The Thief of Womanhood

was geschehen und nie geschehen ist (what happened and never happened) by photographers Amelie Sachs and Paulina Metzscher, created in collaboration with author and filmmaker Eva Gemmer, confronts one of the least visible yet deeply wounding legacies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR): the forced adoption of children.
 Following Germany’s division into East and West after the Second World War, several hundred to several thousand children were separated from their parents—an exact number that remains unknown to this day. East German family law stipulated that parents should raise their children ‘to be active builders of socialism’. They had to ‘respect work’, ‘love the Soviet Union’, and ‘defend the borders – if necessary with armed force’. When parents failed to comply with these ideological demands, the state had the authority to revoke their parental rights. The practice of forced adoption remains controversial, and the process of reckoning with injustice in the GDR is still ongoing. Through a layered combination of artistic documentary photography, archival material, and factual as well as poetic texts, was geschehen und nie geschehen ist traces the fragmented family histories of five protagonists—Andreas, Ortrud, Swen, Petra, and Ivonne—who were directly affected by these policies. What remains in the aftermath of separation? Grief? Loss? Hope? The work brings together personal narratives and historical traces to create a space where memory, absence, and unanswered questions intersect.