Following a period of disputes over flag displays during last year’s Christopher Street Day (CSD), federal ministries have shown a lack of uniformity in their plans this year. This led the newspaper “Tagesspiegel” to survey all ministries.
According to the report, nine federal ministries plan to raise the rainbow flag on May 17th, the International Day against Homo-, Bi-, Inter-, and Transphobia. These ministries include the Environment, Interior, Research, Health, Social, Justice, Construction, Development, and Finance ministries.
For this year’s Berlin Christopher Street Day on July 25th, the Ministry for Family and the Ministry of Defense plan to raise the rainbow flag, as does the Federal Council. However, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Transport have stated that they will not raise the rainbow flag at any time this year. The Federal Chancellery has also completely withdrawn that plan, while the Digital Ministry reported that it had not yet made a final decision. The Ministry for Economics plans to display the rainbow flag on May 19th, and the Ministry of Agriculture did not comment on the inquiry.
Some ministries, such as the Social Ministry, have indicated they will follow the guidelines set by the Federal Interior Ministry, limiting the flag display to a single day. Others are adopting their own approach. For instance, the Ministry of Defense plans to hoist the rainbow flag within its own building on CSD day, as well as on July 3rd, a specifically designated remembrance day for the defense sector.
These actions drew criticism from the Green Party. Nyke Slawik, the Green Party’s queer political spokesperson, criticized the approach as “mortifying and dangerously weak” arguing that the federal government was “adding fuel to the fire through reluctance and hesitation”. She pointed out that crime statistics show attacks on queer people have increased nearly tenfold in recent years.
The International Day of Action against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexphobia, Transphobia, and Asexism (IDAHOBITA) has been observed annually since 2005. The date was chosen to commemorate May 17, 1990, when the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic classification of diseases. The date also serves as a reminder of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which criminalized same-sex acts between males. Between 1935 and 1944, approximately 50,000 judgments were passed under this paragraph, and around 15,000 homosexual people were incarcerated in concentration camps.
While homosexual acts were no longer criminally prosecuted in East Germany starting in the late 1950s, Paragraph 175 remained strictly enforced in West Germany in its unchanged form until 1969. It was only after German reunification that the article, which had been weakened, was completely struck out for West Germany as well.
The Christopher Street Day commemorates the uprising against a violent police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar in the Greenwich Village district of New York. While pioneers such as Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld had been actively fighting against the criminalization of queer people since the 19th century, the Stonewall uprising is viewed as the starting point of the modern protest wave for the equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and asexual people, as well as transgender and intersex individuals.