Brigitte Klump (23 January 1935 – 10 July 2023) was a German author and campaigner. She was born into a relatively poor farming family, originally of Huguenot provenance. She grew up, between 1949 and 1957, in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) where she trained as a journalist, before undertaking an internship at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. Here she was mentored by Brecht's widow, the actress-director Helene Weigel. Klump escaped to West Berlin in 1957.
Subsequently, invoking United Nations resolution 1503, she was able to help approximately 4,000 East German citizens escape to West Germany, thereby reuniting families divided by the political division of Germany. She later stated that this was, in part, a conscious atonement for the failings of a distant ancestor who had been a noted lawyer in Arles. During a period of religious persecution, he had enabled thousands of Waldensians to escape abroad by successfully delaying a trial, but 4,000 had nevertheless been killed.
Brigitte Klump claimed descent from King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France via their daughter, the twenty minute queen, Marie Thérèse Charlotte de Bourbon.
Life Brigitte Klump grew up the third of five siblings in Groß-Linichen, then a small village between Stettin and Bromberg in Pomerania. Her father was a small-scale farmer and tradesman. With the intensification of ethnic cleansing during 1945 the family fled on a hospital train, ending up in Glöwen, which after May found itself in the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany. In October 1949 the area under Soviet administration was relaunched as a stand-alone Soviet sponsored state with its economic and political structures consciously modeled on those in the Soviet Union. Klump's father participated in the land ownership reforms, taking on leadership of the Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG Agricultural Production Cooperative) in Glöwen.
Klump attended school in Havelberg, passing her school leaving exams (Abitur) in 1953, after which she worked in Berlin as a volunteer on the weekly newspaper "Der Freie Bauer" ("The free peasant"). In 1954 the paper's editorial management sent her to study at the Faculty of Journalism at Leipzig. The faculty, which at this time offered the only university-level journalism courses in the country, was popularly known as "das rote Kloster" ("the red monastery"). The faculty was surrounded by high walls which were lit up through the night. East German journalism students led privileged lives, well-fed in an era of acute austerity, but their mail was censored and there were listening devices in the rooms. The Ministry for State Security (Stasi) were omnipresent. Students were encouraged to spy and report on one another. Student contemporaries included , Horst Pehnert and others who in the ensuing decades became senior political journalists in Germany's second one- party dictatorship.
In January 1956, Klump was set to write a seminar paper entitled "Die Vulgarisierung der Literatur durch Bertolt Brecht" (roughly "The vulgarisation of literature by Bertolt Brecht"). One of her tutors, Wieland Herzfelde, had published Brecht's work early in the dramatists' career and he arranged for an invitation from Brecht in order that a group of the Leipzig students might visit Brecht's theatre company at his theatre in Berlin. The University Culture Association organized a special train for 700 students to make the visit. However, at the last minute the train had to be cancelled by the authorities on account of track maintenance. Klumpe later learned from a confidant that the train cancellation had been a calculated message to Bertolt Brecht, traditionally a hero of socialism, but increasingly viewed by the authorities as troublesome. Helene Weigel, who for many years had been both Brecht's wife and his business partner, saw to it that the party leadership paid for the cancelled production. In Leipzig Brigitte Klump found herself the focus of blame for the fiasco, forced to grow out of her political naivete rapidly, and becoming familiar with the Stasi methods involving spying, denunciations and mind games used to pressure East German journalists.
Klumpe lacked the political motivation to submit to the surveillance duties that the security services assigned her, which involved spying on friends and fellow students: she sought advice from Helene Weigel. Brecht's death from a heart attack in August 1956 suddenly left Weigel as the widowed sole director of the Brecht Theatre. Weigel was able to offer Klumpe an interneeship at Berlin in theatrical production, under the supervision Brecht's former "master student", Benno Besson.Jürgen P. Wallmann: Die Witwen des Bertolt Brecht, in: Rheinische Post, 30. September 1978. during the 1956/57 season. As matters turned out, once Klumpe moved to Berlin, Weigel herself also took her in hand. Klumpe learned why the theatre principal showed her such kindness from other actors. "You are the first girl in the theatre that hasn't passed through Brecht's hands" When she protested that she would have been much too young to be of interest to the grand old man of East German theatre, Klumpe reported that she was assured, "that would not have put him off: on the contrary....".
