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.

Klump's father participated in the land ownership reforms, taking on leadership of the Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG Agricultural Production Cooperative) in Glöwen.

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.

[1] Student contemporaries included Klaus Raddatz [de], Horst Pehnert and others who in the ensuing decades became senior political journalists in Germany's second one- party dictatorship.

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.

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.

[1] 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 Security[10] was a necessary precondition for receiving the diploma necessary to work as a socialist journalist.

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.

[4] 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.

[14] 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 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.

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.

[18] It set out how the idea of involving the United Nations in attempts to free her nephew had originated from discussions with a family friend who was an Argentinian diplomat.

She received thousands of pleas for help, and she very quickly assembled a first dossier concerning 23 (East) German citizens identified as deserving of release from political imprisonment.

The country's sportsmen and women enjoyed international travel privileges that were denied to their fellow citizens, and as a result of which a number escaped to the west, over the years while competing abroad.

[20] The ensuing media storm persuaded Egon Krenz, at that time the Politburo member responsible for sports politics, to lift the travel ban on the split families of the escaped sportsmen and women.

[21] After reunification in 1990 the lawyer who had negotiated the "Häftlingsfreikauf" releases on behalf of the East German government, Wolfgang Vogel, wrote to Brigitte Klump a letter, dated 13 November 1991,[22] apologizing that he had not been permitted to co-operate with her ("dass sie unter den damaligen Verhältnissen nicht kooperieren durften") under the structures in place before 1990.

It was from Vogel that the figure of 4,000 came, as the number of East German citizens who had been released without any of the financial incentives involved in "Häftlingsfreikauf",[23] because they had appeared on Brigitte Klump's lists for submission to the international body.

[24] She was assigned to the ministry's "Central Coordination Group (ZKG) - Department 5", and included in a more wide ranging programme under the code name "Kloster", which was presumably a reference to the title of her first book.