I want to counter the emptiness with something meaningful

Baghdad, April 7, 2003. Christian Liebig made it. As one of the few German and worldwide 600 accredited journalists, he accompanies the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd US Infantry Division, in which he is “embedded” – embedded, on their advance to the Iraqi capital. He is where he always wanted to be. At the immediate scene of the action, to report as truthfully as possible about what he sees and hears with his own eyes.

He is happy to receive direct information from the command staff, but remains an incorruptible war observer, as he has been on missions in Congo, Somalia and Kosovo. This is also the quality of his reports: they are direct, unbiased eyewitness accounts. In his words, he knows how to paint an impressive, authentic picture of the war. He does not need photos.

Christian Liebig keeps an online war diary, informs his colleagues from the FOCUS editorial office several times a day by satellite phone about what is happening and also reports regularly on the Hessian private radio station FFH. He is not an adventurer who recklessly puts his life on the line and seeks out danger, but is not afraid of it in his search for the truth.

Christian Liebig: No daredevil

“No story is worth dying for,” he wrote in his online diary just a few weeks ago and therefore made a conscious decision against her that morning. Together with his Spanish colleague Julio Anguita Parrado of the daily newspaper “El Mundo”, he stayed at the headquarters of the 2nd Brigade 15 kilometres outside the city. As a precaution, he and Parrado have refrained from accompanying the commandos advancing on Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces.

Christian also thinks of the constant fear that his parents and his partner at home have for him. And of the plans that Beatrice and he had made before he left for Iraq. “I think I have made the most important decision of my life,” he says the evening before on the phone to his editor-in-chief Helmut Markwort. And laughingly follows up when he answers him that he should not risk anything: “I decided against the Pulitzer Prize and for my safety.

Against the Pulitzer Prize, supposedly for safety

“One of those moments in life when you are absolutely powerless.”

Should we call it fateful, grotesque, tragic or all of them together that Christian’s caution, of all things, cost him his life?

The advance of the troops into the presidential palaces has been successful, but the battles for the capital are still going on. Christian is standing in the headquarters right next to the command staff, he has just before transmitted the good news about the success of the action to his editorial office and also called his parents: “Switch on FFH, here comes an interview with me”. Then he and Parrado move away a bit to transmit further news. It is the moment when the Iraqi ground-to-ground missile, the only one that hits human targets during this war, hits not even 5 meters away from them.

The American Lieutenant Colonel Eric Wesley, who often discussed the meaning of the Iraq war with the two journalists, later says that everything went so fast and Christian must have been dead immediately. “Everyone hadn’t moved a bit from the place where they had last been seen. It was one of those moments in life when you are absolutely powerless.

After the impact and the subsequent incredibly loud explosion, fire and panic break out all over the camp. Buildings, vehicles and equipment are immediately set ablaze. In addition to Christian and Parrado, three US soldiers are killed and fourteen others are injured.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Christian Liebig is the only German of a total of 14 journalists who lose their lives in Iraq. His colleagues, however, who accompanied the dangerous advance of the American command to the presidential palaces that day, while Christian remained at headquarters for security reasons, all return home safely.

The sympathy that follows the news of the death of the reporter, who has just turned 35 years old, is enormous. Hundreds of letters and e-mails reach the FOCUS editorial office. Readers, politicians, colleagues, friends and acquaintances express their condolences in touching words, pay tribute to Christian’s work and humanity, and try to give his family and companion at least a little comfort in their grief. And Helmut Markwort announces: “We want to make his work unforgettable.”

However, can such a loss really bring comfort and make Christian Liebig’s work truly unforgettable?

I could not and would not hold him back

Yes, says Beatrice von Keyserlingk, Christian’s former partner, when today, 17 years after his death, she talks about the time after Christian’s death and takes stock.

For Beatrice, April 7, 2003 is a day like any other. Like Christian’s parents, she too has learned to live with the fear for him. The risk in his assignments as a reporter in crisis areas was always high, even though he promised them not to go with the troops in the middle of the action, to the front line. Beatrice also knew how important his work was to Christian. That it was his vocation, that it made him happy.

