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Charlotte von Mahlsdorf
(1928 - April 30, 2002) Germany

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf

Furniture collector

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Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde in Mahlsdorf, was the son of a benevolent mother and a tyrannical father. At a very early age (seven or eight), he discovered that he liked to wear his mother's old clothes, jauntily noting that "I still have my mania for aprons."

Mahlsdorf recalls being transferred from public to private school after a teacher beat him for making a crack about Hitler Youth. He found a job working after school in an antique furniture store. But then a Jewish co-worker was taken away, and more and more often they began dealing in "Jewish bequests".

Mahlsdorf escaped the war and his father by going with his mother, sister and brother to East Prussia, and from there to stay on his aunt's farm, where he was encouraged and nurtured by his lesbian aunt, herself a cross-dresser. Near the end of the war, when he returned to his home village, still teenager, he repeatedly witnessed his drunken father bullying and terrifying the mother he idolised. Finally, unable to contain himself, he lost control and beat his father to death with a blunt instrument.

After an early release from a southern German youth prison, Charlotte would later describe returning to war-devastated Berlin in the spring of 1945. Nazi soldiers discovered his true identity and lined him up against a wall to be shot.

He'd been hiding in a shelter designated for "Women and Children only". As rifles were levelled at the teenager, an officer intervened. "Is this how far we've degenerated, to the point of killing kids," he yelled when calling off the execution.

Lothar named himself Charlotte (after his cross-dressing lesbian aunt's lover), living as a transvestite for the rest of his life. Most of Charlotte's adult life was spent under the repressive Communist regime in East Germany, where she turned her large house into a hidden museum of Germany's past, stuffed with furniture and a remarkable collection of gramophone records, her abiding passion.

Dressed in high-heeled sandals and a good suit, Charlotte has collected furnishings from the Grunderzeit for half a century: in the Third Reich, she "rescued" pieces from Jewish deportees; in the German Democratic Republic, she protected "bourgeois cultural assets" from the Stasi, , the much-feared secret police.

She was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Honor), the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1992 for founding East Berlin's Grunderzeit Museum which preserves furniture and household appliances from the period 1870-1900. She is the author of the 1995 autobiography I Am My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, Berlin's Most Distinguished Transvestite.

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