The careful execution of excavations, in which Dr. Barbara Degen continues to dig in holes that others wouldn't even look into, is one of her fundamental characteristics - "In terms of character, I have the mentality of a truffle hog". The variety of discoveries is great: both the beautiful and the ugly can be brought to light. A grateful talent as a lawyer, a necessary one as a scientist - and sometimes a burden. Because those confrontations with people who misunderstand this quality led to a feeling of isolation in Barbara's life at times. Many also know of Barbara's lively, humorous and communicative aura. A woman who can quickly capture the interest of others, possibly also due to her time as a speaker at various demonstrations at the end of the 1960s.

She grew up at the time of the National Socialist regime of terror, but also in a warm-hearted family home. Photos of her in a baby carriage with shining eyes, as if life was just waiting for her, still remind us of this today. The photographer, her loving father, can also be seen in some of these pictures, pushing the baby carriage between meadows and woods. In the course of her excavations, Barbara finds out one day that he - himself with Jewish roots - had been deployed in Russia during the Nazi era "to fight Jews and partisans". To this day, she is close to the theory that he may have been partly responsible for his own death.

The ambivalent feeling towards her family can also be found in her relationship with her mother and she only understood large parts of her mother's love in later years. The mother, a psychologist and doctor, uses her knowledge and skills to draw up reports on her own children, some of whom are already adults, and to confront them with the information she has obtained. "Bärbel and her bizarre nature" - this is how the mother describes her child, who continues to say that Barbara lets her mind guide her too much. From an early age, Bärbel was accompanied by a feeling of inner conflict and division, which she was only able to leave behind when she gave birth to her second daughter in her mid-30s.

Barbara was born in 1941 as the first of three children in the "Reichsgau" of Poznan, also known as "Wartheland". Her brother Bernhard follows a year later. In 1939, her father got his first job with the city, where he was responsible for planning outdoor facilities. Both parents came from Silesia and, for better or worse, were part of the "Poznan power structure" during the Nazi era, but with mental resistance. In Barbara's memory, the city of her birth is still the place where there was some salvation despite the Nazi era. When Barbara's father was killed in Russia in 1943, her heavily pregnant mother's lifelong dream was shattered shortly before the birth of her third child, Christof.

The happy days of childhood also end here for Bärbel, for whom her father was "the love of [her] life". A year after the painful loss, the family fled to Göttingen. But even here they are not protected from the destructive force of the war; bombs fall here too. And for Bärbel, the time is dominated by fear. While she experiences everyday life during the war, she continues to try to come to terms with the traumatic loss of her father. The family of four expands when she moves into a four-room apartment with her aunts and grandmothers. The women who survived the war and lost their husbands at the same time live here in a very small space. Bärbel draws strength and support from her time in the women's community. Here, for the first time, she discovers the (survival) strength of women through her own family: grandmothers, aunts, her own mother. Women were therefore an essential part of her childhood upbringing and, above all, a role model through their courage to survive.

At the age of seven, everything changed for Bärbel. Immediately after the end of the war, her mother resumed her medical studies. No care can be found for the children - even the aunts do not see it as their duty and want to make up for the years lost during the war. Bärbel's mother sees no other choice and places her three children in an orphanage in 1948. They spend almost four years of their lives in a home where Bärbel and her brothers experience brutality and violence among the children. At the same time, it was "absolutely the freest time" in their lives, says Barbara today. The children spend Christmas at home, with aunts and their mother occasionally coming to visit. Otherwise, they had to find their own way around and "survive". When they returned home in 1952, all three children were struggling with health problems. "We were unsettled, disturbed by something destructive in the depths," she recalls. She later wrote down her memories of her time in the orphanage in poetry form, about "forgotten children thrown away - beaten and raped" and at the same time "but you are alive - thank your guardian angel". A contradictory feeling, as contradictory as time itself.

Decades later, when she confronts her mother with the question of how she could have done this to her own children, she learns that her mother had seen the orphanage as a place of protection from the everyday hunger that would have threatened the children during her student days. In post-war Germany at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, with no assets and having to "get by somehow", there was no room for a life as a single, student mother of three children. Today, as then, Barbara blames National Socialism. For everything that happened to her in her childhood - the loss of her father, conflicts with her mother over her new partner and the traumatic time in the orphanage.

In 1952, the family moved to Cologne, which was still in ruins. Barbara's mother had been given a job there as an intern. Bärbel attends a grammar school, where she becomes aware of her talents for the first time. But no sooner had she put down roots than four years later her mother snatched her away from her surroundings and took all the children together to their new destination in Frankfurt. Her new partner lives there and she cannot and does not want to leave her children alone a second time. Barbara is now 15 years old and in the midst of puberty. She doesn't stay at her first school for long, the entry on her report card is clear: "Bärbel doesn't fit in with the school rules". However, she later completed her Abitur at the second grammar school. She associates Frankfurt with the time of her first rebellion, her first love, the beginning of her studies and, above all, a landmark turning point: the beginning of her political awareness.

