was the only option. 

The job centre called us impossible to place in work. It’s not just putting on a dress and giving yourself a woman’s name; that’s just where the problems start. There were no self-help groups either, no way to talk to others. I needed practical tips, support. I found it in the little trans community at Chez Romy Haag. I called it my Factory. 

You worked on the door at the legendary club and in the guest cloakroom, wore glitter and high heels and trowelled on the makeup. A pretty retrograde image of women. 

That attention-seeking, emphatically feminine look – they were constrained roles we enjoyed playing because they awakened desire. You noticed whether you were being looked at or not. The stares, glances, gazes were our version of Likes. 

Did you get hate too? 

I can’t remember one of us ever having bad experiences in the seventies. I always took the U-Bahn home from the club. In the early days, I looked pretty done up, and people could certainly still see the man underneath. But still, nobody made any comments or jokes. 

You describe yourself as pragmatic. 

These days, I see a lot of thin skins. I think we were more robust in those days, not constantly in offended mode. I’d like it if young people took a more confident approach to it. Not everything that’s said wrong is meant badly. 

What was it like in your childhood, did you feel like a boy? 

I felt absolutely out of place. Boys were something I desired, but I wouldn’t even think of playing football with them. I felt very close to the girls and their interests. My mother was a dressmaker and I got the leftover fabric to make dolls’ clothes. I used to bake as well. She never said: Boys don’t do that. 

When you came out to your family at the age of 23… 

…my mother instantly accepted me as a woman, her daughter. She even gave me my new name, Nora. She often visited me in Berlin and we’d tell each other all sorts, even intimate things. She had a photo of me on her bedside table, in a dress with long curly hair. But it’s strange – we never talked about me bring trans. 

When did you realize you are trans? 

I thought I was gay, at first. I experienced West Berlin as a gay paradise, but even there I felt out of place. Yes, I desired men, but not as a man. It’s almost impossible to explain, that’s just how it was. For me, being trans means living with two genders. With a female identity and a no longer quite so male body. 

You still have male sex organs. 

I’ve never experienced that as a contradiction. Some people feel a burning need to change their bodies through gender confirmation surgery. 

In your just-published memoir, you write that surgery has become a dogma, and also a lucrative business. Do a lot of trans people have the feeling of being trapped in the wrong body as children? 

I know there are people who can’t cope with their physicality. And then there are just as many who feel it’s key to stay physically intact. Aside from that, I know how and where lust comes about in my body! Sure, the surgeon’s art has made a lot of progress, but we’re promised all sorts of things when it comes to nerves and sensitivity. That was always out of the question for me. I knew even during puberty: You can be a girl without looking like one. 

When you meet someone, at what point do you clear up ‘the genitalia issue’ as you call it? Or do you like to surprise people? 

In my younger days when I was very sexually active, a look was usually enough. When things got serious I’d ask: Do you know who I am? I had this formative experience… 

…when a young man got such a shock he ran out of your flat. 

That was right at the beginning. After that, no one ever backtracked on me. Human beings are open, in principle; nature gives us the ability to be bisexual. I’ve met a lot of caring family fathers. Sure, they didn’t turn their backs on their lives. But they needed the adventure as well. 

Do you feel society used to be freer than it is today? These days, the main focus is on fears. 

Even though diversity is omnipresent in the media, the problems actually seem to be bigger. The seventies, my heyday, seemed more innocent to me. There was a lot of curiosity. These shitstorms, all the hate – I never experienced anything like that back then. 

Where did you get your confidence?

We knew we wanted to live trans lives, it was just that we had to conquer that space first. Nothing was regulated. Everything is regimented these days, you can’t do anything without a therapy plan. There’s also an entitled way of thinking that we could never have had. We could get everything we wanted, but we had to take care of it ourselves. Hormones, for example. 

They seem to have been amazingly easy to get hold of, perhaps dangerously so. 

I found my supplier at Chez Romy Haag, a doctor. One day I asked him: Listen, you can write me a prescription for hormones, can’t you? – Yes of course, what do you need? 

Did you inject yourself? 

There was always a helping hand around. The compound was called Progynon. The patient information leaflet said it was for ‘inoperable prostate carcinoma’. So we were immune to that. 

What interested you was the side effects. 

Something other people think is unpleasant was exactly what we wanted: breast growth. I’d hoped my first injection would flip a switch in my brain. But that didn’t happen. My breasts grew gradually, like in puberty. 

After the wild nightlife period, you made a surprising choice of a traditional woman’s job for the next 35 years: shorthand typist. 

