Anne Klein (2 March 1950 – 23 April 2011) was a German lawyer and, at the time of German reunification, a Berlin Senator. Her politics were green. Her focus as a senator was on women's rights. She was also the first Berlin senator to "go public" about being a lesbian. Life Anne Klein was born in Bilsdorf, a small village in the hills above Saarlouis, in what at that time was still part of the Saar Protectorate, controlled under conditions of growing ambiguity by the French government. There have been suggestions that her subsequent approach to gender politics may have been influenced by the 1947 Saarland Constitution, a document based on French law which incorporated elements of gender equality before the law and the concept of equal pay for equal work. To the north and east of the region lay West Germany, which under Chancellor Adenauer would have been seen as a relatively conservative society in respect of such matters. After 1955 the Saarland was integrated into the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Klein passed her Abitur (school final exams) at the Realgymnasium (secondary school) in nearby Dillingen. She studied Jurisprudence and Psychology at Saarbrücken and, from 1972, as a referendary in Berlin. She became involved in West Berlin's rapidly evolving feminist movement and with fellow activists set up the city's first women's shelter and its first feminist legal advice centre in Berlin's Kreuzberg quarter. In 1978 she passed her state law exams and, in the teeth of opposition from the German Law Society ("Rechtsanwaltskammer") set up in Berlin the first law practice in the country specialising in women's law. Until shortly before she died she continued to work in Berlin as a lawyer and notary specialising in family law. Politics and professional life Between 1983 and 1984 Anne Klein worked as a research assistant for the Green Party group in the Bundestag (West German parliament). It was the first time the party's candidates had been elected to the assembly. She worked particularly closely with Waltraud Schoppe und Petra Kelly. The policy area on which she focused covered "women, antidiscrimintation and social affairs". With other women she worked on the party's first draft for an "anti-discrimination law", which some years later - albeit with further changes - was introduced in the Bundestag. Anne Klein's principal objectives with this work were to anchor feminist policies within the Green Party's strategy and