On the death of Rita Süssmuth: We bid farewell to our museum's patron

We mourn the loss of our museum's patron: Rita Süßmuth has passed away. ‘A brave fighter,’ ‘the lover of her neighbour,’ ‘the steadfast one’ – the headlines of the obituaries that appeared in the hours after her death speak for themselves.

The professor, former President of the Bundestag and CDU Federal Minister paved the way for social change in many ways, often against resistance from her own party.

As the first Minister for Women, she consistently championed gender equality, including in parliament. She fought for physical self-determination, for the reform of Section 218 of the German Criminal Code on abortion, and for the criminalisation of rape within marriage. She was also committed to sexual self-determination, the rights of queer people, and against the exclusion and stigmatisation of homosexual men during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Early on, she also advocated for a new understanding of Germany: as the first prominent CDU politician, Rita Süßmuth openly acknowledged Germany as a country of immigration as early as the late 1990s and advocated for a policy that views migration not as a threat but as an enrichment.

‘What better place for this than a living museum?’

In 2000, she headed a commission of experts appointed by the federal government to examine the framework conditions for migration to Germany. The group, later known as the ‘Süßmuth Commission,’ came to a clear conclusion: Germany is dependent on immigration – a self-image that many conservative politicians in particular did not share at the time, but Rita Süßmuth did.

Against this backdrop, she became patron of our museum in 2015. ‘It is a place where Germany can discover and learn to understand itself as a country of immigration,’ she said. ‘What better place for this than a living museum?’ We will always be grateful to her for her many years of support for our project to establish a nationwide migration museum.