Before that, however, from 1977 she was touring abroad, making regular guest appearances in West Germany, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and France.

Foreign travel was seen as a privilege conferred (or not) by state authorities in the countries ruled under Soviet direction at this time, and in 1980, following a change of policy by East Germany's ruling SED (party), Barbara Thalheim went public with criticism of a newly imposed travel ban on East German artists wishing to tour in western Europe.

[4] Eventually, however, she was permitted to renew her recording career with "Amiga", albeit with a different support band, and she was again able to take part in concerts and talk-shows in West Germany.

With a Berlin-based rerun of the Prague Spring now seeming less likely than many had previously thought, this opened the way for a series of events leading to the end of the one- party dictatorship and then, formally in October 1990, political reunification.

She then set up cultural management business organising, among other things, the summer festival "Schaustelle Berlin" for the city council.

[8] Early in 2012 Thalheim received a part share in a scholarship awarded at the Künstlerhof Schreyahn by the Lower-Saxony Ministry of Culture.

This resulted in more songs and more touring, including, in December 2012, a concert in Chile,[9] a country still periodically featured in German news reports as the retirement destination of East Germany's former "first lady", Margot Honecker and, more briefly, of her late husband.

[12] Collaboration ended abruptly after her exclusion from The Party 1980, by which time the ministry had already launched one of their infamous career destruction ("Operativer Vorgang") operations against her.

[12] In addition, in various subsequent interviews she insisted that back in 1993 she had already asked the journalist Karl-Heinz Baum of the Frankfurter Rundschau to investigate and report on her Stasi-related activities.