Klaus Behnke

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Klaus Behnke (born July 2, 1950 in Teltow ; † September 13, 2015 in Berlin-Gatow ) was a psychologist and author who was expatriated from the GDR in 1977.

Life

Behnke studied psychology at the Humboldt University in Berlin until his enrollment was revoked because of protests against the GDR state party, the SED . After studying theology in 1977, he was expatriated to West Berlin and was banned from entering the GDR until 1989 . He referred to it as a “prison camp with green spaces”. In the 1980s he worked as a consultant at the Waldstrasse meeting point in Berlin-Moabit, a contact point for people in need, primarily addicts.

After the fall of the wall and the opening of the Stasi documents , the future Federal President Joachim Gauck of the Stasi documents authority asked him if he would like to look after those inspecting files. During this activity, advising people who had been betrayed to the Stasi by their closest family members, he noticed how precisely and individually the Stasi’s decomposition measures were tailored to the victims. He suspected that psychologists and psychiatrists had worked on it, which he finally found confirmed when inspecting the files of the Stasi records authorities: At the Stasi University in Potsdam there was a secret department of operational psychology , where Stasi officers learned to psychologically assess their victims in order to be able to suppress and manipulate them better afterwards. He examined the Stasi methods and the trauma caused by them in the victims and processed his experience in counseling and care for Stasi victims in 1995 in the book Zersetzung der Seele , published with Jürgen Fuchs , in which he deals with psychology and psychiatry in the service of Stasi argued. This was followed by a second book, Stasi in the schoolyard .

In the summer of 1998, the advice center "Gegenwind" was founded for people who had experienced political imprisonment and decomposition and suffered damage to their health, and Behnke and civil rights activist Jürgen Fuchs were particularly committed to bringing it about.

Behnke worked as a psychotherapist in private practice in Berlin.

Fonts

  • with Jürgen Fuchs : decomposition of the soul: psychology and psychiatry in the service of the Stasi. Rotbuch Verlag 1995.
  • with Jürgen Wolf: Stasi in the schoolyard. Ullstein 1998.
  • Stasi in the schoolyard: the abuse of children and young people by the Ministry for State Security. Ullstein, 1998.
  • Decomposition Measures - The State Security Service's “Operational Psychology” and its traumatic consequences. In: Ulrich Baumann, Helmut Kury (ed.): Politically motivated persecution: Victims of SED injustice (= criminological research reports from the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law. Vol. 84). Ed. iuscrim, Freiburg (Breisgau) 1998, ISBN 3-86113-028-9 , pp. 379-399.
  • with Stefan Trobisch : Raising panic and consternation: The practice of "operational psychology" of the State Security Service and its traumatic consequences. In: Klaus-Dieter Müller, Annegret Stephan (editor): The past does not let us go: prison conditions of political prisoners in the Soviet occupation zone / GDR and their health consequences. Berlin-Verlag Arno Spitz, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87061-812-4 , pp. 173-195.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heike Vowinkel: "In the GDR there was a real blindness to the soul" Morgenpost.de November 4, 2009.
  2. ^ Klaus Behnke (born 1950) . ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed on April 9, 2017]).
  3. ^ Psychosocial Initiative Moabit eV
personal data
SURNAME Behnke, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychologist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 2nd July 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Teltow
DATE OF DEATH 13th September 2015
Place of death Berlin-Gatow , Germany