“Christian wanted to go to Iraq. I couldn’t hold him back. I wouldn’t hold him back.” Nevertheless, the care for him remains her constant companion. Even this morning, after she has just spoken to his parents on the phone, who tell her that they have just heard from him, she thinks: “Another stage win – everything is fine until NOW – always with the buzzing feeling that this can change every minute”.

Beatrice von Keyserlingk: “Learned to live with fear for him.”

Beatrice is a trained goldsmith and on this day together with her boss at an exhibition in Basel. She gets the FOCUS, “because of course there were always reports and photos of Christian to read and see. She shows the latest article by him to another colleague at lunchtime and runs her thumb over the photo, which shows him in khaki-coloured clothes in a desert-like landscape and says: “Gee, you look pretty dusty.”

Then, in the afternoon, the call comes. Ellen Daniel, a very good friend of Christian’s and colleague at FOCUS, with whom he also shares the office in the editorial office, is on the phone.

Christian’s editorial colleague Ellen Daniel is the first to talk to Beatrice.

“She told me that there had been an attack on the TOC (Technical Organization Center of the American military outside Baghdad) and that they have since lost contact with him. There was no confirmation yet and she could not and would not believe it, but the probability that Christian would have been hit would be relatively high, but what exactly happened is not yet known.

She was very excited and sounded desperate, wanted to hope too, but at that moment I was already pretty sure that it had hit him. At this point I was standing in a back room of the mass, separated by a curtain, slipping down to the floor against the wall with the receiver in my hand – a feeling as if I had drunk a bucket of acid: Actually no hope anymore, although Ellen still assured me that nothing was certain, nothing was confirmed.”

The waiting period begins. Nothing more can be found out for hours, there are only rumours, including the one that it is another German journalist. Beatrice is brought to the hotel by her boss, where she waits for her father and his wife, who, after learning of the terrible suspicion, immediately set off to pick her up in Basel, or, if the terrible is not confirmed, to celebrate with her.

But even before they arrive, Beatrice’s stepbrother, who lives in Spain at the time, has already found out about Christian’s and Julio Anguita Parrado’s death and that of three soldiers through the news ticker there and passed it on.

Beatrice‘s life’s dream was shattered from one second to the next with Christian’s death

Beatrice’s father can only pack his completely apathetic daughter into the car and drive back to Munich with her. He and his wife stay with her. Beatrice’s personal life dream has been shattered from one second to the next with Christian’s death. The dream of marriage, of a family, of growing old together. They had made plans before he left for Iraq.

“The plan was that Christian would work as a correspondent in South Africa and we would both move there.” He wanted to return home before Easter, he e-mailed her a few days before his death. “Just in time for asparagus season.” He said that he had seen enough of this war, in which horror and suffering determined everyday life. More than he wanted to see.

“Christian was the first man for whom the thought of having children with him did not frighten me – before and after that, unfortunately, it never happened again. My heart was very, very sore then.

For a few days I was paralyzed – crying all the time and only acting on direct demand – getting up, washing, dressing, eating. My stepmother, my family, my friends took touching care of me. But then it was suddenly clear to me, you can’t leave it like this. My father said I was grieving like an island woman. Short and intense, then it goes on.

In fact, from the beginning I talked a lot about Christian’s death, both with my family and with friends. And I started to find the positive aspects for me:

Christian hadn’t suffered, he had died instantly … His greatest fear: kidnapping, torture, mutilation hadn’t happened … He had died doing what he loved to do most: being a journalist in the front line … No one could have stopped him, it was his own decision … At the time of his death he was satisfied with his life … He had a job, where he wanted to be … had a wife he wanted to marry … And between us there was nothing unspoken, we had parted very lovingly and clearly before his departure. His strong and loving energy was still very much in evidence.”

