Brigitte Klump (1935–2023)

Brigitte Klump was born in Gross-Linichen, then a small village between Stettin and Bromberg in a region split between Germany and Poland. Her father was a farmer and tradesman. In 1945, at the end of World War II, the family ended up in East Germany. She attended school in Havelberg, passed her Arbitur (school leaving exams), and went to workin East Berlin as a volunteer on the weekly newspaper Der Freie Bauer. In 1954, she was sent to study journalism at the University of Leipzig. The faculty there, which at the time offered the only university-level journalism courses in the country, was popularly known as "das rote Kloster" ("the red monastery"). There she learned how the Stasi (East German state security) used surveillance, denunciations and mind games to pressure and control journalists.
In 1956-1957,
she obtained an internship in theatrical production in East Berlin from Helene Weigel, the widow of Bertholt Brecht and director of the Brecht Theatre, who became her mentor. In 1958, she married Johannes Zirwas, a sociology professor. When the Berlin Wall was built, Brigitte Klump fled to West Berlin and enrolled at the Free University of Berlin. In 1960, she married a second time to Wolf Heckmann, who in became editor-in-chief of the daily newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost. In 1978, she published her first book, Das rote Kloster, a semi-autobiographical work based on her life in Leipzig. The East German government tied to suppress it, but it received much media attention and quickly became a bestseller. In 1979, her 19-year-old nephew, Klaus Klump, was imprisoned in East Germany for attempting to escape across the border to West Germany to become a journalist there. She petitioned the West German Foreign Ministry and the United Nations in New York, revealing the existence of Resolution 1503, a private complaint procedure at the UN to help reunite families and political prisoners held by the East German government. Her second book, Freiheit hat keinen Preis: ein deutsch-deutscher Report (Freedom Has No Price: An Inter-German Report, 1981), set out her attempts to free her nephew via the UN and sparked thousands of pleas for help from others. In 1984, she organized a hunger strike that was joined by East German athletes and high school students. The ensuing media storm persuaded the government to lift the travel ban on the family members of those who had escaped the country.