Nearly 90 participants joined Professor Benno Gammerl as he opened the academic year of the Robert Schuman Centre (RSC) with the 2026 Yves Mény Annual Lecture on 24 September, arguing on the importance of intersectionality for understanding contemporary history.
Gammerl began with Germany’s history since 1945 and the various success stories through which it is often told: the economic miracle and social market economy, welfare states promoting equality, liberalisation, democratisation, gender equality, the growing acceptance of sexual diversity, and the peaceful revolution of 1989. But what happens to this picture, Gammerl asked, when we look more closely at the people who experienced these changes?
“The same development can have very different effects on different groups of people,” Gammerl explained. Historical accounts based on large structures and averages, he argued, can miss experiences that do not fit the broader narrative.
One such story is that of ‘Frau Schmidt’, born in 1943 and interviewed by Gammerl in 2009. Her biography spans financial dependence and violence within marriage, a return to education, periods of unemployment, a fractured professional trajectory, feminist activism, economic precarity, and illness.
These experiences, Gammerl pointed out, were closely connected to the political and economic changes taking place around her: heterosexist structures affected Schmidt’s education and professional life, as well as her position during divorce and a custody dispute. While she completed her studies at the age of 40, high unemployment in West Germany made entering the labour market particularly difficult. Set against Germany's success stories, her life reads almost as their negative: violence within marriage in the decades that brought gender equality, unemployment at 40 in the economy of the miracle, heterosexist structures in the years when sexual diversity was gaining acceptance. Different forms of discrimination, Gammerl showed, accumulate and intensify one another
Yet, when describing her life to Gammerl, Frau Schmidt did not recount it simply in terms of hardship or failure. She described how she became active in the women’s movement, worked on issues related to violence against women, and gained personal freedom and self-confidence over the years. Her biography contains, in Gammerl’s words, tensions between “successes and failures, inclusions and marginalisations”.
The very same tension runs through the collective histories Gammerl turned to next: Black and queer feminism, Afro-German queer feminism, and migrant-feminist activism in Germany, where people from different backgrounds brought anti-racist, feminist, and queer struggles together. Personal relationships and exchanges across borders built these networks and supported the cooperation across them.
These same networks also held disagreements and conflicts between people, groups, and agendas. For Gammerl, this is not a flaw in the story, but part of it: solidarity here did not depend on shared identity or agreement, and it is that kind of cooperation across difference that intersectional histories can make visible.
For Gammerl, these individual and collective histories complicate a picture built primarily around overall social progress.
“Success stories and concerted histories of averages need to be complemented with and complicated by unruly and uncommon stories,” he highlighted.
Such is the importance of intersectional perspectives, Gammerl concluded: they can help trace “diverse and contentious histories” that allow us to better understand the present. These histories show that solidarity does not necessarily depend on shared identities or the absence of disagreement. By looking at how people have cooperated across differences in the past, they can also help us think about how such cooperation might be possible today.
Watch the full recording of the 2026 Yves Mény Annual Lecture.
A video interview with Benno Gammerl will also be published soon.
Since 2014, the Yves Mény Annual Lecture has honoured the RSC’s first director, Yves Mény, while marking the beginning of the academic year and the launch of the Schuman Centre Seminar Series.