Ottilie Klein

Dr. Ottilie Paola Klein (born 14 February 1984 in Villingen-Schwenningen) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and a member of the Bundestag since 26 October 2021. She holds her seat through the Berlin state list and is the CDU candidate in constituency 81, Berlin-Neukölln. In the 21st Bundestag she is the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's spokesperson for culture and media and chair of its working group on that subject. From September 2023 to July 2026 she was secretary-general of the CDU in Berlin.

Klein passed the Mittlere Reife in 2000 and the Abitur in 2003 at the Wirtschaftsgymnasium in Villingen-Schwenningen, in Baden-Württemberg. From 2003 to 2008 she studied for a Magister at the University of Bonn, including the 2006–2007 academic year at Mount Holyoke College in the United States. In 2009 she worked at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and in 2009–2010 she completed a master's degree at the University of Oxford. From 2010 to 2016 she undertook a binational doctorate at the University of Giessen and the University of Helsinki.

Before her mandate she was a research assistant in a Bundestag office in 2017, headed the office of the CDU group chair in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin from 2017 to 2020, and served from April 2020 to September 2021 as a department director at the Association of German Public Banks, a post for which the Bundestag's register records a right of return. At the 2021 federal election she was the CDU candidate in Berlin-Mitte, then constituency 75. In the original count the CDU took 20,002 first votes (13.3 percent), while Alliance 90/The Greens led the district with 45,870 votes (30.5 percent), and Klein entered parliament on the state list. The partial repeat election held in parts of Berlin on 11 February 2024 left the CDU first-vote share in Berlin-Mitte at 13.9 percent (19,216 votes).

In the 2025 federal election she stood in Berlin-Neukölln and finished second, with 28,487 first votes (19.7 percent), behind Ferat Koçak of Die Linke, who won the constituency with 43,413 votes (30.0 percent). She again took her seat through the Berlin state list. In the 21st Bundestag she is a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs and the Committee on Culture and Media, and a substitute member of the Finance Committee, the Committee on European Union Affairs and the Joint Committee. In February 2025, still secretary-general of the Berlin CDU, she and the state association signed cease-and-desist declarations after she accused Chancellor Olaf Scholz of having called Berlin's culture senator Joe Chialo the CDU's "black fig leaf" (schwarzes Feigenblatt); Der Spiegel reported that this wording was not in the Focus account of remarks in which Scholz was said to have called Chialo a "court jester" (Hofnarr).

Early life and education

Family and childhood

Ottilie Klein was born on 14 February 1984 in Villingen-Schwenningen, in Baden-Württemberg. Her parents were Russia Germans. The Berliner Zeitung reported that they left the Soviet Union for the German Democratic Republic in the early 1980s and reached West Germany at the end of 1983, a few months before her birth.

In a 2021 first-person account published by the history project Migrationsgeschichten, Klein set that move in a longer family history. She wrote that ancestors from southern Germany had settled on the Black Sea more than 250 years earlier at the invitation of Catherine the Great; that her grandparents were deported under Joseph Stalin from Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, to the east of the Soviet state; and that her parents grew up in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. She described the departure for East Germany as difficult, the onward journey to the Federal Republic as motivated by a wish to live in freedom, and the new start in the west as beginning from nothing, because Soviet qualifications were not recognised. In that account she also described herself as the first person in her family born in Germany.

The same account places her childhood in the Black Forest inside a Russia-German milieu: large family gatherings, Russian songs played on the accordion, food such as pelmeni, shashlik and blini, and a spoken German that mixed an older inherited variety, Russian and Soviet vocabulary, and Swabian dialect. She wrote that her grandparents spoke of deportation, labour camps, hunger, cold and death.

School and university studies

The Bundestag biography, which rests on members' own statements, records that Klein received the intermediate school-leaving certificate (Mittlere Reife) in 2000 and the Abitur in 2003 at the Wirtschaftsgymnasium in Villingen-Schwenningen.

From 2003 to 2008 she studied for a Magister at the University of Bonn, including the 2006–2007 academic year at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. The author note published with her later book states that she graduated from Bonn in American studies, modern history and political science, studied English at Mount Holyoke, and graduated in women's studies from the University of Oxford. The Bundestag dates the Oxford master's course to 2009–2010. Klein has said that a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes supported her studies.

Doctoral research

Between 2010 and 2016 she completed a binational doctorate at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the University of Helsinki. Helsinki's repository records the English-language monograph Lethal Performances?: Women Who Kill in Modern American Drama, issued on 15 December 2015, as a binational degree in the European PhDnet programme "Literary and Cultural Studies", taken jointly at Giessen and at Helsinki's Faculty of Arts. The recorded supervisor was Greta Olson; the opponents at the examination were Herbert Grabes and Pirjo Lyytikäinen.

