Sonja Gerstner

Sonja Gerstner (13 June 1952 - 8 March 1971) was an East German artist and writer. She died young, after which publication by her mother of a book containing some of her poems, diary entries and other writings covering treatment she had received for her psychotic illness brought her to the attention of an audience beyond the usual confines of the arts and literature establishment.

Sonja Gerstner was born in Berlin into one of East Germany's elite families. Her father, Karl-Heinz Gerstner (1912-2005), was an economics journalist.Sibylle Boden-Gerstner (1920-2016), her mother, was one of East Germany's leading fashion journalists. Sonja was the younger of her parents' two daughters. The writer-controversialist Daniela Dahn is her elder sister.

When she was 17 Sonja displayed the first signs of psychotic illness. Several stays in closed psychiatric wards, where she was subjected to Insulin shock therapy and Electroconvulsive therapy intensified her sense of helplessness and spiritual isolation. Her attempts to make herself understood were mostly ignored. Her parents' desperate attempts on her behalf to find psychotherapeutic care were unsuccessful. Advised by doctors to cut herself off from her friends, Gerstner encountered growing difficulties at school and college. At the end of her third stay in the clinic she was released in December 1970 and moved into her own apartment, but experienced loneliness and an acute sense of inadequacy. She ended her life on 8 March 1971. The date has added significance because 8 March was celebrated in East Germany (and elsewhere) as International Women's Day.

After Sonja Gerstner died her mother, using the pseudonym Sibylle Muthesius, published "Flucht in die Wolken" ("Escape into the clouds"), a volume about her daughter that included full-colour reproductions of many of Sonja Gerstner's images. The book was published in 1981 and widely distributed. The next year it was published across the Inner German border in the west. Exhibitions of Sonja's writings and images followed.

Sonja Gerstner confided her hopes and anxieties to her diary. She also wrote poems, songs and letters. Increasingly, after her first psychotic episode, she expressed her artistic talent with surrealistic-expressionistic paintings and drawings.

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