Warm sympathy and your own positive attitude to life help with processing

“Unlike many victims of the war on the ground, I had a perspective, my life would go on.”

The great public sympathy and the encouragement that immediately follows the terrible news also give her support and strength. “It didn’t leave me feeling so alone.”

But also because Christian had died in a catastrophe, so to speak, with an infinite number of other casualties and not as an individual, there was something like a collective mourning experience, together with many mothers and wives and children in Iraq. From the very beginning it was therefore clear to me that my life – in contrast to many victims of the war on the ground – would continue, that I had perspectives”.

Letters from complete strangers, mostly women, some of them very old ladies, reach her and make her aware – at that time even before the first missions in Afghanistan – that “I am the youngest German war widow. Christian’s death had brought this war, in which we Germans were actually not even involved, into our living rooms. Suddenly everyone was very close. As close as we hadn’t been in a whole generation – a collective shock that it wasn’t a game or a TV series, but a cruel and sad reality.”

This is also the first time Beatrice learns how many people have read Christian’s diary from Iraq online.

“They wrote to me how much they appreciated his openness and objectivity. He had often written so critically that we feared that the Americans would not tolerate him in their ranks for much longer and would soon send him home, which unfortunately never happened – but through this he also learned a lot of honest information from reflected people.”

Of course there are also sarcastic letters that reach them via the FOCUS editorial office, where the letters to them are collected and filtered. Mostly held in the tenor of whether she would have expected “the soldiers in Iraq to be walking with flowers in the barrel”. Or that whoever put themselves in danger had to expect that something like that would happen.

One of the letters even contains a proposal of marriage “creepily” – as a reaction to the pictures the newspapers bring of her. “The letter was so absurd that it was almost funny again,” says Beatrice, who also recalls the behaviour of some newspapers as being absolutely negative.

“They naturally tried to get hold of private information and maudlin material, and began to call friends and acquaintances, even the owner of the apartment. In a night and fog action, we cleared out Christian’s apartment to prevent further such assaults.”

Sarcastic letters, a marriage proposal and poking around in private fortunately remain the journalistic exception.

In this way, and thanks to the then press spokesman of FOCUS, “who advised me well and, if necessary, threw himself before me like a lion”, Beatrice manages to remain completely outside this kind of press. A kind of journalism that Christian “always detested deeply and called ‘widow shakers’ – reporters who suddenly stand in front of your house and put their foot in the door”.

But these are the exceptions. All in all, the predominantly warm-hearted sympathy helps Beatrice to cope with her grief.

Education for Africa at eye level: honouring Christian’s name with something future-oriented

A precise observer: Christian Liebig had a clear opinion of what constitutes good development aid.

Added to this is her positive attitude towards life, the thoughts of the many conversations she had with Christian about Africa, and the desire to make his work truly unforgettable. Together with Christian’s parents, friends and colleagues, she founded the Christian-Liebig-Stiftung e.V., an association to support educational projects in Africa.

“The feeling that the energy drawn from the collective grief and sympathy had to be bundled and not allowed to fizzle out came very quickly – after three days, the idea for the foundation was already born in its basic structure.

During his lifetime, Christian had still given her the intellectual guidelines for the tasks she was to take on. Now she would implement his ideas one to one.

How often had he helped various aid organisations with press releases and over the years had formed a clear opinion about what constitutes good and bad development aid. How often had they talked about this point in particular. And also about adopting one or two children in Africa in addition to one or two of one’s own.

Beatrice von Keyserlingk and her godchild Florence.

“Christian has always seen education and enlightenment as the only real development aid – as the possibility of helping people to help themselves. He has often expressed this to me in many conversations. I would have had to find my role in the field first, but I was in high spirits.

Now she had the opportunity. With Helmut Markwort, the then editor-in-chief of FOCUS, and Christian’s immediate department head Ulrich Schmidla, she discussed her plans for founding an association as Christian had imagined. “Just like me, they saw in this task, which was turned towards the future, an opportunity and also a nice possibility to honour Christian’s name with really meaningful action. Helmut Markwort announced full support if I was prepared to make a lasting commitment as the face of the association. A no was therefore not an option for me, and for the last 17 years almost all those who have pushed the foundation with me have kept their promises with unbroken motivation”.

