Angelika Mangoldt was born in Brandenburg an der Havel, a small town then in the German Democratic Republic, near Berlin. Her father was a freelance landscape gardener who later worked as a builder in a cooperative. She attended school at Schenkenberg and, between 1966 and 1970, at :de:Jeserig |Jeserig nearby. After this she attended a pre-university school at Ziesar. In order to progress to higher education it was necessary to pass her school leaving exams. She encountered major difficulties in obtaining permission to sit the exam because by this time her parents were listed by the authorities as "negative and hostile" because they made a point of boycotting the country's phony elections. Nevertheless, in the context of East Germany's acute shortage of skilled labour, she took her Abitur, passing a semi-vocational exam designed for skilled manual workers, with a "distinction" citation in 1970. She was able to pass the exam in this way without compromising her political independence. She studied Biology at Berlin's Humboldt University between 1970 and 1974, with a particular focus on behavioural aspects. Between 1974 and 1979 she worked for a year in "plant preservation" in Potsdam, and then as a biologist with the :de:VDI 6022#Hygieneinspektionen|Hygiene Inspectorate in Berlin's Lichtenberg quarter. Around this time she got married. While bringing up her small children she continued to study behavioural biology in spare moments. She also joined the local church council and over time began to take a closer interest in potentially political issues such as environmental concerns, human rights and pacifism. It was through her church connections that she came across the :de:Friedenskreis Pankow|Pankow Peace Circle, which had been established by in 1981. Angelika Barbe joined the peace circle in 1986. In 1987 she was a co-founder, with Marianne Eschenhagen, of the Women's Working Group in Berlin's :de:Johannisthal |Johannisthal quarter. During 1988/89 she became involved in the Peace Working Group around Ulrike Poppe, Jens Reich and Marianne Birthler. As political tensions rose, especially in the cities, she came under state surveillance in the Ministry for State Security's so-called "Operation Hysteria". Barbe was one of the small group of people who on 7 October 1989 formed a new incarnation of the Social Democratic Party in the Berlin area of East Germany. She was voted the party's number 2 spokesperson and, in January 1990, its deputy chair. After reunification in October 1990 the East GermanSDP merged into the West German SPD, which left Angelika Barbe a prominent member of what was, at that point, Germany's second largest political party in terms of vote share. Meanwhile, in March 1990 East Germany held its first and - as matters turned out - last free and fair general election. The SDP's 21.9% vote share entitled it to 88 of the 400 seats in the national parliament, and Angelika Barbe, as a candidate, was high enough up on the party list to be elected. She was a member between March and October 1990, serving as chair of the parliamentary committee on women and family. After reunification she became a member of the Bundestag between December 1990 and November 1994, elected as part of the SPD party list for the Berlin electoral district. Despite being a member of the SPD party executive during that period, her uncompromising clarity of thought and expression within the party made Barbe the opposite of a natural political networker. She was not favoured by the party officials in Berlin with an easily winnable position on the national party list, instead being pitched against Gregor Gysi of the PDS in the East Berlin electoral district. She was not re-elected in 1994, and a period of unemployment followed. Between 1995 and 1998 she worked as a senor hospital administrator in Berlins Prenzlauer Berg quarter. She nevertheless remained politically concerned, in December 1996 switching her political allegiance from the Social Democratic Party to the CDU because she objected to her SPD party comrades entering into political alliances with the Party of Democratic Socialism. She was joined in switching from national left-wing parties to the CDU by other former citizen rights activists from the East German period, such as Günter Nooke and Vera Lengsfeld. It was also in 1996 that Barbe was a co-founder of the Berlin Citizens' Office for Evaluating the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship. In 2001 she became a member of the National Executive of the :de:Union der Opferverbände Kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft|umbrella organisation for Communist Tyranny Victims' Associations, serving as the organisation's deputy chair till 2007. She has also been actively involved between 2000 and 2017 with the :de:Sächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung|Saxony Regional Office for Political Education. She has repeatedly participated in rallies of the Islam-critical PEGIDA movement and has been elected to the board of the Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung which is associated with the AfD.
