Brigitte Klump

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Brigitte Klump (born January 23, 1935 in Groß-Linichen , Pomerania ) is a German author. As a private complainant to the United Nations , she advocated the reunification of separated families.

Brigitte Klump (1984)

Life

Brigitte Klump grew up as the third of five siblings in Groß-Linichen, a small village in Western Pomerania , as the daughter of a farmer and merchant. When the village was encircled during the war in 1945, the family fled in a hospital train to Glöwen , Westprignitz district ( Mark Brandenburg ). Her father, a large-scale farmer , took part in the land reform , founded and took over the management of the agricultural production cooperative (LPG) in Glöwen. In 1953, after graduating from high school in Havelberg , Brigitte Klump volunteered in the Berlin central editorial office of the weekly newspaper Der Freie Bauer . In 1954 she delegated the editorial team to the Faculty of Journalism at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . This faculty was popularly called the “red monastery”.

In January 1956 Brigitte Klump was supposed to write a seminar paper, "The Vulgarization of Literature by Bertolt Brecht ". When Wieland Herzfelde - one of her teachers and Brecht's first publisher - found out about this, he sent her to Brecht's theater on Schiffbauerdamm . Brecht invited the Leipzig students to form their own opinion, to see a performance by the Berliner Ensemble and then to discuss it with him. The Leipzig University's cultural club organized a special train for 700 students. Walter Ulbricht prevented the trip by simulating track work. Helene Weigel let the party leadership of the SED pay for the unusual performance . This violation of study discipline activated the State Security Service against Brigitte Klump, a naive girl who matured into a political personality in the maelstrom of events. She was raised to be a socialist journalist using the methods of spying, denouncing, blackmailing, and psychological conditioning.

When the independent student did not submit to the probationary tasks of the State Security Service to spy on friends and fellow students, she sought advice from Helene Weigel, the director of the Brecht Theater, and did an internship in the Berliner Ensemble in 1956/57 under the direction of Benno Besson , the Swiss master student of Bertolt Brecht. The dean of the faculty, Hermann Budzislawski , told Helene Weigel during a fireside chat that probation tasks for the Ministry for State Security (MfS) are indispensable for the award of the diploma of a socialist journalist. Brigitte Klump fled the GDR on November 13, 1957 and continued her studies at the Free University in West Berlin .

Brigitte Klump first married Johannes Zirwas, who later became professor of sociology, in 1958, and in 1960 her second marriage was Wolf Heckmann , who later became the editor-in-chief of Hamburger Morgenpost for many years , was de-registered and became the mother of two children.

Act

When her first book The Red Monastery was to be published by Hoffmann und Campe in 1978, the GDR Ministry of Culture stepped in and, through negotiator Otto Gotsche, a member of the SED Central Committee, offered the publisher Rüdiger Hildebrandt 1 million  DM in licenses, lest he publish this autobiography. He refused because he did not want to go down in the history of literature as a publisher who had suppressed a book. This book, a document of contemporary history, made it to the top of the bestseller lists of the news magazine Der Spiegel and the best list of literature in a very short time and triggered a tremendous media response.

