Walter Ulbricht would be uneasily ensconced not as one among several, but as the de facto leader of the party, and thereby also of the state and of the government. As she much later recalled, back in 1946 Freyer felt more than a little overwhelmed by her mission: "He might have been speaking in Chinese. I didn't understand a word". Most of her more politically enthused contemporaries were at this point still working as youth leaders with the party's recently inaugurated Free German Youth organisation, but the newspaper internship, though challenging, evidently suited Freyer well. It provided the opportunity to learn the journalists' craft from more experienced comrades such as the Spanish Civil War veteran, Georg Stibi, who later became a deputy Foreign Minister of the German Democratic Republic. During 1947/48 she undertook a six month course in journalism at the Karl-Marx Party Academy at Liebenwalde, just outside Berlin. During 1948 and 1949 she then worked as a regional press officer in Saxony for the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD), which was one of five important quasi-party mass organisations which under the Leninist constitutional structure adopted from the Soviet Union had a fixed quota of seats in the East German parliament ("Volkskammer") in what by this time was becoming a new kind of German one-party dictatorship. During 1949/50 she worked for the ruling party's regional leadership team ("... SED-Landesleitung Sachsen"). In 1951 Yvonne-Ruth Freyer was appointed editor in chief of the regional Zwickau-based party regional newspaper "Freie Presse". This made her the first female editor in chief of a mass-circulation newspaper anywhere in East Germany. Her incumbency was brief, however, since in 1952 she was transferred to the newly launched party newspaper "Freies Wort", published in Suhl. She was the paper's founding editor, and remained in editorial control of it till 1959. Between 1956 and 1960 she combined this with membership of the party regional leadership team ("SED-Bezirksleitung") for Suhl, also - for some of the time - chairing the local branch of the national Union of Journalists. After this, having been awarded a "service medal", during 1959/60 she underwent a further training course at the Karl-Marx Party Academy (which by this time was accommodated in central Berlin). In 1960 she accepted a post as press officer for the chairman of the East German Council of Ministers. In reality her duties involved acting as an additional "control