Sibylle Boden-Gerstner (17 August 1920 – 25 December 2016) was a German costume designer, artist and fashion writer.

[1][2] In 1956 she founded the East German arts and fashion magazine which bore her name, Sibylle, working with the publication as its editor in chief till 1961.

[3] Boden first met the government lawyer (and, later, journalist) Karl-Heinz Gerstner at a ski resort in the Giant Mountains in southern Silesia.

War had broken out a few months earlier, but Gerstner was excused military service due to the effects of his childhood spinal paralysis.

[2] In Paris she was able to resume her study of painting, now at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where her attendance is described in one source as "undercover".

Under the terms of the London Protocol, signed in September 1944, the principal Allies of World War II had agreed to a postwar partition of Berlin between themselves into four separately administered zones of occupation; but directly after the war the entire city was occupied by Soviet forces.

[3] In 1946, British military police arrived in Wilmersdorf and arrested Gerstner, believing that his job in Paris meant that he must have been a senior Nazi official.

[1] In Gerstner's 1999 memoirs he referred to the evidence Boden-Gerstner gathered to secure his release, stating "I owe her my life" ("Ich verdanke ihr mein Leben").

[3] In 1953 the family relocated again, moving to a house in the prestigious suburb of Kleinmachnow on the north eastern edge of Berlin.

[3] The managing director was required and permitted to travel frequently to destinations such as Paris, Milan, Prague, Warsaw and Moscow.

[3] In the end, the direction taken by the magazine was determined to be "too French for Socialism" ("zu französisch für den Sozialismus"), and in 1961 Boden-Gerstner had to resign.

The magazine continued to carry my stamp" ("Ach, die waren eifersüchtig und wollten wahrscheinlich meinen Posten.

[3] After 1961 Boden-Gerstner returned to her work as a free-lance costume designer for the DEFA film studio and East German television.

She considered herself a dissident as a young woman in the German Democratic Republic, and continues to be an establishment critic of the unified Germany.

[3] Published under the pseudonym Sibylle Muthesius, Boden-Gerstner's book, Flucht in die Wolken appeared in 1981 in East Germany.