[1][2][3] Her career was adversely affected in 1999 when it was disclosed that twenty years earlier, while at university, she actively operated as a paid informer for the Ministry for State Security under the one- party German dictatorship of that time.

[4][5] Gisela Ekardt was born, the youngest of her parents' four daughters, in Schmauch, a little village in the marshy flatlands south of what was at that time known as Königsberg in East Prussia.

She never knew her "Nazi father", as she described him in 1962 to a young journalist from - unusually - the west, during an encounter in connection with a rare "Gesamtdeutschland" festival in the main square at Weimar.

The girls' mother worked in a pastoral capacity for Moritz Mitzenheim, the local bishop who had extensive administrative responsibilities for the Lutheran church in the region.

Mention of her "Nazi father" was also repeated along with a term much favoured by the East German authorities at that time, "Klassenfeind" ("Class enemy").

Relating this to an interviewer many years later Oechelhaeuser insisted that Adorno's "Soviet research" did not and never had existed, but she took the admonition as indicating that her failure to obtain a "cum laude" commendation for her doctoral work was the result of politically-driven intervention by party officials.

[11] On the basis of her success in the world of cabaret in Saxony she was able to add teaching to her activities, employed between 1985 and 1990 as a stagecraft teacher at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin.

[1][6] Despite her evident ambition, and despite repeated signs that her political profile was likely to be holding her back, she later told an interviewer that it was only in the 1970s that she joined the party.

In September 1984 she became vice-president of the national Committee for entertainment art, a post she held till 1989[13] The Distel Cabaret Theatre in East Berlin and its "Intendantin" negotiated the reunification transition much more successfully than many East German institutions: Oechelhaeuser remained in charge till 1999, promoting a positive left-wing brand of political cabaret that resonated with Berlin audience members, especially those from the former east, during a decade when some were surprised to discover that western freedoms involved forfeiting many of the eastern certainties - not all of them disagreeable - that comrades had grown up taking for granted.

[1] The files showed she had provided her handlers with character sketches of subordinates at the cabaret, including rumours or suspicions of Nazi personal histories.

[5] Her stage career was far from over, however: she has continued to perform as a free-lance cabaret artiste, chiefly in venues in the "New federal states" (former East Germany).

[1][16] Gisela Oechelhaeuser has told interviewers that long before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the siblings with whom she had grown up had made their way to and settled in West Germany.

Sources are silent about her first marriage, but she has spoken with pride about her son, Sebastian Oechelhaeuser, who in 1993, aged 22, was about to embark on a course of study in London.

[17] According to one source it was, indeed, the early stages of Oechelhaeuser's relationship with Dietmar Keller that put an end to her three-year stint as a Stasi informer.

They concerned post graduate students ("intellectuals") and sometimes political cabaret performers all of whom were, by definition, of interest to the inherently paranoid security services; but these were not "high-profile" targets.