Wieland Förster
[4] In the aftermath of war the authorities refused to discuss or even to acknowledge the continuing existence of concentration camps in the Soviet part of occupied Germany, but their all too physical presence never became increasingly hard to dispute.
By 1950 Förster was in poor general health dangerously ill with Tuberculosis and on 21 January 1950, following a threatened investigation by the International Red Cross, he was the beneficiary of a "backdoor" release, emerging from the camp without identity papers and without any formal pardon or other explanation.
It was in this new kind of one- party dictatorship, with its principal political and economic structures modelled on those of the Soviet Union itself, that Förster built his life and career over the next four decades.
Walter Arnold, himself a consummate hands-on craftsman, helped a few of his students, whom he regarded as politically reliable, to deepen their understanding on the essential elements in figurative sculpture, by gaining experience with the works of the westerners Hermann Haller and Charles Despiau.
[4] In his third year, required to produce a "portrait from a 'photo", Förster chose as his subject Bertolt Brecht, a long-standing icon of the German intellectual left but nevertheless at this stage ostracised by the authorities.
In order to accomplish his course objective he was permitted, a few weeks before Brecht's death in 1956, to attend a rehearsal of Life of Galileo, being staged by the Berliner Ensemble (theatre company).
[8] After just eighteen months his time as a Master Student of Cremer was prematurely terminated in connection with the increasingly heated debate then emerging on the subject of Formalism.
He was permitted to use a workshop at the academy to complete his Life-sized plus group of figures "Völkerfreundschaft unter Studenten" (literally "People's friendship between students") which won the TU Dresden prize in 1961/62.
For some years he lived and worked here as a virtual hermit, visited by his family and a couple of close friends, notably Erich Arendt and Franz Fühmann.
From the time she was six years old her father insisted that she should keep a daily diary, a habit through which she developed a succinct writing style: she grew up to become a theatre critic, writer and lyricist-poet.
[4] In the absence of membership of the government approved professional association it became hard to obtain materials, and for some time he operated without an official tax payer reference number.
In the end, in December 1972, working under conditions of increasing privation from which his health suffered, he was able to arrange an evidently candid meeting with Konrad Wolf, the politically well connected president of the National Arts Academy, at which he spelled out his situation.
The timing was propitious, in that the country's new leader, Erich Honecker, was cautiously trying to move the East German government beyond the unrelenting inflexibility of his predecessor.
[11] In 1992[6] or 2010 the National Arts Academy took over the Wieland Förster Archive, comprising many pages his correspondence with fellow artists and with the authorities in East Germany.
Grudging rehabilitation, backed by Konrad Wolf, followed in 1974, when he was admitted to the National Arts Academy, and he was almost immediately able to stage his first major exhibition (organised by Rudolf Tschäpe [de]) in Potsdam in the former observatory building on the Telegraph Hill.