The dissertation surveys American plays from the 1910s to the 1980s in which murder by a woman is a central event. It distinguishes what Klein calls "narratives of containment"—plots that use the killing to disturb order and then restore it, reinforcing a dominant ideology—from "lethal performances", in which the figure is used to comment on social ills or to expose ideological contradictions, and it ties that function to the historical moment of each play. The published contents include Susan Glaspell's Trifles and The Verge, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, María Irene Fornés's The Conduct of Life, Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, and Wendy Kesselman's My Sister in This House.

The German National Library catalogues the book Lethal Performances: Women Who Kill in Modern American Drama, issued by Peter Lang in 2017 at 346 pages, as a 2015 Giessen dissertation (ISBN 978-3-631-73264-9). It appeared as volume 1 of the series Contributions to English and American Literary Studies. In November 2016 the book-trade magazine Börsenblatt reported that Peter Lang had given Klein its Nachwuchspreis for 2016 in the humanities, one of ten monographs by early-career scholars from several European countries that the publisher then brought out in print and as e-books.

Career before parliament

Foundation and academic employment

According to her Bundestag biography, which the parliament states is based on members’ own information, Ottilie Klein was a staff member (Mitarbeiterin) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2009. The entry places that year before a master’s course at the University of Oxford and does not describe the work. The foundation, established in 1953, is a non-profit organisation that promotes international scientific cooperation, chiefly by enabling researchers who have been working abroad to carry out research stays in Germany. It is financed predominantly by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.

Staff roles in Berlin politics

The same biography lists her for 2017 as a research assistant (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in a Bundestag member’s office, and from 2017 to 2020 as head of the office of the chair of the CDU group in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin. On 20 November 2017 the trade magazine politik&kommunikation reported that she had been a research assistant to Sybille Benning, the CDU member for Münster, and that from that November she headed the office of Florian Graf, then chair of the Berlin CDU group. She succeeded Jürgen Kornmann, who became office manager for Paul Ziemiak. Benning, a landscape planner and geographer, had represented Münster since 2013 and from 2017 was deputy chair of the Bundestag committee on education, research and technology assessment.

The Abgeordnetenhaus is the parliament of the city-state of Berlin and enacts the Land’s laws, the role a Landtag fills in the territorial states. On 12 June 2018 the CDU group elected Burkard Dregger as chair with 27 of 31 votes after Graf resigned. Graf, chair since 2011, kept his seat and became managing director of the CDU Economic Council’s Berlin-Brandenburg branch. politik&kommunikation reported on 17 December 2018 that, since November, Klein had also led a new strategy and planning unit, reporting to Dregger and the parliamentary business managers Stefan Evers, Danny Freymark and Heiko Melzer, while remaining head of the chair’s office. On 4 May 2020 it reported that Julian Möller had taken over that unit from 1 May, after Klein moved to the Association of German Public Banks.

Association of German Public Banks

The Association of German Public Banks (Bundesverband Öffentlicher Banken Deutschlands, VÖB), based in Berlin, describes itself as a peak association of the German credit industry. Its published account names 64 members, including the Landesbanken and the promotional banks of the federation and the Länder. It states that it represents members before federal and state legislatures and before supervisors, and that it is accredited to the Bundestag, the European Parliament and the European Commission. It also states that it is the only credit-industry association which acts as an employers’ association, with bargaining done by the Tarifgemeinschaft Öffentlicher Banken.

On 20 April 2020 politik&kommunikation reported that Klein had, since 1 April, been a department director (Abteilungsdirektorin) for strategy and committees (Strategie und Gremien), reporting to Dominik Lamminger, a member of management responsible for promotional banks, financing and association steering. The Bundestag biography dates the post from April 2020 to September 2021. A February 2022 profile in the Heilbronner Stimme wrote that she had overseen strategy and association development until mid-August, then taken annual leave for the campaign. Disclosures under the Bundestag’s rules of conduct list that pre-mandate occupation as department director at the VÖB in Berlin and record a right of return (Rückkehrrecht). The member profile still gives her occupation as Abteilungsdirektorin.

