[3][4] Christa Hecht was born into a working-class family at Krakow am See, a small market town in the flat countryside to the south of Rostock in northern central Germany.

[6] Her selection held out the possibility of the chance to travel abroad in the future – which in the context of the time and place meant the Soviet Union or the other fraternal socialist member states of the recently launched Warsaw Pact.

She was able to confirm that she had no close relatives beyond the increasingly impenetrable "inner frontier" in "the other Germany", and knew to keep her indignation to herself when asked almost casually how she felt about the church.

Inwardly she thought the matter was none of the business of her interviewers, but the reply she gave, as she would recall it many years later, was restricted to the observation that she enjoyed listening to organ concerts.

[6] Before agreeing to the move she had obtained her parents' advice on it,[6] and during her time at Halle she used to return home on the train to the north of the country regularly.

[8] Passing her Abitur (school final exams) as a student at the Workers' and Peasants' Faculty in 1956 opened the way to university level education, and she enrolled as a student at the College of Foreign Trade ("Hochschule für Außenhandel") in Berlin-Slaken, then moving on to the Berlin Economics College ("Hochschule für Ökonomie Berlin"/ HfÖ) at Berlin-Karlshorst where her teachers included Helmut Koziolek, and from where she emerged in 1960 with a degree in Economics.

Remaining at the HfÖ, in 1968 Luft received a full-time teaching contract in the newly developed academic discipline, "socialist foreign trade" ("Leitung des sozialistischen Außenhandels").

[4] She was also a regular visitor to "the Academy for Foreign Trade and Tourism "("Hochschule für Außenhandel und Touristik") at Maribor, a city in the northern part of what was at that time known as Yugoslavia.

[8] She was able to build on her contacts with comrade-academics from other socialist countries, representing The Institute at international gatherings and at conferences organised by the United Nations in Geneva and New York City.

As a representative of the largest Economics teaching and research institution in the German Democratic Republic, Luft participated during this time in a succession of international congresses at which she made presentations: venues included Athens, Madrid and New Delhi.

[11] More than twenty years later Christa Luft told an interviewer that by October 1988 it had been clear that there were "only a couple of blockheads, who did not want to see what was happening, and how unrest was increasing among the general population, not simply because of the shortages, but because people were spiritually at the end of their tethers.

On 28 October of that year Christa Luft was appointed rector of the institution which had by this time been the focus of her professional and academic life for three decades.

It was the first time since the foundation of the German Democratic Republic back in October 1949 that the SED) and its proxies had not commanded a comfortable majority in the chamber.

[16] During her time as a national politician Christa Luft retained her links with the HfÖ, in charge of the "East European Economics" ("Osteuropawirtschaft") teaching chair till 1 October 1991, which was when the Berlin senate, a couple of days ahead of reunification, closed down the entire institution.

The focus was to educate a generation Russian speaking economics experts from Russia and the surrounding post-Soviet successor states, especially from Bulgaria and also from China.

[20] During her time as a member of the East German parliament ("Volkskammer") at the end of 1989 Luft volunteered to undergo a check to see whether and how she might feature in the surviving Ministry for State Security (Stasi) files.

[21] Subsequently, after further delving in the Stasi archives revealed that back in 1963, when she was 25, she had signed an undertaking to provide unspecified items of information to the authorities, she stated that she had no recollection of the matter ("Daran erinnere ich mich nicht").

He provided a large amount of information to western intelligence after the collapse of East German's power structure/[21] He said that Luft had been handled by a Stasi officer known as Manfred Süß,[22] but this turned out to be incorrect.

It was established that between 1963 and 1971 Christa Luft had been registered under the cover name "IM Gisela" in connection with an operation undertaken by the Stasi's Main Directorate for Reconnaissance ("Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung" / HVA) section.

On 31 October 1963 she had signed a handwritten "declaration of obligation" statement, of the kind frequently used for informants (" inoffizieller Mitarbeiter") recruited by the Stasi.

[23] By 1995 the Stasi records had been archived and citizens had a statutory right to access them, whether for purposes of academic research or simply to understand what personal information the East German security services had held on their movements and contacts.

In June 1995 Christa Luft made a personal application to the Gauck Commission (as the relevant agency was then known) to try and find out what information the Stasis had held on her.