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Brigitte Seebacher
Brigitte Seebacher, from 1983 to 2003 Seebacher-Brandt, (* 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 language and literature in Bonn, Cologne and at the Free University of Berlin, where she took her master's degree in 1972. She received her doctorate there in 1984; her dissertation, supervised by Ernst Nolte, dealt with Erich Ollenhauer. After a career as a journalist at Berliner Stimme, a Social Democratic newspaper, Seebacher-Brandt worked from 1977 in the press office of the executive committee of the SPD, of which she was a member from 1965 to 1995.

From 1979 (marriage in 1983) until his death in 1992, she lived with Willy Brandt in Unkel[1]. In 2003 Seebacher-Brandt married in second marriage the bank manager Hilmar Kopper. On the occasion of this marriage, she changed her last name to Seebacher.

With her book Die Linke und die Einheit (The Left and Unity), published in 1991, and her later biography of Willy Brandt, she increasingly distanced herself from the SPD and resigned from 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 wish. Thus appeared the portrait of Willy Brandt, 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 commented on SPD politicians, but especially on Herbert Wehner, whose contacts with the GDR leadership she cast into the twilight of treasonous intentions. The book aroused considerable resentment among historians and also among companions. Seebacher-Brandt was accused of having interpreted her husband partially incorrectly or of having put her own interpretation of history into her husband's mouth. This fact was also discussed in public. Stern magazine even devoted a cover story to her with the headline "Die unheimliche Witwe".

After Willy Brandt's death in October 1992, his second wife and mother of his three sons, Rut Brandt, did not attend the state ceremony and the funeral. She was not invited and, according to her son Peter (on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Willy Brandt), this was, on the one hand, in accordance with his father's wishes and, on the other hand, his mother had said to him that she would not have taken part even if she had been invited: "She was not stupid. That would have been the found food for the media. [...] the two widows." Nevertheless, she would have gladly 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, there were many public rumors that Seebacher-Brandt had pursued an explicit invitation to Rut Brandt, for which, however, there is no clear evidence. Egon Bahr reported many years later that Rut Brandt had refrained from attending the funeral on her own initiative.

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

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

Fonts

 * Ollenhauer. Biedermann und Patriot. Siedler, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88680-144-6 (Vorwort von Ernst Nolte).
 * Bebel. Künder und Kärrner im Kaiserreich. Dietz, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-8012-0137-6.
 * Die Linke und die Einheit. Siedler, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-88680-375-9.
 * Politik im Rücken. Zeitgeist im Sinn. Ullstein, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-550-07076-4.
 * Willy Brandt. Piper, München 2004, ISBN 3-492-04383-6.

Weblinks