[1] When a local mansion was due for demolition, von Mahlsdorf was allowed to live there, and its contents became the basis for her collection of everyday household items from the Gründerzeit period (c. 1870s).

Thanks to the committed involvement of the actress Annekathrin Bürger and the attorney Friedrich Karl Kaul [de]—and possibly also thanks to her enlistment as an inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (an unofficial collaborator) for Stasi, the secret East German police—the authorities' attempt was stopped in 1976 and she was able to keep the museum.

[citation needed] Her life could be described as that of an outsider who survived, no matter the ruling ideology, during the Nazi period, Communist-controlled East Germany, or, once the wall fell, modern Germany, as described in the article "The Sexual and Political Chameleon of Berlin: The Ambiguities of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's Life in I Am My Own Wife.”[3] Von Mahlsdorf died from heart failure during a visit to Berlin on 30 April 2002.

[citation needed] People still honour her memory, be it for her work as the founder of the Gründerzeit Museum, or for her public role as a transgender woman and her foregrounding of the persecution of homosexuals in both the Third Reich and East Germany.

[citation needed] The intention of the organizers was to erect a memorial with the inscription "Ich bin meine eigene Frau (I am my own woman) – Charlotte von Mahlsdorf – 18.

[citation needed] American playwright Doug Wright wrote the character play, I Am My Own Wife based on von Mahlsdorf's life from his own research of her biography.

German author Peter Süß [de], co-author and publisher of von Mahlsdorf's book, has made another play called Ich bin meine eigene Frau.