", a biography of her father, a noted anti-Nazi activist and political exile in Warsaw and Moscow who, after 1945, returned to what became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and in 1953, despite his longstanding record of communist activism, emerged as an uncompromising critic of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht: he was expelled from the party and suffered various other government mandated public indignities.
She grew up and lived the first part of her adult life in the German Democratic Republic, but succeeded in moving to West Berlin during 1988, thereby anticipating reunification by more than a year.
They nevertheless settled in what was left of Berlin, based in that part of the city included in the Soviet occupation zone: till 1953, her father built for himself a successful career as a journalist-politician.
[9] She had selected an exceptionally challenging and unusual degree topic, but China was of particular interest to the East German ruling élite (and others) during the Cultural Revolution.
Between 1967 and 1975 Irina Herrnstadt worked as a contributing editor on "Deutsche Außenpolitik", an East German specialist journal dealing with the country's "foreign policy".
[10] It was while working at "Deutsche Außenpolitik" that Irina Herrnstadt got to know Rolf Liebmann (1939–2003), who subsequently became known as an innovator in the world of East German documentary film production.
Under the existing system of largely covert but nevertheless highly effective censorship, contemporary drama had virtually no chance of finding its way into the theatres.
Beyond officialdom, however, Liebmann's proposal evidenced a network of increasingly confident and strident opposition to theatre censorship, both among "famous name" celebrity authors such as Günter de Bruyn and Christoph Hein, and across the intellectual classes more generally.