The Leipzig Affair

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the Gillian Purvis Trust for a new writing award, which enabled me to travel to Germany to complete research for this book. Grateful thanks are also due to Sigrid Grünewald for talking to me about her imprisonment at Bautzen II and to the Gedenkstätte Bautzen for facilitating our meeting. Frau Grünewald and Jacqueline Braid were also kind enough to share extracts from their Stasi files with me.

I am also grateful to Freight Books for permission to reprint chapters one, three and twenty-one, versions of which have appeared in Gutter magazine.

I am indebted to my editor, Cheryl Robson, and to Felicity Parsons, Susan Kemp, Tamara Evans, Marianne Taylor and Mark Stanton for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this book. Last but not least, I would like to thank my husband, Peter Edwards, who has lived with this project for far longer than it was reasonable to expect and who is my constant inspiration.

Oh the shark has pretty teeth dear,

And he shows them pearly white

Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear

And he keeps it out of sight.

The Ballad of Mack the Knife

Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, 1928/

English translation, Marc Blitzstein, 1954

She lied to me with her body you see

I lied to myself ’bout the chances I’d wasted.

The Saturday Boy, Billy Bragg