When the women's movement still had Courage
“Good Old” Berlin #2: The Women's Magazine “Courage”
Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1976, the pilot issue of the Berlin women’s magazine “Courage” was published. Its founders were the first to treat feminism as a cross-cutting issue—thereby paving the way for gender mainstreaming in the media.
“We had an editorial policy where we didn’t select articles based on what we liked to read, but rather decided: We’ll choose the articles that spark the most controversy among us. In that sense, I think people could sense that we put our heart and soul into producing this magazine.”
In 1975, Sibylle Plogstedt was one of more than 20 women who had decided to start their own feminist magazine. A year later, the time had come: First, the pilot issue was published in June, followed three months later by the first “real” issue of “Courage”. On page 1, was a “From the Editor” note stating that the magazine was not named after Berthold Brecht’s “Mother Courage”—who learns nothing from her mistakes—but after Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s “Courasche”—as a “symbol of the combative, independent woman.”
“Courage is, after all, a woman of the people. That’s what we liked about her. The fact that we aren’t doing this for ourselves—for other female students or female teachers—but rather—and this was the leftist approach from the start—always for female factory workers as well”, says Sabine Zurmühl. Like Sibylle Plogstedt, she was a co-founder of *Courage*. The two women were also a couple in their private lives. On the cover of the first issue, dated September 15, 1976, they appear together in a passport photo—in the middle of a photo collage of the founding women. In her picture, Annette Eckert cheekily stuck out her tongue. She had already worked for several newspapers in the left-wing scene, whose editorial staff included both men and women - and found that when she said something, nobody would listen. She therefore nudged a male friend who was sitting next to her and asked: “Please, say exactly what I just said, and let’s see what the reaction is.” And indeed, the people in the room responded to him. “I experienced the same thing in college”, Eckert recalls. “We women were basically invisible. Men would be discussing something, and women would be clapping. So I was very happy when I found out that the magazine Courage was being founded”.
“The fact that we published a free pilot issue was revolutionary in the newspaper market at the time,” recalls Sibylle Plogstedt. “We organized a party and had 3,000 copies printed at our own expense. About that many women showed up—women who were interested in celebrating the magazine’s launch and who donated to the cause. That’s how we were able to finance the pilot issue and commission Issue No. 1.”
At the Courage editorial office at Bleibtreustraße 48 in Charlottenburg, very few of the staff were female journalists. Most, however, were female academics or students, and quite a few were also unemployed. Things eventually fell into place, because it quickly became clear that if you want to do this magazine, it’s a full-time job. A core group formed that would arrive in the morning and leave again in the evening.
For the first few months until the end of 1976, Courage was published only in West Berlin; thereafter, it was also published in West Germany. The circulation quickly rose to 70,000 copies. Each issue was financed by the proceeds from the previous one. Revenue from commercial advertisements was minimal. The staff, who initially worked on a volunteer basis, received a modest fixed salary. Sibylle Plogstedt recalls:
“Over the course of these eight years that Courage has existed, we’ve had to break a vast number of taboos—not only in the outside world, but also within ourselves. Many of us couldn’t imagine that women were being beaten by men to the extent that it actually happened. Back then, we lived in a society where women, when they talked about their marriages, would always say how wonderful everything was”.
Courage was one of the first to report on child abuse, rapes during World War II, eating disorders and anorexia, and genital mutilation in Africa. Regarding the debate over pay for housework—a major issue in West Germany in the late 1970s—the magazine asked: “Why should only daycare providers get paid for caring for other people’s children, and not all mothers?” What about the psychological strain placed on women when their husbands come home exhausted from work? Psychoanalysts earn top salaries for this—women do this work for free their whole lives.”
Courage featured firsthand accounts from women who had experienced these issues alongside articles by female scholars. There were special issues on the cultural history of menstruation and on women in psychiatry. The editorial team also denounced misogynistic behavior within the leftist scene without hesitation. Sabine Zurmühl still has quite a few old issues of Courage at home. “Here, for example, we had an article about Peter-Paul Zahl”, she points out. “Back then, he was—well, you could say—a left-wing hero. We reported that he wasn’t keeping up with his child support payments and we got a huge—today people would call it a “shitstorm”—for daring to remind this poor, beleaguered left-wing man, who’s fighting so nobly for the revolution, that he wasn’t paying for his children”.
Starting in February 1977, Courage faced a powerful competitor. Alice Schwarzer launched the magazine EMMA in Cologne—with a circulation of 200,000 copies. Professionally designed, with color photos and snappy copy, EMMA appealed to a broader readership but was frowned upon within the autonomous women’s movement. “Courage” remained the smaller but more radical sister publication. In the debate over mandatory military service for women, for example, Alice Schwarzer argued that women should have the same right as men to bear arms. The Courage collective, on the other hand, rejected military service on principle.
“We didn’t place that much emphasis on professionalism”, admits Sibylle Plogstedt. “What mattered to us was staying connected to the grassroots of the women’s movement—even without the tools of social media”. Later on, people referred to this somewhat disparagingly as “affectedness journalism.” But at the time, it had a very radical, explosive impact, Plogstedt believes. “A woman who wrote down her own experiences found different ways to express them than a female journalist would if she were told the story”. The texts submitted by readers were therefore edited only to the extent necessary to ensure they remained authentic.
“That’s what a lot of women are doing on their blogs these days—describing how they feel. That’s how it was back then, says Barbara Rosenberg, who joined the Courage editorial team in 1980. As with all left-wing projects of that time, the discussions went on until everyone was exhausted. So that the women could see how each person reacted to a text, they read the articles aloud to each other in the group—the editorial meetings took an impressive amount of time. “However, we weren’t allowed to knit—which I would have loved to do—because it was very frowned upon”, Rosenberg scoffs. “I had quit smoking in France, but then I started again because we were sitting there for hours on end”.
