Gisela Bock, who was Professor of Modern Western European History at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute from 1997 to 2007, passed away on November 7, 2025. Born in 1942, Gisela Bock grew up in Oberkirch in the Black Forest. Her dissertation, which dealt with the Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella, his utopian thinking, and his involvement in the Calabrian revolt against Spanish rule in southern Italy, was supervised by Wilhelm Berges at the Free University. In 1971, she was hired there as an assistant by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and increasingly combined her academic work with involvement in Berlin's dynamic political scene. She was one of the founders of the “Autonomous Women's Center West Berlin.” In the same year, her German translation of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James' book The Power of Women and the Overthrow of Society was published, which became a bible for the autonomous women's movement. In 1976, she co-organized the first summer university for women at the FU. Her lecture, given there together with Barbara Duden and published a year later, Work of Love – Love as Work, analyzes female housework as an invisible and unpaid part of the capitalist economic system.

Gisela Bock's postdoctoral thesis Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (Forced Sterilization under National Socialism, 1986) remains a standard work of research to this day. The book examines the history of the approximately 400,000 sterilizations carried out by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945, which were forced upon “anti-social, inferior, and hopelessly hereditarily diseased” individuals (Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick). Sterilization, the counterpart to a pronatalist policy aimed at increasing the number of “genetically healthy” offspring, was intended to launch the social project of the “people's community.” At first glance, the Nazi sterilization policy appears to be gender-blind, as it affected women and men equally. However, since the operation was significantly more complex and dangerous for women and deprived them of the opportunity to give birth to children, they suffered more and differently than men. Among the estimated 5,000 fatalities resulting from sterilization, approximately 90% were women – most of whom died while attempting to resist forced infertility.

Gisela Bock's first professorship took her to the European University Institute in Florence, where she taught from 1984 to 1989. From there, she moved to Bielefeld University before receiving a call to Freie Universität in 1997. Her international network and commitment to comparative perspectives found a forum in the International Federation for Research in Women's History, which she co-founded.

Her book Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte (Women in European History, 2000), which has been translated into many languages, documents the insights gained from a cross-border gender history. Her study on women's suffrage around 1900 (1999) was also groundbreaking, deriving a new explanation for the different chronologies in the international development of suffrage from a broad-based international comparison. In view of this, it was only logical that Gisela Bocks was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit at Bellevue Palace in 2018, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Germany. 

Current developments and debates show that the political and scientific impulses emanating from Gisela Bock's oeuvre are highly topical. Recent initiatives for “care work” take up the critical impulse of the “wages for housework” campaign, and a new generation is once again reading and discussing Mariarosa della Costa. Current debates on prenatal diagnostics and genetic manipulation of emerging life require knowledge of past eugenic practices.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Janz
Prof. Dr. Daniel Schönpflug

The public funeral will take place on December 19 at 12 noon at the Heerstraße Cemetery, Trakehner Allee 1, 14053 Berlin.