Jutta Limbach

As the former president of the Federal Constitutional Court and incumbent president of the Goethe Institute, Jutta Limbach is one of those people whose voice carries particular influence in political and moral discourse in Germany today. She is one of only few women to have achieved this status – and now strives to help more women do as she has.

Jutta Limbach was born in 1934 in Berlin and studied law in Berlin and Freiburg, completing her Ph.D in 1966. In 1972 she became a professor at the Free University in Berlin. From 1989 to 1994 – as Germany was undergoing reunification – she was senator for justice in Berlin. Subsequently she was president of the Federal Constitutional Court to 2002. Today she is president of the Goethe Institute. Jutta Limbach has three children.

Jutta Limbach comes from a family of Social Democrats and has been a member of the Social Democratic Party for four decades, campaigning and fighting in her various positions and functions, and also in her writings, for civic society and a culture of commitment and solidarity. As president of the Goethe Institute she still resolutely strives for understanding and dialogue, and a culture of active debate and dissent. When she was designated to lay a wreath before the monumental statue of the North Korean “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung in conjunction with an inauguration ceremony for a reading room in Pyongyang, she interrupted the ceremony, saying that for historical reasons Germans felt uneasy with too great a personality cult, and turned back at the top of the steps.