Private complainant to the United Nations

In 1979 Brigitte Klump was drawn into German-German quarrels again when her 19-year-old nephew Klaus Klump tried to flee across the border to become a journalist with his uncle Wolf Heckmann in Hamburg. The escape failed, he was imprisoned. Through lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, the GDR refused any attempt at ransom. Klump visited the General Secretariat of the United Nations in New York and the Foreign Office and found out about the UN proceedings in 1503. Since 1980, Klump worked as a private complainant at the United Nations in Geneva. With her collective complaints she helped to reunite German-German families when intra-German negotiations failed due to the persistent refusals of the local GDR authorities. Klaus Klump and his parents were granted permission to leave the GDR on November 13, 1980, three months after the UN collective complaint was submitted, thereby confirming the effectiveness of UN method 1503 , which Brigitte Klump used to apply Resolution 1503 (XLVIII) ECOSOC had developed. Now it became clear that, with the emphasis of the United Nations, family reunions were possible without ransom. In 1981 Brigitte Klump describes in her second book, Freedom Has No Price , a report on national and international politics, the implementation of the UNO method 1503. Human trafficking has been a thing of the past since 1973, when both German states joined the United Nations (UN), has become an image problem. The GDR was literally seduced by the total recorded income of 3.4 billion DM for human trafficking to systematically incarcerate people in order to then sell them piece by piece for 95,875 DM West by lawyer Wolfgang Vogel to the Federal Republic of Germany. Publisher Rüdiger Hildebrandt, meanwhile head of Droemer and Knaur, bought the paperback rights from Freedom Has No Price in 1983 and helped this book to a great media success, especially in ARD and ZDF television programs that were seen in the GDR and thus practical citizen aid performed.

Hunger strike in favor of GDR athletes

In the case of the GDR athletes who had fled , the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED stubbornly refused to allow families to be reunited for up to seven years. Brigitte Klump mobilized a hunger strike in 1984, which she passed on to the athletes in a relay, which many high school students joined. The media hype led Egon Krenz , Politburo member responsible for sport in the GDR, to lift the travel ban for separated families. After reunification, the GDR lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who was involved in the ransom, apologized in a letter to Brigitte Klump on November 13, 1991 that they were not allowed to cooperate under the circumstances at the time . And he asserted that he had never settled the cases of your UNO complaint with the federal government . Since the GDR feared a reduction in its international reputation, from 1980 to 1989 it released the 4,000 citizens of the GDR who were listed as victims on the Klump collection lists without any further reprisals. If attacks by the Stasi against UN petitioners were attempted, Brigitte Klump protested against this by sending a telegram to the Public Prosecutor General of the GDR, thereby ensuring that in such cases the exit was ordered within 14 days. Since the authorities consist of people who do not like to be held accountable by their superiors, Brigitte Klump considered sparing these GDR authorities if they were willing to cooperate and expanded her UNO method into a cooperation model. As soon as she had submitted a collection list to the UN Secretariat in Geneva, she informed the GDR authorities concerned with advance information and asked for immediate processing, as this could avoid the UN procedure. The authorities usually thanked for this advance information with the tacit approval of the relocation within one year, so that a charge by the UN could be avoided. The cooperation model was suggested because Muammar al-Gaddafi majored the votes in the UN Human Rights Commission with his then Organization for African Unity (OUA) (now the African Union , AU) and with the votes of his 53 states his political friend Erich Honecker regularly sought to favor.

reception

State security measures

After the reunification of Germany, the “ Gauck Authority ” showed that the Central Coordination Group (ZKG) Section 5 of the MfS was involved with the activities of the “enemy” Brigitte Klump across borders and had set up the operational process “Monastery”. According to BStU documents, the Ministry for State Security occupied Brigitte Klump with “ decomposition measures ” on the soil of the Federal Republic of Germany until 1989 . 19 main departments were set up by the deputies of the Minister Erich Mielke to compromise, spy on and disinformation on the author and her family. Lieutenant General Gerhard Neiber , Colonel General Markus Wolf and Werner Großmann , Lieutenant General Rudi Mittig had the author monitored around the clock by means of postal controls, telephone surveillance and break-ins into her apartment until the collapse of the GDR.

Media coverage in the Federal Republic

In the Federal Republic of Germany, all the major print media, radio and television reported on The Red Monastery and Brigitte Klump's UN method.