Rosenberg also quickly realized that the much-touted lack of hierarchy wasn’t really a thing. She noticed a huge divide between the editorial staff, the layout team, and the office staff. Whenever this came up, it would spark heated arguments. “No, we’re a collective!” The accusations were directed primarily at Sibylle Plogstedt and Sabine Zurmühl, who were considered the unofficial bosses. Zurmühl admits in retrospect: “Within the editorial team, Sibylle Plogstedt and I were sort of the leading duo. You could certainly say that whenever a decision was about to be made that went against our convictions—it didn’t go through”.
Annette Eckert, who only visited the editorial office occasionally, wrote an autobiographical erotic essay for a special issue on sexuality—it was 17 pages long, including images. “There was a real conflict among the editorial group because it far exceeded the page limit I’d been given. The fact that it was published after all is thanks to those two, Sibylle and Sabine.” Her erotic essay, which had caused such a stir, continued to make waves in the years that followed beyond the pages of Courage. It was later translated into Finnish and into French. For ten years, it served as a training text at pro Familia. “Yes, you could certainly say that Courage helped set some trends”, says Cornelia Döhring who had moved from Cologne to Berlin specifically to do an internship at Courage.
The Courage editorial team also published several groundbreaking books. In 1979, they organized the “Women’s Movement Anti-Military and Anti-Nuclear Congress” in Cologne. But in the end, these external successes could no longer bridge the internal rifts. In late summer 1981, a major scandal erupted. Six women from the editorial, subscription, and layout departments left the magazine en masse. One of them was Cornelia Döhring. In their resignation letters, they also outlined their reasons. They spoke of a wage hierarchy instead of a collective pot, information monopolies, and a system of praise and punishment designed to keep employees in line. “We’re talking about psychological terror and control, dividing and isolating people, and stress-related illnesses, about resistance to suggestions for improvement, stagnation in content, and letters from disappointed readers”, summarizes Döhring.
Overnight, the Courage team lost a third of its staff. On top of that, the growing influence of the women’s movement—to which the magazine had contributed—was also changing the media landscape. Even the renowned mainstream magazines STERN and SPIEGEL were now covering issues relevant to women’s politics. Courage lost readers. By then, all publishers had their women’s book series, and the newspapers had their women’s page and radio stations their women’s program. “In that sense, it’s true that a publication like Courage has outlived its usefulness”, says Sibylle Plogstedt.
In November 1983, the Courage team achieved one last major success when it published the photo book “Brüste” (Breasts). For the book, women had posed with their breasts exposed and shared their personal relationships with their breasts. The response from female readers was overwhelming. Yet the magazine’s sales continued to decline. By the end of the year, Barbara Rosenberg also left the editorial team.
In an act of desperation, the remaining editorial staff decided to switch from a monthly to a weekly format in order to be more up-to-date. The price they paid was a cheaper layout, an even heavier workload, and chronic underfunding. Now they had to work for free again. Eventually, the remaining Courage team filed for bankruptcy. The last issue was published in May 1984. Sibylle Plogstedt remembers as if it was today:
“That was a very sad time. We had poured all our energy and time into this project for eight years. Now we could only watch it fail and figure out how to move on with our lives”.
Decades later, Courage—a recognized milestone in the women’s movement—has long been the subject of historical women’s studies. Its former creators realize that a women’s newspaper in that form could no longer exist today. Sabine Zurmühl: “What Courage was back then would be an internet platform today—a place where women try to summarize the important facts, ideas, blogs, related to women’s issues”.
Since 2016, the Association of Women Journalists has been awarding a Courage Prize for current reporting—a goal the magazine had failed to achieve. Nevertheless, the former Courage editors look back on those days without bitterness. According to Annette Eckert, the opposite is true:
“We certainly made a lot of mistakes, but we also made a big difference. Even today, men come up to me and say, they read our magazine back then; they say ‘It was really important because otherwise my girlfriend wouldn’t have talked to me’.”
Barbara Rosenberg and Sabine Zurmühl feel the same way:
“I heard a term the other day: “Pleasure work”. That describes my time at Courage perfectly. I just loved combining life and work.”
“All these women were incredibly close to one another, like sisters. The fact that we could come up with an idea and then actually make it happen—that was a great blessing. And we shared that together.”
This text is a translated and abridged transcript of my radio feature on the 40th anniversary of Courage and can be heard in its original form on my German website, along with a short report on the current 50th anniversary.
50 Years of Courage: On June 22, 2026, former Courage editors and contributors will celebrate this anniversary in Berlin with panel discussions featuring fellow activists and today’s feminist media creators, music for dancing, and a photo op with hats. The event is being organized by the Association for the Promotion of Women’s Politics in Lower Saxony, whose chairwoman, Sibylle Plogstedt, co-founded Courage. As early as 2023, former editorial team members Monika Arnholdt-Esche and Barbara Weber Yoffe designed and launched the website “Couragefrauenzeitung.de” on their own initiative and at their own expense, in consultation with the other Courage women. On this website, the women are bringing their story back to life—sharing where they came from and where they went after Courage. A short video brings them all together again in a medley. Sibylle Plogstedt sums it up this way: “Courage has shaped our entire lives. We’ve all remained feminists. That’s why we’re celebrating.”
All issues of “Courage” are archived online and available to read.
P.S.: I copied the headline for this article from the event celebrating Courage’s 30th anniversary because I think it’s I think it’s a brilliant turn of phrase.