LIAS Kolloquium: The Archival Gap: Methodological Reflections On Leftist Women’s Internationalism During The Cold War
Kirsten Kamphuis, LIAS Fellow
16. Dec
In the winter semester 2026/27, the LIAS Colloquium will open its doors to the university community for the first time. The Fellows will present their current research projects, offering insights into the questions, methods and perspectives that shape their work. The weekly colloquium provides a space for focused exchange on the diverse research projects pursued at LIAS. All members of the university community are warmly invited to discover the programme and engage with the Fellows’ research.
Date:Wednesday, 16 Dec 2026, 12:15-1:45 p.m.
Location:Campus | Central Building C40.530
In November 1960, two delegates of the Indonesian leftist women’s organisation Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement) arrived in freezing East Berlin. Marwani Pardede and Mastiti Soeprapto were both leading Gerwani figures. They had travelled all the way from Southeast Asia to attend the seventh congress of the DFD (Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschland, Democratic Women’s League of Germany), the women’s mass organisation of the German Democratic Republic. In my presentation I will take this encounter between East German and Indonesian leftist women activists as a point of departure for a methodological reflection on a transnational approach to women’s leftist activism during the Cold War.
In particular, I will focus on the challenges related to the availability and accessibility of source material about the DFD and Gerwani. For the DFD, sources are abundantly available in the German Federal Archives as well as in several library collections across Germany. The case of Gerwani is completely different. The Indonesian leftist movement was violently destroyed in 1965–1966 in the wake of a military coup. In the wave of anti-leftist violence that swept the country, much historical evidence was lost. This means that there is a vast imbalance between the two bodies of sources, not only in terms of the amount of historical evidence that is available, but in terms of source typology as well. In my talk, I will ask which approaches gender historians might use to come to terms with such imbalances when working on North-South activist interactions.