The association has achieved a lot since then. It has now built 25 primary and secondary schools for around 24,000 pupils who are taught in them, launched many educational projects and awarded scholarships. Mainly in Malawi, but also for a few years in the neighbouring country Mozambique from 2007. Orphanages were financed. In addition, two residential houses for 130 schoolgirls were built, so that they have a safe place to live and learn. A bakery for the education of disadvantaged children is also one of the commitments of the association.

“Education is and remains our main concern. It is not alms, we meet at eye level, give guidance for self-help, preserve the national culture and strengthen self-confidence. Do not create dependencies.”

Not alms, but development aid at eye level – that is how the Liebig Foundation sees itself.

Her work at the foundation, which she has been pursuing part-time for 17 years now in her free time and on vacation “in Christian’s name”, continues to fulfill Beatrice to this day. She was and is the best means of “opposing the emptiness and senselessness that Christian’s death has left behind with something good”. Moreover, she also considers her commitment to be the best recipe for not melting into self-pity, which she considers to be a “completely useless feeling”. “It doesn’t get you anywhere, and it ruins any chance to think outside the box, it means stagnation.”

No patent remedy, but trained in dealing with loss and grief

“Trained” in losing loved ones: Christian is the fourth loved one she’s lost.

Beatrice von Keyserlingk knows what she’s talking about. There is no patent remedy for the loss of a loved one for her. The wounds that such a loss tears never heal completely: “The scars remain, even grief and often something like phantom pain. Depending on the form of the day, it can strike you suddenly like a wild animal, even after years.”

Her first death close to her was her grandfather, who died of lung cancer in her parents’ house when she was 12 years old. When she was 18, her mother died of colon cancer at the age of only 40, and ten years later her grandmother, who was “very close to her and, especially as far as my faith is concerned, very formative”. Another 15 years later she lost Christian in the Iraq war.

So Beatrice is “trained” in dealing with loss and grief. She says it has automatically developed “a kind of crisis management”. “You already know how it feels and at what point you can function again. You know that you’d like to press a fast-forward button to get to the point where things get easier again, but if you don’t experience and live through everything, you won’t be able to cope.

Repressing should really not become a tactic. Pain and a piece of emptiness, grief and uprootedness always remain. Only after a while they determine your everyday life and your actions less and less. At some point it stops hurting acutely, but not a day goes by without you thinking about these people – these feelings become a natural part of your life. You may think that you are no longer affected in your actions and in your dealings with other people; but I do think that an irreversible ‘quirk’ remains, with which some people cope better, others worse in their dealings with the person who is mourning.

The foundation, the work in Christian’s name and meaning, his loss still determine Beatrice’s life today. But she has found her way, is attached to life and feels committed to it. Since Christian’s death, she has thought about, tried out and clarified many things for herself, and has found them to be good or even less good.

Helping other people, talking to them and exchanging ideas, looking at other fates that relativize her own, sympathy, reflection, accepting death as a part of life, have helped her most and are focused not least in her foundation work.

“Of course one may be sad and should definitely grieve, but one should not allow oneself to be paralysed by it over a longer period of time. When you look at how badly others are doing and how much you still have to give yourself, it puts your own values in perspective. To feel needed, even if you have just lost a great love. That is simply a much better feeling than giving yourself completely to suffering, I think that is a big mistake. It’s much harder to put things back together after they’ve been completely broken than to repair some cracks.

“Refuse to be paralysed.” Helping other people also helped Beatrice.

Especially at the bottom of the depression to remain active in all areas and not to hide away, to look who and what is good for you and “not to be talked into anything”. To be together with people with whom “you can be weak at times, but who also kick your ass in a friendly way and don’t let you sink into grief”. For them, these are further factors that help to stabilise people physically and mentally after a loss.