During early 1957 Hermann Budzislawski, the dean of the Leipzig Journalism Faculty, discussed the case of Brigitte Klump in an informal chat with the theatre director Helene Weigel. He made it clear that undertaking surveillance duties on behalf of the Ministry for State SecurityKarl Corino Unter dem Druck der Organe. in "Deutsche Zeitung", 20. August 1978 was a necessary precondition for receiving the diploma necessary to work as a socialist journalist.Erhard Schreiber Warum die DDR bei ihren Journalisten auf Vorzensur verzichten kann, in: Rheinischer Merkur, 1. September 1978. It would be more than another three years before the ever more intensive political division of Berlin was reinforced with a physical wall: on 13 November 1957 Brigitte Klump fledStefan Mikorey Auch Brigitte Klump floh vor dem Einheitsdenken, in: Münchner Merkur, 7. September 1978. to West Berlin and enrolled at the Free University of Berlin in order to progress her studies. She subsequently removed herself from university before completing her degree course.
Highlights
"Das rote Kloster" By 1978 Brigitte Klump was ready to publish her first book, "Das rote Kloster". The book was a quasi-autobiographical work based on her time as a journalism student in Leipzig. The publishers were ,Verlagsankündigung, 4 Jahre Elite-Schulung in der DDR. Ein mutiges Buch über unvorstellbare Verhältnisse. In: FAZ, Oktober 1978 a long-established publishing house based in Hamburg. Although both the author and the publisher were residents in West Germany, the subject matter concerned East Germany where the authorities became concerned over the book's imminent appearance. The East German Ministry of Culture, communicating through Otto Gotsche, a writer turned politician who since 1966 had been a member of the country's powerful Party Central Committee, offered the Hamburg publisher Rüdiger Hildebrandt one million marks to acquire the rights to the book in order to prevent its publication. Hildebrandt rejected the offer, however, because he did not want to go down in history as the publisher who had suppressed a book.
Although it dealt with a period twenty years earlier, this was the first book to shine a light on the so-called "Red Monastery" - the Leipzig University Faculty of Journalism. Those who knew about it had thus far kept their mouths shut for fear of reprisals, because although the faculty operated formally under the aegis of the university, it was in reality a training academy controlled by the Party Central Committee. Klump indicated that she herself had delayed publication for nineteen years in order sufficiently to distance herself from the emotional encumbrances of her time in Leipzig. When she fled to the west in 1957 she was, like all her fellow students, a "Civil reserve officer" ("Reserveoffiziersbewerber") of the German Democratic Republic. It was a precept of Leninist doctrine that journalists were the sharpest weapon in the party arsenal. Brigitte Klump identifies the principal protagonists in her record by name. None of those named has ever filed a complaint alleging that dialogues reported are not authentic. The book is not presented as any kind of "reckoning" with the past, and shuns defamation. Klump simply provides a factual record of her experiences with the Ministry for State Security and with fellow students such as Reiner Kunze, Helga M. Novak and Wolf Biermann. "Das rote Kloster" was written in 5½ months, and continued to be available in various editions for twenty years, till 1998.
The appearance of "Das rote Kloster" in November 1978, was accompanied by a resounding media fanfare, and it quickly climbed the bestseller lists although the critics were not universally adulatory, with Dieter Hildebrandt complaining in Die Zeit of syntax appearing in recorded conversations that felt more resonant of the seventies than of the fifties, the decade in which the action of the book is set.
Private plaintiff before the United Nations For some years after the establishment, in 1949, of separate West and East German states, the frontier between the two was completely porous. During the 1950s the economic performance of the two states diverged as West Germany recovered strongly and East Germany did not. Sources differ over the extent to which political repression also triggered or exacerbated discontent, but a spate of high-profile show trials in East Berlin followed by a forcibly suppressed uprising in 1953 make it clear that the methods employed by the party to consolidate and maintain power in East Germany were not universally accepted. Through the 1950s there was a steady stream of East Germans migrating to the West, with the working age demographic featuring disproportionately. Birgitte Klump was part of that. By August 1961, when the Berlin Wall made escape from East Germany not merely illegal but also under most circumstances impossible, East Germany was desperately short of workers. The closing of the frontier had been a progressive process, however, and it left many families physically and apparently permanently divided. In 1979 the issue became personal when Brigitte's nineteen-year-old nephew, Klaus Klump, attempted to escape across the border in order to become a journalist with the Hamburg newspaper edited by his uncle, Wolf Heckmann. The escape attempt failed, and 1980 found young Klaus Klump was still imprisoned in a Cottbus jail.