Angelique Nagel’s book Who Is Ever Born a Woman Anyway, Man Is First Made into a Woman is not only a memoir but a quiet act of defiance against forgetting. It tells the story of a life lived against the grain of postwar Germany, at a time when transsexuality was unspeakable, unnamed, and largely unimaginable. Long before public debates, legal frameworks, or cautious acceptance, Angelique Nagel existed, observed herself, and chose to live, fully aware that doing so would cost her safety, certainty, and ease.
Born on June 11, 1950, as Willibald Aschenbrenner, she grew up in Moosburg within the well known Aschenbrenner hairdressing dynasty. The world she entered was rigidly structured, socially conservative, and merciless toward anyone who deviated from prescribed norms. From early childhood, Angelique sensed that the body she inhabited was not her own. She recalls knowing, at the age of three or four, that something fundamental was wrong, not in her feelings, but in the expectations imposed on her. Carnival costumes became early battlegrounds, where she longed to be a princess rather than the comic male characters assigned to her. In today’s language, this might sound familiar. In the Germany of the 1950s, it was unspeakable.
The book traces this early dissonance with remarkable restraint. Nagel does not dramatize her childhood for effect. Instead, she allows the quiet cruelty of social norms to speak for itself. Being born out of wedlock already marked her as an outsider. Educational opportunities were limited, and despite her talent for languages and writing, university or journalism were unattainable dreams. Hairdressing was not a calling chosen freely, but a path dictated by family tradition and social limitation. Yet it would become both her refuge and her stage.