During her puberty, she feels like she is "in a search loop". Her family does not nurture her, and her past, thoughts of her time in the orphanage and her unresolved family history, bring the question of identity ever more to the fore. The upheaval comes a year later. The documentary "Night and Fog" by Alain Resnais is shown at school, without any preparation or follow-up by the teachers. Barbara and her classmates are shocked to see footage of the extermination camps, especially the Auschwitz concentration camp and the victims of the National Socialists - scrawny, lifeless bodies with their eyes torn open. "We (...) had to look at all the piles of corpses," says Barbara.

Overwhelmed and disturbed by what she had seen, Barbara began to pester her mother at home with questions. After a long period of silence in the house on the subject, Barbara can no longer avoid shaking her mother and saying "you have to talk now!" Uncomfortable questions that her mother can't answer. No explanations about the cruelty of the concentration camps, no explanation of how the political events could have developed in such a way, how people could have caused and allowed the horror of the Holocaust; "And my mother remained stubbornly silent". The aunts don't want to talk either. This helplessness is the starting point for Barbara's research into the Nazi era, which continues to this day - as well as coming to terms with her own family history in the Third Reich.

The mentality of the "truffle pig" leads her to search the estate for letters that could provide her with answers to these questions every time a death occurs in the family, and she also visits every accessible concentration camp. In the course of her life, Barbara breaks through the wall of silence through her recurring urge to shed light on National Socialism in Germany. This urge has stayed with her to this day and has remained part of her identity. What's more, for Barbara it is not only important to stop the silence, but also to "always try to tell the truth clearly and unambiguously (...) as far as it is accessible to you". Among other things, she publishes works about the women who lived and survived in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. She also researched the von Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel during the Nazi era and made accusations of "euthanasia".

Nevertheless, her mother feels obliged to do something. As she is unable to provide any answers herself, she makes contact with Ulla Illing. Illing is known in Frankfurt at this time for her modern educational work and a new understanding of politics. At the Seminar for Politics, Illing focuses on the Nazi era, especially at the beginning of her work. Today, Barbara describes getting to know and participating in her seminars as her "political birth"; a "process of political awareness and classification" begins.

She began studying law in Frankfurt. The choice of subject was "pure chance", says Barbara. And although she was "always a totally unhappy lawyer", she was "a good one though" - her truffle-pig mentality proved its worth.

Her mother's liberal parenting style provided Barbara with the foundation for her rebellious, adolescent phase. However, when she becomes pregnant unplanned, her mother tries in vain to force the child's father to marry her. Finally, Barbara is taken to Franconia by her mother and gives birth to her first daughter in 1963 in a doctor's home "for fallen girls". The hours of childbirth are traumatic due to inadequate medical care - but both survive. Barbara's mother felt remorse and took her daughter and granddaughter in. She even takes care of the child, enabling Barbara to take her first law exam in Göttingen. But when she returns to Frankfurt, she has to face the task of being a single mother. She hopes for a freer life and plunges headlong into her first marriage, but it doesn't last too long.

Barbara is still searching for her identity, constantly revolving around the question "What is my role as a woman?" She wears big hats, smokes a pipe and knits at public events. In short: she stands out. In 1967, she joins the SPD and joins the Working Group of Social Democratic Women. The AsF starts with various campaigns such as sticking over sexist posters. The debate about Paragraph 218 leads to meetings of active women. The living room of a female activist becomes the central meeting place for the women's group. After a short time, the number of participants increases tenfold from four or five women.

The first demonstration for the abolition of the paragraph without replacement takes place in 1970 in the center of Frankfurt, where Barbara appears as one of three speakers. The discussion gave rise to a debate about the position of women in society in general, particularly with regard to family law. The period of political upheaval leads to demonstrations with different backgrounds. "We were always demonstrating," Barbara remembers.

But she doesn't think much of the violent riots - giving free rein to aggression or even throwing stones was never an option for her. A pacifist ideology developed at such "concrete, small points", which Barbara took with her from this time. The young people of the 1968 movement also observed with excitement how the generations above them reacted. Barbara makes fun of this and asks each instructor the following two questions when they meet: "What did you do during the Nazi era?" and "Who does the washing up in your house?" - Shamed silence was usually the reaction to the student's intimidating behavior.

Defending her basic position, even in the years to come, she divided those around her. A woman who also finds words of redemption for those women who are afraid to speak out in public. At the same time, she was a woman who triggered fear in men that their wives could stand up for their rights just as radically; "That was always the mood around me (...) that was my role, so to speak." Barbara's active time within this movement in Frankfurt remains the most intense and formative time of her life.

When she realized that her subject was an "instrument of capitalist domination", she lost the last remnants of interest in law despite doing well in her exams. During her legal clerkship, she turned her attention to educational work and, from 1971 onwards, ran a district adult education center near Frankfurt. Here, she focuses on target group work for women. At this time, her political views were growing in a similar direction, so that she left the SPD and joined the DKP. A few years later, she was banned from her profession. Despite her attempts to fight it (which went all the way to the Federal Labor Court), she had to admit defeat.

After a few months as a job seeker, she becomes an editor at the Luchterhand publishing house for labor and social law in Neuwied with the help of a friend. On the one hand, she was able to be creative and make suggestions, and on the other, Luchterhand-Verlag had always been a liberal publisher, so Barbara felt at home there.

