By Constance Garcia-Barrio

By the age of five, ceramic artist Angela Klaerner Clark had mastered the skill of leading two lives. Raised in East Germany in the Zella-Mehlis mountains, Clark, 59, and her older sister Karin knew better than to mention certain family activities outside of their home.

“At school, you had to lie,” said Klaerner, now a Germantown resident. “If teachers asked what TV shows we’d watched, we had to respond with the names of communist programs, not shows like ‘Lassie.’” Their mother would quiz them every morning about how to answer teachers’ questions so that they wouldn’t slip up, Klaerner said.

Despite stumbling blocks at school, the atmosphere at home nourished the Klaerner sisters. Their mother, an architect, and their father, owner of a business that made specialty metal and concrete parts for construction, often had political discussions with friends that would have raised eyebrows.

Still, the demands of leading a double life took their toll. “It was a tough way to grow up,” Klaerner said. “I wanted to feel like I fit in, but I never did.”

The world outside of their home seemed to shrink with the passing years. “We could visit Eastern Bloc countries, but political unrest could put them off limits,” said Klaerner. “For example, after the founding of Solidarity in Poland, we couldn’t travel there.”

Political reality and a surgeon’s advice steered Klaerner toward ceramic art. At 14, she had an operation to correct an eye condition. Although it proved a success, the surgeon had a warning. “When I told him that I wanted to become an architect and build bridges, he asked me whether I wanted to draw them or do the math involved. I said, ‘Draw them.’ He felt that it would be too much of a strain on one of my eyes.”

Klaerner and her parents mulled over other choices in creative fields. If she became a writer or painter, the communist regime would co-opt her talent to convey political messages, her father warned. “For example, writers might have to write about Lenin.”

Pottery, on the other hand, seemed less important to the government and could offer freedom. So Klaerner applied to the ultra-competitive Fachschule fur angewandte Kunst (Academy of the Arts) in Heiligendamm. Of 3,000 applications a year, the school accepted just 40 students.

Klaerner made the cut. She took courses like landscape painting, aesthetics and graphic design, “and then it was ceramics, ceramics, ceramics,” she said, but she enjoyed it. “Clay is a very forgiving material, and you can do almost everything with it. It’s soothing to work with it. It comes from the earth, and it has some magic in it for me.”

After graduating, Klaerner set up a studio and made a living at her craft. “It was like paradise in a prison because you were financially and politically independent, but you couldn’t leave the country.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which came with the liberalization of the Eastern Bloc policies, brought a seismic shift in Klaerner’s life. From seeing buildings in utilitarian gray, she felt she’d been tossed into a neon kaleidoscope. “Everything was so bright in Western Europe, so much color that the change was almost unbearable.” She took advantage of the flood of travel scholarships that became available to artists and visited China, Israel and the U.S.

The new political climate also brought international artists into the former East Germany. Klaerner and her future husband, U.S. potter Jimmy Clark, met at a symposium on ceramics in Roemhild, near Klaerner’s home. “Jimmy likes to say that it was ‘love at first dance.’”

But they both had other obligations. Twenty years later, they met again at a ceramic conference in Amsterdam, and the moment was ripe. The relationship blossomed. After they got married in 2004, Klaerner moved to the U.S. “Jimmy had a young daughter from a previous marriage, but I had no children. It made sense for me to move here.” Klaerner and Clark recently celebrated their 12th anniversary.

Once again, Klaerner found herself working to fit in. “The language was my biggest fear,” said the artist, who speaks German, some Russian and now, superb English. Awestruck by the size of the U.S. from her first visit, she continued to be amazed by it. “Europe is so compact,” she said, “but the U.S. is vast, with endless beauty in nature.”

Besides the language, her art presented challenges. “I had to learn technical details before I could fire and glaze and get the results I wanted. I also had to find the right materials for my kind of work.”

Klaerner’s work has taken a new direction since she came to the U.S. “I use a honeycomb material that I get from a factory in Germany. It turns into almost magical structures while I shape it,” explained Klaerner, who sells her work at exhibitions and from her studio.

Although Klaerner has struggled at times in her life to fit in, she finds herself at home in Germantown. “I love it here — the mix of people of different races, religions and classes. I feel comfortable here.”

More information at https://www.facebook.com/angela.klaernerclark or www.germantownartistsroundtable.org