Carola von Braun

Carola von Braun was born on 12 September 1942 in Nakuru, in the British Colony of Kenya, during the Second World War. She was the eldest of five children of Hildegard Beck-Margis (1915 to 2001) and the diplomat Sigismund von Braun, and belonged to the von Braun noble family. Her grandfather Magnus von Braun had served as a minister in the Papen and Schleicher cabinets at the end of the Weimar Republic, and her uncle was the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. The cultural scientist Christina von Braun is her sister.

Her maternal grandmother, Hildegard Margis, died in the Barnimstraße women's prison in Berlin after being accused of belonging to a resistance group connected to Anton Saefkow and Franz Jacob. From 1944 to 1949 Carola lived with her mother and siblings in Vatican City, where her father was a legation secretary at the German embassy to the Holy See.

She later grew up in Bonn and completed her Abitur at the Nicolaus-Cusanus-Gymnasium in 1961. She studied English and history, first at the University of Bonn and then in Berlin.

Von Braun first worked as a journalist. From 1973 she was an assistant in Bonn to members of the Bundestag including Dieter Lattmann of the SPD, Helga Schuchardt of the FDP and Anke Martiny of the SPD, and in 1974 she joined the Free Democratic Party.

In 1975 she was elected to the district council of the Rhein-Sieg-Kreis, where she led the FDP group from 1979 to 1981. She was elected to the Bundestag in 1980 and served until the early end of the parliament in 1983, working mainly on education and cultural policy. She was seen as part of the left wing of her party and in 1982 opposed the end of the SPD and FDP coalition under Helmut Schmidt.

In 1984 she was appointed the first Women's Representative of the Senate of West Berlin under Eberhard Diepgen, and she kept the post in the red-green Momper Senate from 1989 until 1990. After reunification the Berlin FDP was the first party in the city to unite its eastern and western branches, and in 1990 she was elected its leader. From 1991 to 1994 she was a member of the Berlin House of Representatives and led the FDP group there.

In 1994 she resigned her party posts after it was revealed that travel and hairdresser costs had been paid with party money, an episode known as the Figaro affair. She afterwards worked on education in the Berlin Senate administration until 2005.

Alongside politics she sat on the board of trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation from 1982 to 1992. From the 1990s she held leadership positions in the German Evangelical Church Assembly and the synod of the Protestant Church in Germany, worked with the Berlin Protestant church on economics and labour, and from 2008 to 2018 was vice president of the Evangelische Akademie zu Berlin.

Von Braun was married twice and had two sons. Her second husband was the lawyer Jürgen Colsman, to whom she was married until his death in 2021. The couple lived in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin.

Women's rights were the thread through much of her public life. In 1992 she founded the Überparteiliche Fraueninitiative Berlin, a cross-party initiative that linked women working in parliament with those active in grassroots women's projects, and she was a founding member of the federal association of Liberal Women.

Carola von Braun died on Friday 7 August 2026 at the age of 83. Her death was announced by the Berlin Senate Chancellery on 11 August. No cause of death was made public.

Berlin's governing mayor Kai Wegner said that with her death Berlin had lost a pioneer of women's and equality policy, and that as the city's first Women's Representative she had set standards for later generations. The Friedrich Naumann Foundation published an obituary by the Berlin FDP politician Maren Jasper-Winter, who called her a political role model and praised her courage, her clarity and her ability to build bridges across party lines. The Überparteiliche Fraueninitiative Berlin also published a tribute.

Von Braun is remembered as the woman who created the role of Women's Representative in the Berlin Senate and helped put equality policy on the city's political agenda. The cross-party women's initiative she founded continued to work after her retirement from front-line politics and honoured her with an award in 2026.

Her honours included the Federal Cross of Merit in 2009, the Louise Schroeder Medal of the state of Berlin in 2015 and the title of honorary elder of the city of Berlin in 2021, one of the city's highest distinctions.