[1] Brender was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, then French zone of occupation, today Baden-Württemberg.

After schooling at a Jesuit school in St. Blasien in the southern Black Forest (Kolleg St. Blasien), he studied jurisprudence and political science at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau, Munich and Hamburg, earning a Staatsexamen degree in 1978.

Brender has been working as a journalist since 1978, initially for the Zeit, a weekly newspaper from Hamburg (1978–80) and the Südwestrundfunk, the regional TV station of southwestern Germany (Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate) (1978–82).

Following that, he was the head of the foreign correspondents department of the regional TV station for North Rhine Westphalia, the WDR, until 1993.

Controversially, he had to quit this post in March 2010 after the extension of his contract with ZDF was denied by a majority of the station's administrative board members that are politically affiliated with the German Conservative party (the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)).