German sociologist had to hide her address for fear of LGBT violence
A week into my trip to the Netherlands, I received an email from the German sociologist Gabriele Kuby, the author of the magnificent book The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom.
Gabriele Kuby keeps her exact address a secret, although it is well-known that she lives in Bavaria, surrounded by the magnificent mountains she loves so much — these soaring peaks, she says, are "home" to her. She is one of the most blacklisted academics in Germany, if not Europe, and she says that the shutout has been extremely effective: She never gets asked to speak in Germany anymore, although she is in high demand elsewhere as a leading expert on the Sexual Revolution. Her book, after all, has already been translated into fifteen languages.
Sometimes, the culture wars can get dangerous. In 2015, director Falk Richter, a renowned German playwright, premiered a play titled FEAR in Berlin, featuring five pro-family women who rejected gender ideology. The women were presented as Nazi zombies, and were attacked by actors who poked out their eyes — at one point, one of them suggests that the zombies get shot "in the brain, as only then will they be really dead." Richter's play became prophetic, and his demonization effective: Two of the women were targeted by arson attacks. One of them, Hedwig von Beverfoerde, had her van firebombed. The flames spread from the burning van to her family business, leveling it. Thus, Kuby feels it is safer if few people know precisely where she lives.
Perhaps Kuby is particularly hated in Germany because she is a member of an extremely prominent family. Her father, Erich Kuby, was a famous left-wing journalist — an anti-Nazi, she told me as we talked. Erich was actually brought before a military court while serving in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, accused of breaking sentinel duty regulations, demoted, and sentenced to nine months in prison. He kept a diary during his time as a soldier (and, briefly, an American prisoner of war) and in 1975 published My War: Notes from 2,129 Days. It was a brutally honest account, and thus not well-received in Germany. People did not care for Erich's careful documentation of collective German responsibility for the excesses of World War II.
Erich Kuby — he died in 2005 — was considered one of the most important chroniclers of the German Federal Republic, and the rest of the family was prestigious, as well. In 1938 he married his first wife, Gabriele's mother Edith Schumacher. Edith was the daughter of the famous economist Hermann Schumacher, and her sister married the atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics. Although she saw him at family get-togethers, Kuby told me, Heisenberg was "so up there — and of course, I was just a teenage girl at the time." She was quite close to her mother's family, the Schumachers, and it is clear from how she talks about him that she adored her father.
Erich Kuby was involved in the student protests that exploded in Berlin in the 1960s, and Gabriele was there, too. "I wasn't rebelling against authority like so many of the others," she told me. "After all, my father was in it, and so that was how I came to it. We liked Mao back then. He wasn't a stern East German bureaucrat. He was much more exotic." The riots were triggered after a German student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot at a protest against the visiting Shah of Iran on June 2, 1967.
Ohnesorg was married and his wife was expecting a child, but the policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was acquitted of the killing that same year. The event was a catalyst for the explosion of the left-wing German student movement — but it was only a decade ago that the truth came out. "The policeman turned out to have been a collaborator of the Stasi, the East German secret police," Gabriele noted, shaking her head. "But he died peacefully five years ago, and was never brought to trial for what he did." A recent German investigation concluded that too many of the witnesses had died to know what had really happened, and whether the killing had been ordered by the East Germans.
Now, of course, Gabriele Kuby is one of the best-known Catholic writers in the country, and the Left hates her with a fury they reserve for those they consider traitors. Her books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and her blunt and well-researched work exposing the agenda of the sexual revolutionaries and the use of children as guinea pigs in the unfolding horror of gender ideology's ongoing experiments have reduced them to blind rage. And yet, Kuby calmly goes on. She is not afraid, and that is obvious when you sit and talk with her. The truth, she says, is far more important. And the children. It is always the children that get so dreadfully hurt.
After dinner, we sat and talked for hours. This is one of the few joys of the culture wars, she said: Meeting others in the same fight, encouraging one another, and having the sorts of conversations you can't have with just anyone. We talked about the beauty of European culture, and I told her about how the Old World pulls at me when I visit. It is true, she said. The first thing she noticed about houses in North America is that most of them do not have cellars like houses in Europe. Houses here, she said, have roots. As she travels Europe, she too has begun to appreciate it all the more. I asked her why, with such a magnificent heritage and so many exquisite cultures, Europe would throw it all away. I don't know, she replied. So much richness. So much beauty. What a waste.
Before dinner, Kuby wanted to show us the place where she walks to pray each day, and drove us up into the green Bavarian hills, where there is a magnificent view of the mountain ranges and the little villages and the church spires. The wind here is special, she told us. It is called a föhn, a strong, warm south wind that gives a crystal clear view across the sheep-dotted valleys as far as the eye can see. It is so beautiful that it must be experienced, she said. Such beauty always reminds people that God stands above it all, that He has His purposes, and that there is much worth fighting for in this world gone mad.
