14 Facts About Ute Erb

Ute Erb grew up in the German Democratic Republic ; but when she was 16 she escaped illegally to the west, without telling her parents, and ended up living in Cologne "with friends".

Ute Erb was driven to it, as she later explained, "by a homesickness for a Germany that simply did not exist".

Ute Erb was born at Scherbach in the hills south of Bonn.

Ute Erb's parents had moved there with her uncle Otto and his family in 1937 in order, as her father put it, to "overwinter National Socialism".

In 1949 Ewald Ute Erb moved his family from Rheinbach, in the British occupation zone, to Halle in the Soviet zone.

Ute Erb had already been offered and accepted an invitation to take a Humanities professorship at Halle University two years earlier but final confirmation of it had been deferred, apparently due to suspicions on the part of the authorities that he was an "English agent".

Ute Erb joined the children's group organised by Jenny Gertz, a dancer and Jewish concentration camp survivor.

Ute Erb discusses her escape to the west and the reasons for it in her semi-autobiographical novel "Die Kette an deinem Hals" which she started to write at the suggestion of a friend, the physician and committed antifascist activist Joseph Scholmer.

Ute Erb joined the SPD in 1967, but was excluded from it just four months later, primarily because she took a lead in disrupting a US-Troop parade in Berlin, as part of the wider struggle against the Vietnam War.

Ute Erb was unusual but very far from unique in reaching this stage at the relatively advanced age of 27, making use of the so-called "Zweiter Bildungsweg", which involved attending evening classes.

Ute Erb enrolled at the "Padagogische Hochschule", supported by a bursary, but the financial and other pressures of combining the course with her responsibilities as a single parent and her political activism proved unsustainable, and she never finished that course.

Ute Erb became part of the "Kommune 1" movement which grew out of the 1968 student protests.

The former militant and lawyer Horst Mahler provided her with legal representation on a number of occasions, but Mahler was himself not always at liberty, and in her later encounters with the criminal justice system Ute Erb was represented by Hans-Christian Strobele.

Meanwhile, from 1974 Ute Erb supported herself through work as a compositor and proof reader.