Angelika Barbe

Angelika Barbe ( Mangoldt, 26 November 1951) is a German biologist who became a politician.

During the changes in the later 1980s, which led to a restoration of democracy in East Germany and German reunification just over six months later, she played a leading role in the opposition movement, and was a co-founder of the relaunched (in East Germany) Social Democratic party. Following reunification she served as a member of the national parliament (Bundestag) between 1990 and 1994. She has been identified with a certain "moral rigour" which was on display in 1996 when she switched her political allegiance from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the CDU (centre-right party) because she found her SPD party colleagues unnecessarily accommodating with the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) (which was at that stage a partially re-invented successor to what had been the ruling party in the old East German one-party dictatorship).

Life Angelika Mangoldt was born in Brandenburg an der Havel, a small town then in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), near Berlin. Her father was a freelance landscape gardener who later worked as a builder in a cooperative. Angelika Barbe joined the peace circle in 1986. She was voted the party's number 2 spokesperson and, in January 1990, its deputy chair. She was not re-elected in 1994, and a period of unemployment followed. It was also in 1996 that Barbe was a co-founder of the Berlin Citizens' Office for Evaluating the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship ("Berliner Bürgerbüro zur Aufarbeitung von Folgeschäden der SED-Diktatur"). serving as the organisation's deputy chair until 2007. She has also been actively involved between 2000 and 2017 (when she retired) with the Saxony Regional Office for Political Education ("Sächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung").