Barbara worked in the Palais Beauharnais at the German embassy under Nazi Germany's ambassador to France Otto Abetz in Paris.
[3][4] After the war, she worked in the secretariat of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
[6] After the death of her husband in 1966, she completed the catalog of the paintings in 1976 with the help of the Max Beckmann Society, which she co-founded in 1951.
[7][8][9] In her will, she bequeathed a collection of works by Max Beckmann to the Staatliche Museen Berlin, including the works Self-Portrait in a Bar (1942) and Portrait of Erhard Göpel (1944) as well as 46 drawings and 52 prints.
[10] In 2018, she donated a collection of Max Beckmann artworks to the Berlin State Museums,[11] which caused a controversy because of her husband Erhard Göpel's involvement in looting artwork from Holocaust victims.