[1][2] A principal focus of her research was on Literature and the Publishing Sector in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany 1949-1990).
[2] In 1970 she joined the newly created Central Institute for Literary History (Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte / ZIL) in order to work in its Germanistics department.
Her qualifications in Germanistics were fairly mainstream in the East German academic world, but the depth of her knowledge of Slavic studies was unusual.
It covered the same period and was a study of the anti-fascist German writers exiled in the Soviet Union during the Nazi years.
After 1989 Barck worked at the Centre for Contemporary History (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung / ZZF), as it became known after 1996, in Potsdam.