30 Facts About Hildigund Neubert

Hildigund Neubert's father is the distinguished retired Evangelical theologian Heino Falcke.

Hildigund Neubert grew up in Gnadau, an isolated village to the north of Quedlinburg, founded in 1767 as a seat for the Moravian Church.

Hildigund Neubert's mother, Almuth Falcke, had trained and qualified as a nurse, but as soon as the first of her five children was born, in 1957, she had abandoned her career in order to focus on looking after her family.

Thanks to the smuggling talents of some of their more ingenious visitors from the far side of the ever more militarised internal frontier, Hildigund Neubert became familiar with the children's books of traditionalist socialist writers such as Erich Kastner, James Kruss and Astrid Lindgren, none of whom would have appeared on any list of the party's preferred authors.

Hildigund Neubert studied at the academy between 1979 and 1984.

Between 1983 and 1987 Hildigund Neubert Falcke worked as a member of the chorus at the Weimar-based German National Theatre and Concert Company.

Hildigund Neubert was employed at the time as a parish priest and was emerging as a leading figure in the East German peace movement which was something of a surrogate for more broadly based church opposition to the ruling party in the East German one-party state.

Ehrhart Neubert was already a great admirer of Heino Falcke, and by 1987, he had married Falcke's daughter, Hildigund.

Hildigund Neubert hurried over with the babies' pram filled with thermos flasks of hot tea to try and help.

Ehrhart Hildigund Neubert had many friends and contacts in the citizens' movement: many of its Berlin-based protagonists, such as Barbel Bohley, Rainer Eppelmann, Rudi Pahnke, Hans-Jochen Tschiche and Edelbert Richter, became regular visitors to the couple's home.

Hildigund Neubert had already left the apartment with the children, so missed the opening hours of the meeting, but when she returned at around half past nine in the evening, the apartment was still full of people, and the "foundation congress" of Demokratischer Aufbruch was still in full swing.

For hundreds of thousands of supporters of the citizens' movement who believed in something better for the country, including Hildigund Neubert, it was immediately clear after the events of 4 November 1989 that the "German Democratic Republic", as it had hitherto existed, was finished.

At this stage Hildigund Neubert was in no hurry to follow former DA colleagues into the CDU.

Ehrhart and Hildigund Neubert were instrumental in setting up the "Free Baltics Committee" in order to help some of the escapees.

Hildigund Neubert would become exasperated by the growth of "Ostalgie", a nostalgia for the old East German dictatorship.

Hildigund Neubert continues [in 2020] to retain close links with the Berlin "Burgerburo".

In December 1996, together with a number of friends who might have been described by commentators as "former East German citizens' rights activists", Hildigund Neubert joined the centre-right CDU, thereby reversing the decision implicit in her resignation from DA back in 1990.

Hildigund Neubert was attracted by the CDU's promotion of public, open and detailed re-appraisal of the forty years of one-party dictatorship between 1949 and 1989, with a particular emphasis on the conduct of the East German security services.

The clinching argument for Hildigund Neubert was that the CDU held itself out as a Christian party.

Between 1994 and 1998, slightly implausibly, a rising star in Helmut Kohl's final government was a woman who had, like Hildigund Neubert, grown up in the German Democratic Republic as the daughter of a Protestant pastor.

The political education from which Hildigund Neubert benefitted was salutary.

Hildigund Neubert was selected as the CDU candidate for Berlin-Lichtenberg.

Hildigund Neubert found her election posters were promptly defaced or torn down by the "comrades of the armed organs" who had served the East German state and still mourned its passing.

Ehrhart Neubert was by now 63 and nearing retirement, but Hildigund was still only 43, and keen to take on a new public role when Thuringia's new Minister-president, Dieter Althaus, proposed her for the Erfurt-based job in succession to Jurgen Haschke.

In some ways Hildigund Neubert's responsibilities were not so different from those she had undertaken at the Burgerburo, but as only the second Thuringia State Commissioner for Stasi records she had the chance to set her own priorities according to her own assessments of what was needed.

Hildigund Neubert prioritized helping former victims of state persecution with rehabilitation and restitution procedures.

When Hildigund Neubert retired from the job in 2013, Landtag President Birgit Diezel, paid tribute to the great passion and unstinting commitment which she had applied to the job.

Hildigund Neubert explained that more than twenty years after the ending of the dictatorship, further examination of Stasi files to check out whether new applicants for jobs in the public and private sectors were in most cases superfluous, since younger job applicants were too young to have been involved with the Stasi, while the necessary checks had in most cases already been performed in respect of older applicants.

Since 2011 Hildigund Neubert has been a board member of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and, since 2013, a highly visible vice-chairwoman of it.

In 2006 Hildigund Neubert was awarded the Order of Merit.