Herta Leistner is a German is a practitioner of social pedagogy, a teacher and an author. She is a Deaconess of the Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) Church who has come to wider prominence as a pioneer of the lesbian liberation movement inside the church.
In 1996 Leistner was awarded the German Order of Merit ("Verdienstkreuz am Bande"). Her award hit the headlines and the high-profile theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, an uncompromising critic of homosexual practice, returned his own Order of Merit in protest.
Life
Provenance and early years
Herta Leistner was born at the height of the Second World War in Altensteig, a small town in the Black Forest south of Karlsruhe and Stuttgart. Her father was close to retirement and probably too old to have been conscripted into the army. He worked as a vet. From him she inherited a love for animals which she has sustained ever since. The more decisive influence came from her mother and maternal grandmother who shared the house, making the family home one in which three generations of women lived together. The family's Protestant faith was an important aspect of family life, but it was practiced without dogmatism. As a teenager she attended a girls' "evangelical circle", while quietly nurturing an ambition to become a sports teacher when she grew up.
Childhood bereavement
Everything changed when her mother committed suicide. She was now sixteen and there was no longer any question of completing her school career to the point at which she would pass the Abitur exam which would have been necessary to progress to any sort of teacher training college or other university level educational institution. The suicide had come shortly after the death of her grandmother, and now it was down to Herta to look after her bereaved father and brother while at the same time running the house. However, approximately a year later her aunt moved in and took over the household duties. Herta Leistner was now able to move away to Stuttgart where she spent an unpaid "diaconal year" at the "Evangelische Diakonissenanstalt" (loosely, "Evangelical Deaconess Institution") where she undertook a training as a "Gemeindehelferin" (loosely, "parish assistant"). During her Stuttgart year she developed a deep attachment for a deaconess. The sisters made their disapproval clear "although there was absolutely nothing going on". Leistner was unsettled by these reactions. She sensed that she was "different", recalling that even at school she had developed a crush on a (female) teacher; while all her contemporaries were chattering excitedly about the boys. She found no words to describe her feelings, but she knew that they must be sinful.
Youth worker
After that she undertook an apprenticeship in youth work at Denkendorf, before becoming became district organiser for the Ulm region for girls' youth work with the Protestant churches in the area. Protestants were still outnumbered by Roman Catholics in the region, but ethnic cleansing from Silesia and other parts of central Europe during 1944/45 had reduced the extent of the Roman Catholic preponderance. Protestant youth work remained the principal focus of Leistner's life through the 1960s. Looking back she would later recall that youth work was still strongly divided between boys and girls to an extent that a later generation might find hard to appreciate. Towards the end of the decade, encouraged by a teacher, she resumed her studies for the Abitur, on which she had missed out when her mother's suicide had forced her to leave her schooling incomplete. She undertook the necessary work at evening classes in order to avoid disruption of her daytime responsibilities, passing the exam in 1968/69.
Mature student
The way was now open for a belated return to university level education. Herta Leistner, by now aged 37, moved to Tübingen. A conventional choice would have been to study for a degree in Theology. Leistner chose social pedagogy instead. "Learning Latin and Greek was not really my thing. I thought my value was more as a practitioner than as a theoretician". That would make her a good fit for the Bad Boll Evangelical College where she took a managerial post as director of studies in 1974. Her five years as a student at Tübingen came in the wake of the "events" of May 1968 and coincided with a number of rapid societal changes, often with students taking the lead. The period also marked a new awakening for the women's movement to which, as she later told an interviewer, Leistner owed a great deal. It was also at Tübingen that Leistner had her first love affair with another woman. Even after the romance ended and her lover married someone else, the two women would remain on friendly terms.