Wie alle, nur anders

A nineteen-year-old man moves to West Berlin in 1973 to escape the Bundeswehr. He immediately falls for the rough charm of the rundown half-city. Above all, the seemingly gay man realizes that he is transgender. With great ease, humor, and laconic wit, Nora Eckert narrates her gender transition: from the initial ordeal of buying clothes to self-treatment with hormones, culminating in the joy of living a "third option."

West Berlin in the seventies. A young man, newly arrived in the city, realizes that he is not gay but transgender. To become who she is, she takes a job at Chez Romy Haag, the then most famous drag club in Europe. Not only David Bowie frequents this place. And everyone who enters this club must now pass by Nora Eckert, the cloakroom attendant at the small establishment in Berlin-Schöneberg. With humor and laconic wit, Nora Eckert recounts her gender transition, sharing the painful and joyous experiences that came with it. She talks about the humiliating assessment process she had to undergo to be recognized as a woman "officially." Retrained from the Berlin employment office to become a stenographer, Nora Eckert returns to the bourgeois world in 1982. She then dives into the "high-culture" nightlife of the city: theater, opera, concerts. The "writing lady" without a high school diploma begins to write herself in the mid-eighties and becomes a busy opera critic on the side. The stage on which all this unfolds is the second heroine of this book, which is, not least, a grand love letter to the wild, hedonistic West Berlin.