Freya Klier

As a result of the slaughter of war in the 1940s and massive emigration in the 1950s East Germany was desperately short of working-age population.

Freya Klier (born 4 February 1950) is a German author and film director.

In 1966 her brother, at the time barely seventeen years old, was accused of "slandering the state" and sentenced to a four-year jail term, following which she resolved to emigrate.

By 1966 leaving the country – even temporarily – was for most people "against the rules" and impossible.

Freya Klier nevertheless devised a plan to escape with an acquaintance from a Swedish theatre group, armed with a false passport and travelling aboard a Swedish merchant ship.

Shortly before the ship was due to sail, in July 1966, she was betrayed and arrested.

She was sentenced "for attempting to flee the Republic" (wegen "versuchter Republikflucht") to a sixteen-month jail term but served only twelve months, after which the four month balance was "suspended" for two years.

In 1968 she passed her school final exams ("Abitur") which under other circumstances would have opened the way to a university-level education, at the same time, due to the subjects studied, earning a diploma in mechanical draftsmanship.

Her school years had involved a "twin-track" path, which for her generation was not unusual.

Although she was a member of the party-backed Young Pioneers, outside school she was also participating in religious studies.

Later, despite her membership of the party's youth wing (FDJ), she was also involved with the church-sponsored "Young Community".

Once she had finished with school and prison she undertook various low status jobs including waitressing and post office work.

She also took "behind the scenes" work with the Dresden Puppet Theatre.

In 1970, thanks to the intervention of a Party Secretary, Klier was able to embark on a study course at the Theatre Academy in Leipzig, emerging with a degree in 1975.

Next she received a contract at the Neue Bühne (theatre) in Senftenberg, a small town in the flat countryside north of Dresden, where she worked as an actress.

Alongside the acting she also became increasingly interested in directing.

In the 1970s Klier developed a growing interest in the cultural scene in Poland.

That led her, almost unavoidably, to become increasingly critical of the reality of the communist states in central Europe.

She tried to present her criticisms both politically and through her artistic work.

The East German authorities were never receptive to criticism, however finely it might or might not be nuanced.

Accordingly, at this time most of Klier's theatrical productions in East Germany were met with official suspicion or open criticism from the many channels employed by the party.

Most of her productions found themselves rapidly cancelled or reconfigured ("uminszeniert"), so that relatively little survives of her own work.

She was, necessarily, a member of the official "East German Theatrical Union" ("Theaterverband der DDR"), but found herself prevented from accepting invitations to work in theatres abroad – for instance in Hungary, the Netherlands and West Germany.

During the early 1980s she worked on productions of works by Fernando Arrabal (at Halle), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (at Bautzen), Carl Sternberg and John Millington Synge (both at Berlin).

Klier became increasingly involved with the Pankow Peace Circle in East Berlin during the early 1980s.

The Pankow circle was, for many years, one of the more active and high-profile (but still localised) opposition groups cautiously emerging at the time.

She was nevertheless internally conflicted because of her professional goals, and tried to integrate her artistic ambitions and her political goals.

That was not always easy.

Sources attribute this to the critical stance detected in much of her theatre work and to her involvement, from 1981, in the church-backed peace movement.

In July 1981 she staged a small production for a church peace festival despite the threat of exclusion from the Institute for Theater direction (at which she was studying).

That led to a four-year period of study at the Berlin Institute for Theater direction, for which she received her diploma in 1982.

Nevertheless, in 1984 she received a director's prize for the premier of "Legende vom Glück ohne Ende" ("Legends of Endless Joy") by Ulrich Plenzdorf at the Schwedt Theatre where she was working between 1982 and 1984.

Despite, or possibly because of this accolade, she left the theatre that year, and in 1985, after resigning her party membership in April, she was served with a ban on further professional work.

Before 1989/90, she was an East German civil rights activist.

Freya Klier was born in Dresden, the child of working-class parents.

Her father, who worked as a painter and decorator, became involved in a fight when she was three, defending his wife.

The man whom he hit was an off-duty policeman.

Klier's father spent the next twelve months in prison while her mother was switched to night shift work.

Freya and her four-year-old brother were sent to a state orphanage.

The family were reunited a year later, but the children were from this point marked out as the children of political prisoners, a stigma that affected them adversely until the East German dictatorship finally crumbled into history in 1990.