  • Gerhard Zwerenz : Assassin and Secret Services . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , October 21, 1978,
  • Dieter Hildebrandt : Estate from the Red Monastery . In: Die Zeit , October 20, 1978
  • Rolf Donner: Storming the heights of culture . In: Der Spiegel , 7/1980
  • Method 1503, a German woman single-handedly wants to push through that the GDR is condemned by the UN for human rights violations . In: Der Spiegel , 36/1980
  • Divorced by wall and barbed wire . In: Stern , October 4, 1984

Works

The red monastery, a German education

From 1954, when the “red monastery” was declared an independent faculty, until 1978, when the author's book was published, there was not a single book that explained the actual conditions inside the institute. For fear of cross-border reprisals, initiated refugees kept their mouths shut, because the Red Monastery was a training institute of the Central Committee of the SED, only formally subordinate to the university. Brigitte Klump also wrote down her experiences 19 years later, when she had enough distance from her emotions. When she fled to the West in 1957, like all of her fellow students, she was a candidate for reserve officer in the GDR. According to Lenin's principles, socialist journalists should be the party's sharpest weapon . Brigitte Klump names the people involved. None of the named persons has ever brought a lawsuit, because the dialogues are reproduced authentically. The book is not an account of the past and does not defame it. Brigitte Klump describes her experiences with the MfS, as does her fellow students Reiner Kunze , Helga M. Novak and Wolf Biermann . The book was written in 5½ months and was published in various editions until 1998.

Freedom has no price, a German-German report

The book begins in 1977 at a press ball in Hamburg. Brigitte Klump accompanies her husband Wolf Heckmann, the editor-in-chief of the Hamburger Morgenpost, to the ball. A friend of the house, a South American diplomat, gradually brings Brigitte Klump back into politics. When her 19-year-old nephew Klaus was arrested while trying to escape in the GDR, the diplomat advised that the United Nations should be consulted. In 1980 she contacted the German UN Ambassador Rüdiger von Wechmar in New York, and he sent her with her petition to the General Secretariat of the United Nations. She not only wanted to help her nephew, but also other families that were separated by the wall. The responsible head of division at the Foreign Office in Bonn informs Brigitte Klump that the applicable resolution 1503 (XLVIII) of the UN Economic and Social Council has not been published. At the UN in Geneva, she inquired about the conditions of the proceedings of 1503. Here she learned that nothing could be achieved with an individual complaint. There should be at least 20 cases in a collective complaint. The deadline is August 1st; If this date is missed, you have to wait a whole year for the next hearing. German newspapers inform their readers that a housewife has found a hole in the wall . Thousands of people looking for help turn to Brigitte Klump. In a very short time, she puts together a collective complaint of 23 petitions for citizens in need. Brigitte Klump's first collective complaint led to the indictment being brought in the spring of 1981. The Eastern Bloc state GDR is in the dock of the United Nations. For the first time, the UN deals with human rights violations in the GDR. Brigitte Klump met the right people at the right time, who helped her in New York, Geneva, Berlin, Bonn and Hammamet.

Other works

  • 1998 Contributor to the top story film production Bertolt Brecht, love, revolution and other dangerous things , foreign production with ARTE and Goethe-Institut ( Babelsberg film studio )
  • 1988–2009 Systematic genealogy research on family tradition L'OEil

literature

  • Michel Meyer: Freikauf - human trafficking in Germany , Paul Zsolnay, Vienna / Hamburg 1978. Des hommes contre des marks . Editions Stock Paris 1977
  • Ludwig A. Rehlinger : Freikauf / The GDR's business with politically persecuted people 1963–1989 . Ullstein, Berlin 1991,
  • Secret alternative: UN method 1503 . In: Wolfgang Brinkschulte, Hans Jörgen Gerlach , Thomas Heise: Independent buyers - The co-earners in the West. Ullstein Report 1993 , pp. 182-204.
  • Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Siegfried Suckut, Clemens Vollnhals, Walter Süß , Roger Engelmann (eds.): Anatomy of the State Security Service , MfS manual. Berlin 1995, pp. 36-37.
  • Justice Jakob Th. Möller, Alfred de Zayas : The case-law of the United Nations Human Rights Committee 1977–2007 , A Handbook by NP Engel. Kehl / Strasbourg 2009
  • Who is who? The German "Who's Who" , celebrity encyclopedia. Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2007/08, ISBN 978-3-7950-2044-6