And: “It sounds banal – but a very decisive point for me back then was movement. To prevent depression or to get out of it to some extent, you have to breathe. Depression is also a refusal to breathe; people do not take in enough oxygen. And deep breathing comes automatically when you get mobilized: Going out, swimming, running, dancing – also or especially when you understandably do not feel like it. We Westerners often separate too much the body from the mind.

Christian was one of the most empathetic people I’ve ever met

Not only present through the work of the foundation: “He had the talent that made you feel valuable, made you a better person”.

This brings Beatrice back to Christian, who continues to have an incredibly strong presence in her life simply because of the foundation’s work. Although she has the feeling that, because of her work, she is allowed to “let him out a little more” of the rest of her life. She never goes to his grave and has not worn his ring on her finger for several years.

Nevertheless it is sometimes a problem for her that Christian still has something overpowering, especially when she meets other men. On the one hand because of “his great personality, on the other hand because in a direct comparison it is very easy for her to lose her head when she doesn’t really feel comfortable and then thinks: “Phew – I had that better, nicer, smarter, more beautiful …”.

She knows that this is unfair, Christian is not an ‘ex’ in the usual sense – and in contrast to others he can’t do anything wrong anymore. But he was just the right man for her. What really constitutes the essence of a person in his innermost core can certainly not be described in words, but Beatrice tries anyway. For her, Christian was a very special person with a very special gift. He made her want to be the person he saw in her.

“He had the talent that made you feel valuable – made you a better person by trying to live up to the image he had of you. I wanted to live up to the respect and love he showed me, and I wanted to show it for myself as well. Christian was one of the most empathic people I have ever met – he had an incredible talent for putting himself in the situation and thought structure of his counterpart and thereby understanding his actions. He was often asked by his friends to mediate in disputes or crises. He was analytical, clever and attentive, heard nuances, was never indifferent and at the same time incredibly humorous. In the whole time I was with him, he never did anything that I found shabby or somehow couldn’t understand. That sounds like a posthumous glorification – but it’s not. I talked that way about him while he was still alive.”

She therefore does not believe that she has greater problems finding a new partner than other women her age – she may just think she is a little less willing to compromise. “Because I just know what it feels like when it’s right, and I don’t want to have anything less. Of course I would like a new partnership, but not at any price. One big advantage or disadvantage: I know how it should feel – I don’t want less.”

I know what it should feel like – and I don’t want less.

Give the soul a chance to develop, believe in the good – and help others with it

malawi-CO-accept-fate

To accept fate and “always try to be a good person, to live compassionately, to be a little useful”.

Body and mind, life and death. Does Beatrice von Keyserlingk also see connections between faith, the way society in general deals with death and the personal, individual experience of loss?

A complex, sometimes ambivalent topic for Beatrice, who was not baptized and grew up in a very open, spiritual household.

Much broader than in Christianity, she believes in God, who for her, however, is not “the boss, but all in all and in everyone. In every person, in every tree.” She sees everything that happens, including what happens to her, as part of the karmic path, as a task and a teaching process for the development of the soul.

The meaning of life for them, therefore, is to accept life, including death, and to assume that in the end everything will be all right, and “not to be ignorant, to give the soul a chance to develop, and always to try to be a good person, to live compassionately, to be a little useful”.

Beatrice von Keyserlingk is well aware that the circumstances of many a death, make it difficult for the bereaved to “continue to believe in the good and to get up again and again”.

But she does it herself, she stays in life.

And so after his death her Christian is “a warm coat” from which she feels protected but not restricted.

Impressions

Background information and acknowledgement

  • The photographers

    Our sincere thanks go to the photographers who enrich this article with their pictures:

    • Robert Brembeck
    • Wolf Heider-Sawall
    • Florian Goberge
    • Christine Olma
    • Guenay Ulutuncok

© 2025 by Christian-Liebig-Stiftung e.V. – Kindly supported by Hubert Burda Media.