I wanted to do something typically female, and I enjoyed office work. I worked at Ikon, an industrial company, sitting there with my shorthand pad like in a movie. It was fun! At that time, I cut the cord to the trans community; it didn’t interest me any more. No one at the office knew my story – I just wanted to be the woman I lived as. 

But you’re a trans woman. 

That’s what I say now, yes. I was a passing trans woman, permanently worried I’d be outed. I had formative experiences with the company, banal things: someone asked me for a tampon! I felt caught out. It’s only now I realize that the anonymity I lived in was really a way of hiding. 

First you won the freedom to live the way you feel – and then you made sacrifices for such a conservative woman’s role? 

Well, it wasn’t all that conservative. I was very independent. The office job paid all my bills and left me enough free time for a second life. I’d leave work and switch over, went to the opera, the theatre, wrote reviews and books. 

Nora celebrating the New Year, 1990, as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Had you decided to take the job as a woman so you had your peace? 

Back in 1984, I couldn’t know how my colleagues would react to my trans femininity. Only the personnel manager knew, and her reaction was pretty cool. I didn’t want to walk around the office with an ‘exotic’ stamp on my forehead. 

And then you did come out, on your last day at work. 

Retirement is a cut-off point, and I thought: What comes next? I also started digging around in my past. Reading old letters was tough. I thought: What have you missed out on in life? Because I’d done nothing but work for 35 years, focused on success, my whole emotional, intimate life had practically disappeared. So I decided to create some clarity for myself. It was such fun to imagine coming out at my leaving party. I dropped mysterious hints: You’re all going to get a nice big surprise, I’m going to tell you the whole truth about myself. 

What was the reaction like? 

At the end of my little speech, I said I’d been active in the organization TransInterQueer since the beginning of the year – and I’m a trans woman myself. There was a huge round of applause and cheers, everyone came up to me to give me a hug. It was really touching, a great feeling! 

Had you expected that? 

A little bit. I swear by my beloved Berliners, they’re just great. My relationship to Berlin is the only long-term love in my life. 

You didn’t want to call yourself transgender at first. Why was that? 

It sounded to me like a sickness. We used to call ourselves Fummeltanten – drag aunties. There was widespread aversion to the label because it was the technical term used by psychiatrists and assessors. We had our lives, we didn’t need any theory, and certainly not one that presented us as mentally ill and disturbed. The expression was linked to pathologizing at the time. 

There’s a lot of conversation going on in Germany right now about gendered and non-gendered language. Using asterisks in plurals referring to groups of people, for instance… 

I like using the asterisk, as a placeholder for everything between male and female. I still use terms with masculine roots in general language, like jemand (someone) and man (one, you) because that’s more practical. 

A lot of people consider the language discussion a pseudo-debate, changing terminology, not structures. 

My friend the writer Jerôme Robinet, a trans man, gave us this wonderful sentence: We don’t want a piece of the cake, we want a new recipe. We need a culture that can think further than just two genders. 

Since 2018, the WHO no longer categorizes transgenderism as a mental illness. 

That’s not yet official, it has to be recognized by all the states first. Of course, it shows there’s an effort to depathologize it. But the term that’s used now, ‘gender incongruence’, is also a misconstruction. It’s only incongruent from a binary-normative perspective – I myself regard and experience it as congruence. The key factor for our lives, identity, has nothing to do with our genitalia. The American biologist Milton Diamond says the central human sex organ is between our ears, not our legs. There’s something magic about that sentence, for me. 

Germany has its Transsexual Law, which many people consider a violation of human rights. 

It’s a scandal that law is still on the books. The assessment process, above all, is a terrible thing. You go to court, apply to change your name and status, and then you need two psychological assessments diagnosing you as ‘trans’. They practically have to confirm we have an identity disorder. 

You went for assessments yourself in the early days. 

I call it scientific stalking: You had to tell them about your sexual practices and fantasies, tell them what they wanted to hear from us. I used to think we could reform the law. Now I’m in favour of scrapping it entirely and regulating all the legal issues via existing laws. 

The Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling thinks only born women are real women. 

The majority of society isn’t capable of seeing identity decoupled from genitalia. Before the coronavirus, I took part in an event about gender diversity at a school in Berlin-Reinickendorf. Only girls came along. I said to them: There are men with vaginas and women with penises. You should have heard them giggle! They can’t even imagine the idea. But the reality exists. That’s why I want to go public. Even though it’s a Sisyphean task. That stone needs to stay put at the top now.

Ferrandina Press would like to thank Nora Eckert for providing this article, and we hope to see more of her here in New York. 

The book is available from the German publisher, C. H. Beck Verlag, and on various online booksellers. 

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