Katharina Warda

In speaking about "the East", the federal states of the former GDR, important voices are missing. Instead of speaking about the East, there is a need for polyphonic new narratives from the East that reflect on the GDR, the Wende years, and the present East Germany from a critical, intersectional perspective. In my work, I speak both autobiographically as a Black East German and child of so-called Wendeverlierer:innen (Wende losers) about racism, classism, and devaluations towards East Germans and explore stories of other socially marginalized individuals. At the same time, I reflect on such experiences and observations analytically with a sociological lens.

Katharina Warda was born in Wernigerode (Saxony-Anhalt) in 1985 and also grew up there. In 2014, she completed a Magister degree in Sociology, German Literature and Intercultural Business Communication in Jena. In 2008/09, she studied African Studies in Falun (Sweden). Since 2015, she has been a Fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies and is doing her PhD in Berlin on the resistance of biographical narratives in diary blogs. In this context, she spent 2016/17 on a research exchange at Princeton University (USA).
In addition, she works as a freelance author focusing on East Germany, marginalized identities, racism, classism, and punk. Since 2021, she has been a member of the advisory board of "Kein Schlussstrich!", a nationwide theater project on the NSU complex. In her project "Dunkeldeutschland" she explores the post-reunification period from the social margins and illuminates blind spots in German historiography, based on her own experiences as a Black East German woman in the GDR and after 1989/90.