Gabriele Schöttler is a former East German nurse who switched to political activism, joining the Social Democratic Party during the final weeks of 1989, and then successfully switching to mainstream politics following reunification the next year. In the course of a varied political career she served between 1999 and 2001 as the Berlin senator for labour, social affairs and women under Mayors Diepgen and Wowereit. Life and career Provenance and early years Gabriele Schöttler was born, a few months after the 1953 uprising, in Zehdenick, a small town and an important centre for brick production, set in the marshy flatlands roughly 50 km to the north of Berlin. She completed her school education at an East German "Polytechnic Secondary School" in 1970 and then transferred to the Medical College and Berlin-Buch where between 1970 and 1974 she trained and qualified for a nursing career. She then worked as a nurse at the Neurology Clinic in Berlin-Buch between 1974 and 1977. In 1977 she was promoted to the rank of a "deputy station sister" ("stellvertretende Stationsschwester"), continuing her work in the clinic at this level till 1979. An abrupt change of career came in 1979 when she took a post as head of training and further education at the "VEB Elektromontage" manufacturing facility at Oranienburg on the northern edge of Berlin. She worked in this position till 1983. Between 1980 and 1984 she undertook a parallel distance-learning course in business administration and economics with the Business College at Dippoldiswalde. Schöttler continued to work at Oranienburg in the training department at "VEB Elektromontage" between 1984 and 1991, but now with an "Ingenieur-Ökonomin" degree to her name. Politics During the Autumn of changes in 1989 Gabriele Schöttler joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The SPD in East Germany had been subsumed into the ruling SED (party) in April 1946 by means of a contentious party merger that had opened the way for the creation of a Soviet sponsored one-party dictatorship. The superficial plurality of political parties after 1949 had comprised a collection Bloc parties, all closely controlled by the one ruling party. During the second half of 1989 many of the structural underpinnings of the one-party dictatorship were falling away, however. A separate East German Social Democratic Party was relaunched, formally on 7 October 1989. Schöttler joined it. It was almost certainly the first time she had ever been a member of any