Irina Liebmann

Irina Herrnstadt was born at the height of the Second World War in Moscow, to where her German-born Jewish father, the lawyer turned journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt (1903–1966) had fled from Warsaw following the twin-pronged invasion of Poland in September 1939. Moscow was at war when Irina was born. Life was a struggle for survival and there were only soldiers and military vehicles on the streets. The city had been evacuated in response to the German invasion. Only people deemed essential for the war effort had stayed on the city. Her father was editor-in-chief of a German language newspaper produced for prisoners of war. That was important for the war, so the Herrnstadts had stayed behind when the city was evacuated.[5] It was in Moscow that Rudolf Herrnstadt had met Valentina Veloyants (Валентина Велоянца), Irina's mother: she wanted to take her new friend dancing but he "could not [dance]". The child was always told, later, that when her parents met her mother was a scholar of Germanistics, originally from Siberia. In 1945 the family were returned to Germany in April/May 1945, far sooner than most of the many thousands of German political exiles who had escaped to Moscow from Germany after 1933: this was because her father had been nominated to membership of the 30-man "nation building" Ulbricht Group, even though at the last minute his name was removed from the list on account of his Jewish provenance. They nevertheless settled in what was left of Berlin, based in that part of the city included in the Soviet occupation zone: till 1953, her father built for himself a successful career as a journalist-politician.[1][6]

Irina Herrnstadt grew up bilingual.[5] She attended school, initially, in Berlin. After her father's sudden political fall from grace in 1953 the family moved away from the centre of power, and her later schooling took place first at Merseburg and finally at Halle, where she successfully completed her school career in 1961.[7][8] She then progressed to the prestigious Karl Marx University (as that institution was known between 1953 and 1990) in Leipzig, emerging with a degree in Sinology in 1966.[9] She had selected an exceptionally challenging and unusual degree topic, but China was of particular interest to the East German ruling élite (and others) during the Cultural Revolution. Between 1967 and 1975 Irina Herrnstadt worked as a contributing editor on "Deutsche Außenpolitik", an East German specialist journal dealing with the country's "foreign policy".[10] It was while working at "Deutsche Außenpolitik" that Irina Herrnstadt got to know Rolf Liebmann (1939–2003), who subsequently became known as an innovator in the world of East German documentary film production.[11] Irina Herrnstadt became Irina Liebmann.[12]

She continued writing after 1975, now primarily on a freelance basis. Many of her contributions were to East Berlin's principal mass-circulation weekly newspaper, "Wochenpost". Increasingly, she was also authoring radio plays and other prose pieces including, towards and beyond the later 1980s, two children's books and several stage plays.[10]

In November 1987 she came to the attention of the authorities as a result of her contribution that year to the tenth congress of the (East) German Writer's Association. Participating in a large discussion group she urged comrades to introduce a "Theatre of Authors". What she had in mind, she explained, was a theatre "in which the authors put the programme together themselves". Under the existing system of largely covert but nevertheless highly effective censorship, contemporary drama had virtually no chance of finding its way into the theatres. She had already presented the same suggestion at a writers' workshop in March 1987. Representatives of East German theatre criticised the proposal for such a "bourgeois institution": a "Theatre of Authors" as proposed by Liebmann would insufficiently recognise the needs of audiences. The idea gained no official traction in East Germany. The old men who still called the shots felt far more comfortable with "known classics". Beyond officialdom, however, Liebmann's proposal evidenced a network of increasingly confident and strident opposition to theatre censorship, both among "famous name" celebrity authors such as Günter de Bruyn and Christoph Hein, and across the intellectual classes more generally.[13]

Shortly afterwards, during 1988 Irina Liebmann and her family, increasingly alienated by conditions in East Germany, relocated to West Berlin.[2][8]

During the years that followed she has adopted a literary genre of non-fictional prose works that retains much of the drama and lyricism to be sought in novels. One case in point is her so-called autobiographical novel, "In Berlin", published in 1994, in which deeply emotional impressions of life – apparently of her own life – in Berlin Wall through the years of division are expressed exclusively in images of the city. The fast-paced action is largely set in the centre of the city during and directly after 1990, albeit with a large amount of input from Berlin's complicated past. The central character, like the author, is named "Liebmann", though there is also a sense in which the city is itself a co-protagonist.[14][15]

Irina Liebmann has been a member of the German Academy for Linguistics and Literature since 2014.[5]