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The vernacular speaks of the Red Monastery. A visit to the Faculty of Journalism at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig . In: FAZ , October 1, 1955
  2. ^ Wolfgang Paul: Education in the Red Monastery . In: Kölnische Rundschau , August 30, 1978
  3. ↑ Jürgen P. Wallmann : The Widows of Bertolt Brecht , in: Rheinische Post , September 30, 1978.
  4. ^ Karl Corino Under pressure from the organs . in "Deutsche Zeitung", August 20, 1978
  5. ↑ Erhard Schreiber Why the GDR can do without prior censorship for its journalists , in: Rheinischer Merkur , September 1, 1978.
  6. ↑ Stefan Mikorey Brigitte Klump also fled from unity thinking , in: Münchner Merkur , September 7, 1978.
  7. ^ Announcement of the publisher, 4 years of elite training in the GDR. A courageous book about unimaginable conditions . In: FAZ , October 1978
  8. ^ "Klaus Klump" on the RundfunkWiki
  9. ↑ Ambassador Dr. Helmut Türk from November 16, 1978
  10. ↑ Heiner Emde: The poison of the adder - How the Stasi fought a West German woman who helped GDR citizens to leave the country legally. In: Focus , November 11, 1996
  11. ↑ The athletes have been waiting to see each other again for seven years / Brigitte Klump continues the hunger strike for family reunification. In: FAZ , September 17, 1984
  12. ↑ Klaus Blume Psychological terror against families of refugee GDR athletes
  13. ↑ Jürgen Lösselt: For seven years the GDR has not allowed the families of six refugee trainers and sports medicine specialists to leave the country . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , September 16, 1984
  14. ↑ Did Vogel receive any money from the Stasi? Accusation of the Berlin working group on government crime . In: FAZ , July 23, 1993
  15. ↑ Sylke Temple: A Convicting Woman - The writer Brigitte Klump helped 4,000 people to leave the GDR. Against eastern and western resistance . In Wochenpost , March 30, 1995
  16. ↑ Information report-VVS 0107-17047 / 86, 1986.
  17. ↑ Arnd Brummer: The story about Brigitte Klump triggered hundreds of letters / A huge echo . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung , June 20, 1982
  18. ↑ Manfred Moschner: The red monastery . In: Deutsche Welle , September 22, 1978
  19. ↑ A German education . In: Luzerner Tagblatt , October 21, 1978.
  20. ↑ Rolf Donner: Storming the heights of culture . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1980 ( online ).
  21. ↑ Method 1503, single-handedly a German woman wants to push through that the GDR is condemned by the UN for human rights violations . In: Der Spiegel . No. 36 , 1980 ( online ).
  22. ↑ Jutta Brückner, Kaj Holmberg: Bertolt Brecht, love, revolution and other dangerous things . 1998
  23. ↑ Helge Cramer (director): Die Dunkelgräfin von Hildburghausen , in "mdr", January 23, 2003
  24. ↑ Gisela Graichen: The Treasure of the Knights Templar . In: Welt der Wunder , Issue 11, 2005
  25. ↑ Hans-Michael Marten (director): Die Dunkelgräfin , in mdr Leipzig, October 28, 2007
  26. ^ The best list of literature, 5th place , in Südwestfunk, October 1978
  27. ↑ Bestseller fiction, The Red Monastery, called for months at the top of the list . in "Der Spiegel", November 1978
  28. ↑ Raimund Eberle: Award of the Federal Cross of Merit, presented by District President Raimund Eberle . In: Donau-Kurier Ingolstadt, February 22, 1985
personal data
SURNAME Klump, Brigitte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Groß-Linichen , Pomerania