|
|
|
|
Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
|
 In the late 1980’s, Freya Klier played a large role in the overthrowing of the SED communist dictatorship. Born in 1950 in Dresden, childat a young age Klier witnessed her father's arrest, who was sentenced to one year in prison in 1953. After 1966, her 17 year old brother was found guilty of "slandering the state" and was sentenced to four years in prison. At the age of 18, she tried to leave the GDR with a Swedish merchant ship. She was betrayed and sentenced to 16 months in prison, of which she served a total of 12 months. After working odd jobs, completing a training program for actors, and studying to be a director, she worked at various theaters in the GDR since 1982. Almost all of her productions excited the criticism of the party leaders and were therefore discontinued after a short time or restaged from others. Since the early 1980s, Klier worked for the independent peace movement under the protection from the Protestant churches in the GDR. In 1985 she was expelled from the GDR's Theatre Association and forbidden to work. With her former life partner Stephan Krawczyk she performed socially critical programs mainly in churches and community spaces in front of numerous spectators. At the same time she was working on a book based on interviews about the educational system of the GDR. The Ministry for State Security (Stasi) tried very hard to disrupt her "anti-state" tendencies, by fining her and other so-called subversive measures. After Freya Klier had protested against a crackdown on an official march for the murdered communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January 1988, she was arrested and taken to the remand prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Under the threat of a multi-year prison sentence and on the advice of her lawyer Wolfgang Schnur, who later revealed himself as an unofficial employee (IM) of the State Security Service, she signed an exit visa. After her expatriation Klier lived and worked in West Berlin. In numerous books and films, she insists on a critical reworking of the communist, but also Nazi dictatorship. |
|
|
|
|
|
