[1][2][3] Waldtraut Lewin was born in Wernigerode, a small town on the northeastern flank of the Harz Mountains, roughly equidistant between Hanover and Leipzig.
[1] She worked between 1961 and 1973 as a music-dramaturge and stage director at the Regional Theatre (as it was then known) in Halle, in a team that also included Horst-Tanu Margraf and Rudolf Heinrich.
[1] Between 1977 and 1979 she wrote the libretto for Rosa Laub, East Germany's first rock opera, which had its premier at Rostock,[4] although by this time Lewin was no longer among the theatre's permanent staff, having turned freelance in 1977.
Her own website, consulted shortly after her death, stated that she had published around 70 titles, including twelve written jointly with her daughter.
Angry protesters took steps to prevent the destruction of the records, which were believed to evidence forty years of domestic espionage by a principal East German government agency devoted to controlling and monitoring people in the name of "security".
The same commentator quotes another sympathetic source insisting that it abundantly is clear from the thick Stasi files on Waldtraut Lewin that no one suffered damage because of her reports on them.