Brigitte Seebacher

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Brigitte Seebacher at the Frankfurt Book Fair presenting her Brandt biography (2004)

Brigitte Seebacher , from 1983 to 2003 Seebacher-Brandt ; (Born September 23, 1946 in Twistringen ) is a German historian , journalist and publicist .

Life

After graduating from high school in Bremen in 1966 , she studied history and German in Bonn , Cologne and at the Free University of Berlin , where she passed her master's degree in 1972. In 1984 she received her doctorate there, and in her dissertation, which was supervised by Ernst Nolte , she dealt with Erich Ollenhauer . Seebacher-Brandt worked for a career as a journalist in Berlin voice , a Social Democratic newspaper, from 1977 in the press office of the Executive Board of the SPD , which she belonged from 1965 to 1995 as a member.

From 1979 (marriage 1983) until his death in 1992 she lived with Willy Brandt in Unkel . In 2003, Seebacher-Brandt married the bank manager Hilmar Kopper for the second time . In the course of this wedding, she changed her surname to Seebacher .

With her book Die Linke und die Einheit , published in 1991, and her later biography of Willy Brandt, she increasingly moved away from the SPD and left the party in 1995. At the end of his life, Brandt expressed the wish that his wife should write a book about him. She complied with this request. This is how the portrait of Willy Brandt appeared , which she herself did not understand as a biography because of the lack of distance. In it, she described him as a passionate German and a master of retreat. In the book she also spoke about SPD politicians, but especially about Herbert Wehner , whose contacts with the GDR leadership put her in the twilight of treasonous intentions. The book aroused considerable resentment among historians and companions alike. Seebacher-Brandt was accused of having interpreted her husband incorrectly in some cases or of having put her own interpretation of the story in her husband's mouth. This fact was also discussed in public. The star even dedicated a cover story to her with the headline The Weird Widow.

After Willy Brandt's death in October 1992, his second wife and mother of his three sons, Rut Brandt , did not take part in the state ceremony and the funeral. She was not invited and, according to her son Peter (on the occasion of Willy Brandt's 100th birthday), this corresponded to his father's wishes on the one hand and his mother told him that she would not have participated in an invitation: " She wasn't stupid. That would have been the found food for the media. [...] the two widows. ”Nevertheless, she would have liked to have received an invitation, but would have gone to the grave the next day to say goodbye in her own way. In the years after Brandt's death, it was often rumored in public that Seebacher-Brandt had explicitly unloaded Rut Brandt, but there is no clear evidence for this. Many years later, Egon Bahr reported that Rut Brandt had voluntarily decided not to attend the funeral.

From 1995 to 2000 she headed the Culture and Society department at Deutsche Bank . Seebacher also appears as a speaker at the Veldensteiner Kreis , a panel of contemporary historians and political and social scientists. She is a lifetime member of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation , which was established by law by the German Bundestag in 1994 and is one of the six political memorial foundations of the federal government.

She also leads seminars at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn . In summer 2008 she was appointed honorary professor.

Fonts

Web links

Commons : Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Experience contemporary history - in the Willy Brandt Forum , accessed on August 26, 2012.
  2. ↑ cf. star - 18/1993, April 29, 1993
  3. ↑ Peter Brandt in Willy Brandt - Memories of a Political Life , Documentation by André Schäfer for WDR / rbb / arte, Germany 2013. See entry at AGDOK
  4. ↑ Die Zeit No. 47 of November 14, 2013, page 16 of the dossier on Willy Brandt.
personal data
SURNAME Seebacher, Brigitte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Seebacher-Brandt, Brigitte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German historian, journalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Twist rings