Hildegard Hamm-Brücher

Hildegard Hamm-Brücher (11 May 1921 – 7 December 2016) was a prominent liberal politician in Germany. She held federal state secretary positions from 1969 to 1972 and from 1977 to 1982. She was the Free Democratic Party's candidate in the first two rounds of the federal presidency elections in 1994.

Hamm-Brücher was born in Essen, Germany and grew up with four siblings in a non-political, bourgeois family. Her father was director of an electric firm; her mother maintained the household. Unexpectedly, her parents died within a year of each other when she was only ten and eleven years old. After the death of her parents, along with her siblings, she was brought up by her widowed grandmother in Dresden. Her grandmother came from an industrial family, whose ancestors had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. Hamm-Brücher received her Abitur in 1939 and studied chemistry in Munich. She received her doctorate in chemistry in 1945 and began working as a science journalist for the Neue Zeitung, an American-run newspaper, in what was then still occupied Germany.

Hamm-Brücher joined the Free Democratic Party in 1948. She was elected to the Munich city council from 1948 to 1954, the Landtag of Bavaria from 1950 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1976, and the Bundestag from 1976 to 1990. Hamm-Brücher focussed much of her work on education policy, and was appointed as secretary of state to the Hessian and federal Ministry for Education in 1967 and 1969, respectively. She also served as a Minister of State in the German Foreign Office from 1977 to 1982, while her party was part of a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party.

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