Biography
Her father, Hans-Georg Klamroth, was a businessman, Wehrmacht officer and NSDAP member. After the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, Klamroth was sentenced to death on August 15, 1944 as an accomplice and executed on August 26, 1944. Bruhn's mother had to raise the five children alone and joined the diplomatic service of the young Federal Republic in 1949. Bruhns therefore grew up in Stockholm, Berlin and London, where she attended boarding schools. Bruhns completed his high school diploma in Berlin. This was followed by studying history and politics at the University of Hamburg. Bruhns completed a traineeship at the BILD newspaper in 1960, but she dropped out for political reasons. She then moved to NDR television in Hamburg as a freelancer. Then in 1962 she joined the ZDF studio in Hamburg as a youth editor, where, among other things, she moderated the "Drehscheibe". From 1968 to 1971, Bruhns worked as a freelancer for the weekly newspaper "Die Zeit", NDR radio and ZDF.
In May 1971, Bruhns hosted the ZDF program "heute" for the first time. As the first and then only woman on this show, the journalist became known to a wider audience. In the run-up to the 1972 federal election, Bruhns was involved in the "Social Democratic Voters' Initiative" for Willy Brandt as Chancellor, which brought her massive criticism from the right. After 380 "heute" broadcasts, Bruhns moved to WDR at the beginning of 1973, where she attracted attention in the following years with, among other things, critical articles for the political magazine "Panorama". Here, too, she repeatedly made the headlines because of her socially critical commitment. From 1974, Bruhns also worked for the magazine "stern" and as a reporter for the SWF. She had two daughters and was married to the late actor Werner Bruhns until 1977.
Bruhns then worked for the "stern" as a correspondent in Jerusalem from 1979 to 1983. In this context, her first book, "My Jerusalem" (1982), was written, which received positive reviews from critics. Following her work in Israel, the journalist was a correspondent in Washington for the same magazine for four years. She was awarded the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize in 1989 for a "Geo" report on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington that she produced there. After her return, Bruhns initially presented "Three Before Midnight" for WDR from 1989 onwards, together with Gisela Marx. In 1993 she then temporarily moved to the private broadcaster Vox, where she worked as presenter of the news program "Weltvox". From 1995 to 1998, Bruhns was head of the cultural department of the Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandeburg (ORB). On the occasion of the World Exhibition in Hanover, Bruhns acted as spokesperson for Expo 2000 from February 2000.
In connection with the deficit at the world exhibition, the Expo spokeswoman criticized the incorrect calculation templates from the federal and state governments. After completing the Expo project, Bruhns devoted himself primarily to freelance writing. In 2004, the journalist went public with her own family story: the focus of her book "My Father's Country - History of a German Family" is the upper-middle-class merchant family Klamroth and their fate in the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. In 2006 she was awarded the Friedrich Schiedel Literature Prize. In 2007 she received the Hedwig Dohm certificate from the Association of Journalists for her journalistic life's work.
Wibke Bruhns died on June 20, 2019 in Hamburg.
