Klaus Gysi

Klaus Gysi (3 March 1912 – 6 March 1999) was a journalist and publisher and a member of the French Resistance against the Nazis. After World War II, he became a politician in the German Democratic Republic, serving in the government as Minister of Culture from 1966 to 1973, and from 1979 to 1988, as the State Secretary for Church Affairs. He was a member of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and after German Reunification, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). His son is the German politician Gregor Gysi. Life Gysi was born in Neukölln, a borough of Berlin, Germany. His father was a doctor and his mother a bookkeeper. He attended grade school and Gymnasium in Neukölln and in 1928, joined the Young Communist League of Germany, the Workers International Relief and the Sozialistischer Schülerbund. He received his Abitur from the Odenwaldschule in Darmstadt in 1931, and that same year, joined the Communist Party (KPD). From 1931 to 1935, he studied social economics in Frankfurt am Main, the Sorbonne in Paris, and in Berlin. He became active in the left-wing students' movement in 1931 and in 1935; he was expelled from Humboldt University of Berlin. He went to Cambridge, England in 1936 and later, to Paris, France, where in 1939, he became one of the student leaders of the Communist Party there. He was then detained in France from 1939 to 1940, afterward returning to Germany on order of the KPD, accompanied by his wife, Irene. In Berlin, Gysi worked at the publisher Hoppenstedt & Co. and was involved in underground political activities against the Third Reich.