Klaus Bresser

Klaus Bresser was born in Berlin on 22 July 1936, the son of an engineer. He attended schools in Berlin, in Kalisz in occupied Poland and finally in Aachen, where his parents had fled in the last year of the Second World War. While still at school he wrote articles for the Aachener Volkszeitung and the Aachener Nachrichten. He passed his Abitur at Aachen's Couven-Gymnasium in 1956 and went on to study German literature, sociology and theatre studies in Cologne.

Alongside his studies Bresser trained at the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, joining as a trainee in 1958. At 26 he became the paper's chief reporter and covered the visits of Charles de Gaulle, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to West and East Germany. He won the Theodor Wolff Prize in 1963.

In 1965 he joined WDR, taking over the editorial team of the investigative magazine Monitor in 1971 and later leading its current affairs group, where he helped develop Tagesthema, the forerunner of ARD's Tagesthemen, and presented Brennpunkt specials.

In December 1977 he moved to ZDF as deputy head and presenter of the new heute-journal, which he conceived with Dieter Kronzucker and Gustav Trampe and which launched on 2 January 1978. He presented it for six years and led it from 1981. From 1983 he headed ZDF's domestic politics department, responsible for programmes such as Die Reportage and Länderspiegel, and in 1985 he co-created the interview series Was nun, ...?, which became a classic of German political television.

In 1988 he succeeded Reinhard Appel as ZDF's fourth editor-in-chief, a post he held for twelve years. He introduced or oversaw formats including ZDF spezial, the ZDF-Morgenmagazin, Frontal and the talk show Berlin Mitte, extended the heute-journal and led the channel's reunification coverage from the Reichstag on 2 and 3 October 1990. He also wrote and edited books, including Was nun? Über Fernsehen, Moral und Journalisten (1992).

Bresser was married twice. He lived in Berlin and Wiesbaden with his wife Evelyn, who had worked in designer fashion; she died in March 2026. From 2015 the couple were active in helping war refugees. In later years he lived with Parkinson's disease but continued to work on publications. He was a founding member of the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Prize for television journalism.

Klaus Bresser died in Berlin, the city of his birth, on 7 October 2026 at the age of 90. ZDF announced his death on 9 October. Director general Norbert Himmler said Bresser had shaped the journalistic profile of ZDF and always stood for independence and fair dealing, and editor-in-chief Bettina Schausten said programmes such as heute-journal and Was nun, ...? still resonate today.

Bresser is remembered as one of the architects of modern German television news. The heute-journal and Was nun, ...? remain fixtures of ZDF's schedule, and his insistence that journalists should be advocates of the public rather than servants of the powerful influenced a generation of broadcasters. A digital archive of his work, klausbresser.tv, was created at Hochschule RheinMain.