And, as usual, Gabriele Kuby is right.
Published with permission from The Bridgehead.
Gabriele Kuby keeps her exact address a secret, although it is well-known that she lives in Bavaria, surrounded by the magnificent mountains she loves so much — these soaring peaks, she says, are "home" to her. She is one of the most blacklisted academics in Germany, if not Europe, and she says that the shutout has been extremely effective: She never gets asked to speak in Germany anymore, although she is in high demand elsewhere as a leading expert on the Sexual Revolution. Her book, after all, has already been translated into fifteen languages.
Sometimes, the culture wars can get dangerous. In 2015, director Falk Richter, a renowned German playwright, premiered a play titled FEAR in Berlin, featuring five pro-family women who rejected gender ideology. The women were presented as Nazi zombies, and were attacked by actors who poked out their eyes — at one point, one of them suggests that the zombies get shot "in the brain, as only then will they be really dead." Richter's play became prophetic, and his demonization effective: Two of the women were targeted by arson attacks. One of them, Hedwig von Beverfoerde, had her van firebombed. The flames spread from the burning van to her family business, leveling it. Thus, Kuby feels it is safer if few people know precisely where she lives.
Perhaps Kuby is particularly hated in Germany because she is a member of an extremely prominent family. Her father, Erich Kuby, was a famous left-wing journalist — an anti-Nazi, she told me as we talked. Erich was actually brought before a military court while serving in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, accused of breaking sentinel duty regulations, demoted, and sentenced to nine months in prison. He kept a diary during his time as a soldier (and, briefly, an American prisoner of war) and in 1975 published My War: Notes from 2,129 Days. It was a brutally honest account, and thus not well-received in Germany. People did not care for Erich's careful documentation of collective German responsibility for the excesses of World War II.
Erich Kuby — he died in 2005 — was considered one of the most important chroniclers of the German Federal Republic, and the rest of the family was prestigious, as well. In 1938 he married his first wife, Gabriele's mother Edith Schumacher. Edith was the daughter of the famous economist Hermann Schumacher, and her sister married the atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics. Although she saw him at family get-togethers, Kuby told me, Heisenberg was "so up there — and of course, I was just a teenage girl at the time." She was quite close to her mother's family, the Schumachers, and it is clear from how she talks about him that she adored her father.
Erich Kuby was involved in the student protests that exploded in Berlin in the 1960s, and Gabriele was there, too. "I wasn't rebelling against authority like so many of the others," she told me. "After all, my father was in it, and so that was how I came to it. We liked Mao back then. He wasn't a stern East German bureaucrat. He was much more exotic." The riots were triggered after a German student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot at a protest against the visiting Shah of Iran on June 2, 1967.
Ohnesorg was married and his wife was expecting a child, but the policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was acquitted of the killing that same year. The event was a catalyst for the explosion of the left-wing German student movement — but it was only a decade ago that the truth came out. "The policeman turned out to have been a collaborator of the Stasi, the East German secret police," Gabriele noted, shaking her head. "But he died peacefully five years ago, and was never brought to trial for what he did." A recent German investigation concluded that too many of the witnesses had died to know what had really happened, and whether the killing had been ordered by the East Germans.
Now, of course, Gabriele Kuby is one of the best-known Catholic writers in the country, and the Left hates her with a fury they reserve for those they consider traitors. Her books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and her blunt and well-researched work exposing the agenda of the sexual revolutionaries and the use of children as guinea pigs in the unfolding horror of gender ideology's ongoing experiments have reduced them to blind rage. And yet, Kuby calmly goes on. She is not afraid, and that is obvious when you sit and talk with her. The truth, she says, is far more important. And the children. It is always the children that get so dreadfully hurt.
After dinner, we sat and talked for hours. This is one of the few joys of the culture wars, she said: Meeting others in the same fight, encouraging one another, and having the sorts of conversations you can't have with just anyone. We talked about the beauty of European culture, and I told her about how the Old World pulls at me when I visit. It is true, she said. The first thing she noticed about houses in North America is that most of them do not have cellars like houses in Europe. Houses here, she said, have roots. As she travels Europe, she too has begun to appreciate it all the more. I asked her why, with such a magnificent heritage and so many exquisite cultures, Europe would throw it all away. I don't know, she replied. So much richness. So much beauty. What a waste.
Before dinner, Kuby wanted to show us the place where she walks to pray each day, and drove us up into the green Bavarian hills, where there is a magnificent view of the mountain ranges and the little villages and the church spires. The wind here is special, she told us. It is called a föhn, a strong, warm south wind that gives a crystal clear view across the sheep-dotted valleys as far as the eye can see. It is so beautiful that it must be experienced, she said. Such beauty always reminds people that God stands above it all, that He has His purposes, and that there is much worth fighting for in this world gone mad.
And, as usual, Gabriele Kuby is right.
Published with permission from The Bridgehead.
