In the foreword to his book “Folk, Chanson and Songwriters in the GDR”, Lutz Kirchenwitz notes that the current accounts of the GDR music-scene are incomplete. Publications from the East had been smoothed out, contradictions had been removed and they were written without mentioning names of artists with whom there had been “cultural-political friction”. Meanwhile, the West was only interested in the dissidents and even that “only if the case was particularly noteworthy.” The result was that the very different biographies and developmental milestones of the singer- and songwriter-movement with all its sides had never been really summarised. The book aims to close that gap. And in fact today the book is still a definitive reference of the history of the singer- and songwriter-movement in the GDR from the 1960s onwards. (Quotes ibid. p. 10)