However, her interest in the trade union issue led her to apply for a job at the union's own publishing house in Cologne. But when her employer found out during her probationary period that she was a member of the DKP, she was dismissed without notice and banned from her second job. At this time, Barbara is pregnant with her second daughter, who is born in 1976. She and her partner at the time move to the Westerwald with their baby daughter. This gave Barbara new freedom and she began to write.

Her writings include specialist commentaries, a book on employment law and a children's book. Writing remains part of her work to this day. In addition to her research works, she publishes poetry as well as the novel Katharina und die Stimmen, which was published in 2017. The book that has moved her most in her career as an author is her 2010 work Das Herz schlägt in Ravensbrück - die Gedenkkultur der Frauen. She directly senses the strength of women here and adopts some of this strength for herself. Above all, the balance "between this vulnerability of women and strength, I find that a very important element", she says, and her Ravensbrück book shows "the strength of women even in such an extreme situation as in the concentration camp".

Barbara moved to Bonn in 1978, where she worked for the tenants' association until 1985. After her time there, she began her dissertation on the principle of equal rights in employment law. At the same time, she founded a law firm on Münsterplatz in Bonn together with another lawyer. Here she worked as a lawyer specializing in employment law with a focus on works constitution law and sexual violence in the workplace. Barbara chose the Beuel district as her place of residence and has not left since. Despite the fact that she always considered Bonn to be "too well-behaved", many places have touched her here, such as the places where St. Adelheid can be found. The Rhine, with its sometimes silvery shimmering water, also inspired her to write her first poems in her mid-40s. Today, she particularly appreciates Beuel's intact city center with its cultural elements. Above all, places of remembrance, such as the memorial plaque of the synagogue that was destroyed in the pogrom night of 1938, make her feel her identity here.

Barbara and the history professor Annette Kuhn met in Bonn at the end of the 1980s. As a client, she was looking for legal advice in the lawyer's office, as she had recently been dismissed from the examination board at the University of Bonn. Annette puts her in touch with Lilo Pfeffer at the University of Bonn, who encourages her to offer seminars on topics such as equal pay and the advancement of women. This is where Annette and Barbara meet again and hold a seminar together on the normative power of women in history. And although she now spends even more time researching the field of women's history, she attaches great importance to independence and thus sets herself apart from Annette's work. When the House of Women's History was founded and opened many years later, she was at Annette's side as a friend and remained an important part of the house for a long time to come.

Barbara's work on women's studies can be seen, for example, in her 2008 traveling exhibition Füllhorn, Waage, Schwert - Justitia ist eine Frau in cooperation with the Ministry of Women's Affairs. Here, with the help of committed women, Barbara seeks answers to the question of why "the allegory of justice is depicted in the figure of a woman" (wording of the exhibition catalog). Her scholarly interest in the symbolism of Justitia was, however, already expressed through her creative side. Dramaturgically, she and three other women traced her biography in a humorous and ironic way in their cabaret "Justitia kotzt" in the early/mid-1990s, at the end of which the birthing hour of patriarchal law took place.

After leaving the DKP in 1987, her new political home became the feminist rights movement. In 1990, Barbara Degen founded the Feministische Rechtsinstitut e.V. in Bonn with like-minded people, which she ran for ten years.

And the following generations? Barbara takes a positive and joyful view of the current women's movement. She sees the young women, feminists and women's rights activists who are keeping the issue alive through debates such as #MeToo. For Barbara, it continues to be a sign of women's courage: "It simply strengthens me to see the power that women have". She has retained the optimism with which she was born to this day and "this basic feeling seems to have somehow prevailed despite all the blows of fate (...)". In her poem Die Gedankenkatze (The Thinking Cat), she describes how she sees all the twists and turns in her life as a constant return to life itself, which, walking on the rooftops of the world, does not allow itself to be distracted from the search for truth.

The golden-spotted mind cat
walks
on the roofs of the world

chases the bird of knowledge
up to the second branch
of the mulberry tree

is stubborn
and falls from the seventh
into the sweet black fruit
she licks the fairy tales from the silk fur

with relish
what she would give for the chameleon's tongue

frightens the good neighbor's dog
red-hot is her fiery hiss
until the house burns in the churchyard

at the meeting of the cats
shall she answer
for such unseemly behavior

she laughs and speaks
As always, she is unreasonable

I have seven lives

The rights to the above text are held by  Haus der FrauenGeschichte Bonn e.V. (opens in a new tab)

• Degen, Barbara: The heart beats in Ravensbrück. The women's culture of remembrance. Opladen & Farmington Hills 2010.
• Degen, Barbara: The stinging nettle future. Oldenburg 2003.
• Degen, Barbara: Justitia is a woman. The history and symbolism of justice. Opladen & Farmington Hills 2008.
• Degen, Barbara (2018). Personal interview conducted by Jennifer Trierscheidt. Bonn, November 21, 2018.
• Degen, Barbara (2019). Personal interview, conducted by Jennifer Trierscheidt and accompanied by Gera Kessler. Bonn, January 23, 2019.