She is a member of the SPD party.
The extract below appears on Wikipedia.
With the UK a year away from leaving the EU this piece makes an interesting read.
Barley grew up in Cologne; her father was a British-born journalist who worked with the English-language service of Germany's international broadcaster, the Deutsche Welle, and her mother was a German physician.[3] From birth she only held British citizenship, and she only acquired German citizenship some years later.[4] She is fluent in German, English and French.[5]
Her father (born 1935) was originally from Lincolnshire.[6][7]
She has said her father grew up in a working class family on a very small and simple farm that lacked electricity, and that he was awarded a scholarship to attend university after being discovered as a talented pupil by his teacher; however after being turned down by the University of Cambridge for "not having the right accent, the right clothes," he decided as a matter of principle to turn his back on British universities and move to West Germany to attend university instead; he first moved to Hanover and later to West Berlin, where he found society to be more egalitarian and progressive.
In Germany he met Barley's mother and was employed as a journalist with Deutsche Welle's English service in Cologne after graduating. Her mother (born 1940) belonged to an upper middle class family from eastern Germany and was the daughter of an engineer in the automotive industry; her family fled the Red Army in 1945 and came as refugees from stalinism to western Germany.[6]
Barley has said that she had a happy childhood, but that she grew up with a strong sense of social justice, influenced by her parents' experiences.
Although neither of her parents was born in this part of Europe, she identifies culturally as a Rhinelander.[4][8]
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