Gisela Oechelhaeuser

Gisela Oechelhaeuser (born Gisela Ekardt, 22 January 1944) is a German cabaret performer and impresario with a doctorate in modern languages. Her career was adversely affected in 1999 when it was disclosed that twenty years earlier, while at university, she actively operated as a paid informer for the Ministry for State Security under the one- party German dictatorship of that time.

Biography Gisela Ekardt was born, the youngest of her parents' four daughters, in Schmauch, a little village in the marshy flatlands south of what was at that time known as Königsberg in East Prussia. She never knew her "Nazi father", as she described him in 1962 to a young journalist from - unusually - the west, during an encounter in connection with a rare "Gesamtdeutschland" festival in the main square at Weimar. Her father was a Lutheran pastor who died in France during the war. Caught up in the ethnic cleansing of 1944/45, the widowed mother and her children ended up in Apolda, a small manufacturing town near Jena in Thüringia, which was administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone till October 1949, and which was where the children grew up. For the next three years she worked in the large wrist-watch factory at Weimar, producing "four-thousand movement-levers a day". Later she was promoted to the "precision component" section.

She stayed on at Leipzig to receive her doctorate in 1975 for a dissertation on "problems of the Aesthetic Theory of the 'Critical theory' of the Frankfurt School". The work focused on the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, two of the more high-profile Frankfurt School philosophers of the twentieth century. During the 1980s she was appearing as a cabaret artist and undertaking directorial assignments at the "Herkuleskeule" cabaret in Dresden. On the basis of her success in the world of cabaret in Saxony she was able to add teaching to her activities, employed between 1985 and 1990 as a stagecraft teacher at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. right |Gisela Oechelhaeuser interviewed by Hannes Hofmann in 2014

"Satire has to push things right to the extreme edge. That brings people to laughter and then it makes them think - about events that cry out for consideration ...." "Satire muss Dinge ganz auf die Spitze treiben. Das bringt Leute zum Lachen und damit zum Nachdenken – über Geschehnisse, die zum Heulen sind ..." She also, during the 1990s, worked on television, notably as moderator on the ORB-Television programme "Am Tag, als ...". She was identified in Stasi files as "IM-Gisela".

Personal Gisela Oechelhaeuser has told interviewers that long before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the siblings with whom she had grown up had made their way to and settled in West Germany.

Sources are silent about her first marriage, but she has spoken with pride about her son, Sebastian Oechelhaeuser, who in 1993, aged 22, was about to embark on a course of study in London. In 1989 Keller served as in the short-lived Modrow government. After reunification he sat as a member of the German parliament ("Bundestag") between 1990 and 1994. According to one source it was, indeed, the early stages of Oechelhaeuser's relationship with Dietmar Keller that put an end to her three-year stint as a Stasi informer. Most of her reports to her handlers dealt with casual discussions of a potentially "conspiratorial" nature in the student canteen or in the course of student seminars. The reports were received, reviewed and filed in a routine manner. They concerned post graduate students ("intellectuals") and sometimes political cabaret performers all of whom were, by definition, of interest to the inherently paranoid security services; but these were not "high-profile" targets. When her reports started to include casual indiscretions of a potentially political nature that had been uttered by Dietmar Keller, who was already a senior figure within the party hierarchy in the Leipzig area, the reports also ended up in the files. But such reports on a respected senior party official also generated confusion and anger among the Leipzig Stasi officers. Somehow the security services no longer welcomed reports from "IM-Gisela" after she teamed up with Keller.