[2] A member of the East German arts establishment, she served as national "President of the Entertainment Committee" following the retirement, in 1984, of Siegfried Wagner.

[3] Her unforced support for the East German system before reunification has drawn hostility from writers and artists who found themselves persecuted by the régime: Bettina Wegner dismissively opines of her supervisory duties with the October Club (state sponsored song performance association) during the 1980s that Steineckert was the chief censor ("Das war die Oberzensorin").

[1] Her father had also survived the war, which had ended in May the previous year, leaving the region surrounding Berlin administered as the Soviet occupation zone.

Gisela Steineckert is often described as a "self-educated" writer, and it was in the immediate aftermath of war, through films and extensive reading, that she learned in detail about the more horrendous aspects of Nazi Germany.

It was also in 1965 that Steinecker began a period of close involvement in the East German Song Movement, a sustained party mandated campaign to co-opt the dynamic renaissance in popular music that was a feature of the 1960s into the service of the socialist state.

[7] In this context she worked closely with a number of musicians, writing lyrics for songs in the "easy listening" "Schlager" and "Chanson" styles as well as for children.

[9] This coincided with a rapid diminution in her involvement with the Song Movement, and by the end of the decade Penndorf had also stepped back from his career as a radio editor.

[12] During the 1980s she continued a writer of books and articles, also undertaking an ill-defined mentoring role, along with the composer Wolfram Heicking, of the "October club".

In 1990 she became an honorary president of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands"/ DFD),[3] a position she has retained through the ensuing dramatic changes to that formerly East German bastion of socialist womanhood.