Uwe-Karsten Heye

Uwe-Karsten Heye was born on 31 October 1940 in Reichenberg (Liberec) while his father Wolfgang, a Berlin-born singer, was engaged at the theatre there. His mother Ursula came from Danzig. When Wolfgang was drafted into the Wehrmacht, Ursula took Uwe-Karsten and his older sister to their grandparents in Danzig. Wolfgang deserted, was imprisoned and sent to a punishment battalion; Ursula was pressed to divorce him.

In January 1945 the family nearly sailed on the Wilhelm Gustloff, but left by train instead for a relative in Rostock and so survived the ship's sinking. After the war each parent believed the other dead, and they only rediscovered one another in 1960, by which time Wolfgang had remarried. The family later lived in Rostock, Hamburg and Mainz, where Heye began journalism.

After his traineeship Heye worked for several newspapers. From 1974 to 1979 he was press officer and speechwriter for former chancellor and SPD leader Willy Brandt. In the 1980s he freelanced for ARD and ZDF.

In 1990 Gerhard Schröder appointed him state secretary and spokesman of the Lower Saxony state government. When Schröder became federal chancellor in 1998, Heye became head of the Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung and spokesman of the federal government, serving until 2002 through the early years of the red-green coalition.

From 2003 to 2005 he was German consul general in New York. From January 2006 to September 2010 he was editor-in-chief of the SPD newspaper Vorwärts. He wrote books on German family history, demographic change and politics, and in 2018 published his autobiography Und nicht vergessen.

In 2000 Heye co-founded Gesicht Zeigen! Für ein weltoffenes Deutschland e.V., a civic group opposing xenophobia, racism and right-wing extremism, and long served as its board chair. In May 2006 a Deutschlandradio interview in which he urged foreign visitors to avoid certain areas of eastern Germany because of racist violence triggered intense criticism and a wider debate on so-called no-go areas.

He lived from 2006 in Potsdam-Babelsberg with his third wife, culture consultant Sabine Haack. They had a son; he also had a daughter from his first marriage.

Heye died on 30 July 2026 at the age of 85. The Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung announced the death on 3 August 2026 and published a tribute from government spokesman Stefan Kornelius. Gesicht Zeigen! also confirmed the news. A public memorial service was held in the Friedenskirche in Potsdam on 20 August 2026; Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender attended. Burial was planned later in a private family circle. No cause of death was stated in the official announcements.

Heye is remembered as the first government spokesman of the Schröder era, as a link between Willy Brandt's press circle and later SPD communication, and as a persistent civic campaigner against racism and antisemitism through Gesicht Zeigen!. His family memoir and its ZDF adaptation Schicksalsjahre brought a personal wartime story to a wide audience. German political figures across parties marked his death as the loss of a clear, humane public voice.