Freya Klier (née Krummreicht) was born on 4 February 1950; her mother worked in a factory and her father was a decorator. In 1953, her father was sent to prison for a year after striking a man who turned out to be a police officer after coming to his wife’s defence in a fight. Their mother was assigned to shift work as a punitory measure, so Freya and her brother had to spend that year at a children’s home that only released its residents to parental custody on the weekends. This year had a formative impact on both children, particularly as they were viewed as the children of a political prisoners and treated accordingly.

Freya Klier completed her secondary education and vocational training in the dual track typical in the GDR in this period, and thus left school with both an upper secondary certificate and a qualification as a mechanical engineering draughtswoman. Her school years were shaped by another kind of dualism characteristic for this generation as well: she was a Young Pioneer who took religious instruction outside of school and was active in the Young Congregation despite her membership in the Free German Youth (FDJ). In 1966, after her 17-year-old brother was sentenced to four years of penal servitude on charges of “defamation of the state”, she decided she should leave the GDR. With help from acquaintances in a Swedish theatre troupe, she planned to escape by sea, boarding a commercial vessel with a forged passport. She was betrayed and arrested shortly before the ship cast off in July. She received a 16-month sentence but was released after one year. The remainder of her sentence was commuted to two-years’ probation.

For the next few years, Klier got by working as a mail worker, a waitress and a dispatcher. In 1970, thanks to the intervention of a Party secretary, she was permitted to begin studying drama in Leipzig, and she finished a degree in acting in 1975. She was then hired by a small theatre in Senftenberg. She began to study directing in Berlin in 1978 and completed her degree in 1982.

Klier had become interested in the culture and art of Poland in the 1970s. Almost inevitably, this led her to take a critical view of the realities in the communist countries. She used both political and artistic means to try and make her criticism heard. Almost all of the contemporary theatre productions that she directed in GDR theatres drew distrust and criticism from the SED. Most of the plays she staged were either dropped shortly after opening or “re-staged” to such an extent that little that was hers about them remained. Nonetheless, she received a director’s prize for her staging of the world premiere of Ulrich Plenzdorf’s “Legende vom Glück ohne Ende” (The Legend of Happiness Without End – based in part on his earlier screenplay for the film “The Legend of Paul and Paulina”) at Theater Schwedt, where she worked from 1982 to 1984.

Klier also directed plays in Bautzen and Halle and at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. Despite being a member of the official theatre association, she was not permitted to accept invitations to direct plays in other countries (in Hungary, the Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany). This was probably because due to her involvement, since 1981, in the church peace movement in the GDR alongside her “official” theatre work. She was involved in the Pankow peace group (East Berlin), which was among the best known and active groups in the GDR opposition movement for many years. Klier always sought to bring her artistic ambitions into her political work. For instance, she staged a small production at church peace festival in July of 1981 despite threats of expulsion from her studies.

In 1983, Freya Klier started a secret project in which she interviewed women about their circumstances of their lives. Her aim was to create a sound basis for her artistic efforts to discuss the situation of society in a critical light. Having herself been a single mother since 1973, she was well aware of the glaring discrepancies between what the propaganda claimed and the real situation of women in society. In doing research of this kind, she was very close to breaking a taboo in the GDR. Only a tiny minority of SED-loyal researchers were allowed to conduct public opinion and sociological surveys: the risk that “false empiricism” might undermine the “correct theories” was too great.

In February of 1984, Klier met the songwriter Stephan Krawczyk, who had been officially recognise as a promising young artist until quite recently. An SED member, he had received an award as the best chanson singer in 1981. In April 1985, he left the Party and within a matter of months had been banned from working in his occupation anywhere in the country. Krawczyk’s critically minded texts had made him someone that people identified with, particularly young people. Now he was seen as an “enemy of the state” and the “new Wolf Biermann”. However, Krawczyk was not alone in being banned from employment in his occupation, Klier too came under a de facto occupational ban, followed by her expulsion from the theatre association. In the years that followed, the two of them jointly developed socially critical programmes that they produced successfully, mainly in Protestant churches and congregation halls. The state put pressure on the churches to stop such performances. But more and more churches and congregation councils had begun to resist this kind of influence. Freya Klier and Stephan Krawczyk were also subjected to a barrage of administrative sanctions.