Gabriele Stötzer decided to become a writer in 1977, while imprisoned among criminals and murderers in the women’s prison of Hoheneck/Stollberg. A key figure in the Erfurt subculture in the 1980s, Stötzer, with her radical, relentless candour, had a major influence on the independent artistic scene in the last decade of the GDR. She was one of the four women who organised the first occupation of the district headquarters of the State Security administration in Erfurt on 4 December 1989. This act inspired similar actions across the GDR to prevent Stasi records from being destroyed. Stötzer was not tempted to go into politics afterwards: what was and remains important for her is her artistic independence – in the context of activism to counter disenfranchisement and regimentation today and in the past. “Through my writing and my art, I reach unexpected levels at which I am happy”, Gabriele Stötzer says about herself. A banal sentence, perhaps, were it not backed by an extraordinary biography.

Gabriele Stötzer was born on 14 April in the village of Emleben, near the town of Gotha. After an completing an apprenticeship, she worked as an assistant medical technician in Erfurt and went to night-school to earn her upper secondary qualification. She got married in 1973 (she continued to use her married name, Kachold, for twelve years after her 1979 divorce). In 1973, she began to train as a teacher of German and art education at the teacher training college in Erfurt. She was expelled in 1976, having expressed solidarity with another expelled student, Wilfried Linke, who had urged that Marxism-Leninism instruction should be less dogmatic.

She was arrested in November of 1976 as a “ringleader” after signing a petition protesting the revocation of Wolf Biermann’s citizenship. Her refusal to show “active remorse” and withdraw her signature put her in prison for five months. Her candour during her interrogations fulfilled the criteria for the GDR offense of “defamation of the state”, for which she was sentenced to a year in prison with no possibility of parole.

It would be 25 years before the writer, who now splits her time between Erfurt and Utrecht, wrote of her experiences in the women’s prison Burg Hoheneck, a former Saxon state prison, whose harsh conditions were notorious in the GDR. When she finally did so, she sheltered behind the use of third-person narrative.

Unlike many political prisoners, Stoetzer did not want to leave the GDR, which explains why she found herself very low in the prison hierarchy – in a cell with ordinary criminals. Twenty-two women were held in one cramped lockup. Good behaviour could gain one permission to write one censored letter a week, see one visitor behind a pane of glass a month, receive one small package each month. A prisoner who met the work quota, meaning one who sewed 650 pairs of tights every day in the three-shift system, could trade 40 marks for food, toiletries and coupons for real coffee per month.

Her 2002 book “Die bröckelnde Festung” (The crumbling fortress) is at once a fact-filled report about the savage routine in this “murderers’ castle” and a deeply intimate depiction of self-discovery. It vividly describes the subtle pressure to fill the quota, the hierarchy in the locked, poorly heated cells, the alliances among the women, their loves, jealousies, battles and reconciliations and their dreams of an amnesty – or at least of visiting a cakeshop in the city, and also of the impossibility of gaining a respite from the daily piecework, other than through an assignment to the infirmary or through suicide.

Released from prison, Gabriele Stötzer resisted the despair the authorities had prescribed for her by writing down her experiences, fears and hopes. Typed copies of her reports about the prison circulated in secret. She paid Christa Wolf an unexpected visit – an encounter Wolf wrote about in her novella “Was bleibt” (What remains): “Who sent it? The girl dug around in her shoulder bag, finally fishing out a bundle of pages, a manuscript, that was why she’d come. I read the pages immediately. […] What you’ve written here, it’s good, I said. It’s accurate. Every sentence is true. She shouldn't show it to anyone. These few pages could put her back into prison.”

In 1980, having worked in a shoe factory for two years under the terms of her probation, Gabriele Stötzer took over the privately owned “Galerie im Flur” in Erfurt in 1980, which exhibited the work of alternative artists from Thuringia, and later from Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin as well. Reports written by informers, including Sascha Anderson, led to the closing of the gallery in 1981. “But”, Gabriele Stötzer said, “in the end they didn’t succeed in destroying the creative potency.” From 1979 to 1986, the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) persecuted the artist in operation “Toxin”, intending to arrest her again, she was later the subject of the individual-surveillance operation “Medium”. Stötzer had a substantial influence on the independent art scene in Erfurt specifically and in the GDR more generally, and she was known for radically breaking the provincial taboos of socialist dogma. She photographed and made successful Super-8 films – video projects from 1990 onwards – about feminine self-discovery. This work is documented in the 1996 book “Gegenbilder. Filmische Subversion in der DDR 1976–1989”. Again and again, she invented new spaces for action to counter the danger of social isolation and new forms for such action. In 1983, she founded and began to appear in a women’s performance group and publish her pieces in the underground periodicals “und” in Dresden and “Mikado” and “Ariadne” in Berlin.

Stötzer intentionally flouted the paternalistic social order, exploring the “quality of life outside of the state”, and art as the medium for her self-expression. Her first book “zügel los” (reins off/unreined), a collection of experimental prose and prose poems, published under the name Kachold by Gerhard Worf in 1989, embodied explosive self-liberation from the general anguish. In her “grenzen los fremd gehen” (1992), diary-like reflections, sometimes in a rap rhythm, often dramatically exhibitionistic and illustrated with provocative drawings, continue this breakout from social calcification from an intimate, subjective viewpoint.

The language she used in this period was harsh and direct, she rejects euphemistic terms: “I thought at first, some things cannot be spoken. I spoke in contradiction to this. Calling it the slammer rather than the penal system certainly has to do with the hardship that existed. Even though the majority says: nothing happened to me. I did not feel the hardship.” And it is true that very few women writers from the former GDR bring their experiences into their writing with the uncompromising authenticity that characterises Gabriele Stötzer’s work.