Herta Leistner

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. 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. 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").