Her parents had moved there with her uncle Otto and his family in 1937 in order, as her father put it, to "overwinter National Socialism".

[4] Ewald Erb (1903–1978), her father, worked at the local tax office, having lost his academic post as a Marxist literary historian[2] at the University of Bonn in 1933 on account of "Communist activities".

[4] As a member of the wartime German army Ewald Erb was at one stage charged with a form of sedition ("Wehrkraftzersetzung"), subsequently ending up as a prisoner of war.

In 1949 the family were reunited when Ewald Erb arranged for his wife and daughters to rejoin him at Halle in the Soviet occupation zone.

[5] For Elke Erb, approaching her teenage years, the result of the disruption and uncertainty was a lasting alienation from her parents.

[1] This form of required "gap year" before embarking on higher education was not unusual in the German Democratic Republic at this time.

[8] Soon she moved into a shared apartment with the author-poet Adolf Endler in the centre of Berlin "five floors up, with an outdoor toilet".

[1][10] She produced poetry and prose works and further translations, notably of novels by Oleg Alexandrovitch Yuryev and poems by Olga Martynova.

[1] Her closeness to the evolving independent peace movement, her involvement in 1981 with an "unofficial" anthology of lyric poetry and her protests (with others) in 1983 against the deprivation of citizenship of the young civil rights activist Roland Jahn all combined to make her a focus for Stasi surveillance.