Klara Heydebreck

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Klara Heydebreck (born July 16, 1896 in Berlin ; † March 10, 1969 there ) was a German accountant whose life became known to a larger audience through a documentary by Eberhard Fechner .

Life

Klara Gertrud Heydebreck was born as the youngest child of a Berlin house owner. After her parents divorced around 1900, she and her youngest siblings lived with their mother. After the father's death in 1907, the financial circumstances were rather modest; Since the mother did not have a job and did not receive a pension, the children living with her had to earn their own income by working as early as possible. Accordingly, Klara finished her schooling after elementary school in 1910, despite very good grades, and completed an apprenticeship as a commercial clerk. Through various advanced training courses, she expanded her knowledge of her own accord in the course of her professional life. After the siblings got married and started their own families, Klara continued to live with her mother, since 1911 in a two-room apartment on Grüntaler Strasse in Berlin-Wedding, where she was to live until her death. She was often ridiculed by her siblings as a "missed miss" and urged to marry and start a family. However, despite a short-term relationship, she remained single and lived alone after her mother's death.

Klara's pronounced cultural interest was striking for her amusical environment: In addition to music (she attended concerts and sang in the Berlin Volks-Chor ), she was interested in art, she attended exhibitions, took drawing lessons, read a lot and completed courses at the adult education center, for example. B. for foreign languages. However, she found no understanding for this occupation from her family, only a friend who sang with her in the choir shared it. During the Third Reich, Klara was a member of the National Socialist Women's Association , but did not appear politically. Baptized and confirmed Evangelical, she later left the church, but rejoined in 1931. She spent the war and post-war years in Berlin; Relatives later stated that possibly traumatic experiences during this time could have contributed to their behavior, which they then began to see as unusual.

As before the war, her professional activity was interrupted by multiple unemployment, but through strict austerity she managed not only to find a livelihood, but also to support those in need. Nevertheless, Klara became increasingly lonely, the contact with the family broke off almost completely, she could not meet her friend from the pre-war period and the common choir singing after the German division and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, because she lived in East Berlin ; Klara Heydebreck also cared less and less of her cultural interests. With her neighbors in the house, she was considered a quirky and dismissive loner, with whom no one had contact and whom one only knew by sight. Apparently she felt persecuted and therefore refused any contact with the outside world, but on the other hand suffered greatly from the loneliness. When her made to create even more and more health problems, committed Klara Heidebreck 1969 with an overdose of sleeping pills suicide .

documentary

Eberhard Fechner visited the Berlin police for a documentary film on the subject of suicide, for which he said he had not written a script but wanted to be guided by the research results and accidentally picked out Klara Heydebreck's death from among several reported on that day. He sought contact with her family, neighbors and former work colleagues as well as the departments dealing with her death. The family left him the estate of Klara Heydebreck; From these documents and interviews with people who had known Klara, the documentary film Nachrede auf Klara Heydebreck , which was first broadcast at the end of 1969, emerged . Look at an underestimated and misjudged life . By evaluating the estate and questioning the environment, the social and economic framework conditions of a woman could be shown who probably did not want to adapt to the prevailing image of women, encountered incomprehension in her environment because of her cultural interests and finally became completely lonely. The question asked at the beginning of the film, why Klara had ended her life, had to remain open, the stories of those around her suggest that either loneliness or the fear of having to give up her independent life was the reason.

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personal data
SURNAME Heydebreck, Klara
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heydebreck, Clara
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German accountant
DATE OF BIRTH July 16, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 1969
Place of death Berlin