Uncomprehending but captivated, this in due course triggered Hahne's enduring commitment to socialist values which was at variance with her parents' middle-class conservatism.

However, 1933 was also the year in which, in January, the political backdrop was transformed when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship.

Jean Weidt himself fled abroad in May 1933, and Ruthild Hahne's parallel career as a member of a communist expressionist dance company came to an end.

After the coming to power of the Nazis it was through these fellow students that Huhne came into contact with Wolfgang Thiess [de] with whom she fell in love.

[7] By this time, however, the world war had turned against Germany and the Soviet army had started a long advance from the east that would culminate in the capture of Berlin.

In her first major exhibition, held in the Arsenal Museum (Zeughaus) she included a Head of Lenin which, according to her son, created a stir.

[7] This opened the way to a career as a portrait sculptor, with busts of national heroes such as Karl Liebknecht (1950) and political leaders such as Wilhelm Pieck (1960) and even Walter Ulbricht (1963) that were displayed in schools and ministries.

In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and Hahne's political portrait-busts were and also presented as gifts to leaders of the new country's "socialist brother nations".

A succession of practical challenges delayed the project which then received its deathblow in 1961 with the erection of the Berlin Wall directly adjacent to its intended location.

[1] In 1971, which coincidentally or not was the year in which Walter Ulbricht lost power, Ruthild Hahne was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver.

The second part of the afternoon he devotes to his mother's former studio, where he still lives and curates what has become a private museum where in 2008 it was reported that visitors could sometimes take the opportunity study Ruthild Hahne's work.

Others, including notably a half sized image of Thälmann and a group of "workers and peasants" positioned behind him, can still be seen at the studio-museum curated by her son at house number 201/1 in Berlin-Niederschönhausen.