Rise in the Berlin CDU

Joining the party

Ottilie Klein joined the Berlin CDU in 2016. In an interview with Die Zeit after she entered the Bundestag in 2021, she said she had been a member for only five years and that the result of the AfD in the 2016 Berlin state election had stayed with her, especially what she called the relatively large support among Russia Germans. She told the paper that the "Fall Lisa" had just been through the media, that she was herself a Russia German, and that she had felt obliged to get involved; she added that she had just finished her doctorate and did not do things by halves. The interview's introduction presented that sequence — AfD support in that community, then her decision to go into politics — as the background to her sitting in the Bundestag for the CDU five years later.

Her early base was the district association in Mitte. She lived in Moabit, and she later said the district chair had asked whether she could imagine standing for the Bundestag there. She told Die Zeit that she had drawn up lists of arguments for and against and then decided it was a one-off chance.

Membership officer and district associations

In 2019, when Kai Wegner became state chair, he made Klein the Berlin CDU's membership officer (Mitgliederbeauftragte). She still held that office at the time of the 2021 interview, when she discussed the share of women in the party — about 26 percent of the CDU membership nationally and 34 percent in Berlin, on her figures — and said members wanted more internal debate. The taz still described her as membership officer in August 2023, shortly before Wegner proposed her as secretary-general.

Support in her own district association was uneven. When that proposal circulated, the taz reported that Mitte was "not entirely happy" about her as a possible secretary-general. Deputy district chair Carsten Spallek told the paper the suggestion had not been discussed with the association, so it could not comment. On 9 November 2023, after she had taken the state office, Der Tagesspiegel reported that she was leaving Kreisverband Mitte for Kreisverband Neukölln. Under the heading "Little support, poor election chances," the paper said she would in future be active in Neukölln because of better prospects of an electoral victory, but apparently also because of disputes in her home district. The Neukölln association's published executive later listed her as a deputy district chair, with Falko Liecke as chair and several other deputies.

Candidate selection

In a notice dated 25 November 2020, CDU Mitte reported that a constituency delegates' meeting had nominated Klein, then 36, by a large majority for Bundestag constituency 75, Berlin-Mitte, and quoted her on security, affordable housing, good jobs and integration in a borough she called one of the most varied in Germany and marked by sharp social differences. At a digital state meeting on 17 April 2021 she was given third place on the Berlin list for the Bundestag election, behind Monika Grütters and Jan-Marco Luczak. The Berliner Zeitung reported that the presidium had proposed her for that place and that she, like Luczak, was elected without an opposing candidate and with a clear majority; she was identified as the candidate from Mitte and as a department director at the Association of German Public Banks.

For the 2025 election the constituency was Neukölln. On 4 September 2024 Klein wrote that the board of CDU Neukölln had unanimously nominated her for the Neukölln seat and that she would face the delegates at a constituency assembly in October. She stood as the CDU candidate in constituency 81, Berlin-Neukölln. On 12 December 2024 a state delegates' meeting in Moabit confirmed a list the state executive had proposed, with Luczak first and Klein second. The Bundestag biography and the watchdog site Abgeordnetenwatch both record that 2025 mandate as list place 2 for Berlin, with the constituency candidacy in Neukölln.

Secretary-general of the CDU Berlin

Election and tenure

On 9 September 2023 the Berlin state association of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) elected the Bundestag member Ottilie Klein secretary-general at a state party congress in the Europa hall of the Hotel Estrel in Neukölln. She stood on the proposal of state chairman Kai Wegner, the city’s governing mayor; the statutes provided for no opposing candidate. Delegates cast 196 votes for her, 61 against and 13 abstentions, or 72.6 percent of the ballots. The CDU itself spoke of 76.3 percent because, unlike other parties, it left abstentions out of the count.

Klein, then 39, succeeded Stefan Evers, secretary-general since 2016 and by then finance senator in the CDU–Social Democratic Party (SPD) senate. Before the congress Wegner said he wanted to broaden the party, modernize it and make it more female; the Tagesspiegel reported that Klein was also expected to sharpen its social profile. The taz wrote that support in her home district association of Mitte had not been unanimous, and set her 72.6 percent against Wegner’s 94.7 percent the same day, while noting that Evers’s majority in 2016 had been narrower.

On 20 September 2025 the state congress confirmed her. rbb24 reported 175 votes in favour, 110 against and 16 abstentions—58.1 percent of the ballots cast, which it called clearly worse than the more than 70 percent of two years earlier. Excluding abstentions, as the party had done in 2023, the yes share was about 61 percent (175 of 285). She stayed in office. Wegner was re-elected the same day with about 90 percent (258 yes, 26 no, three abstentions), down from 94.7 percent in 2023.

State politics and public disputes

In February 2025 Klein entered the dispute over remarks by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) about Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo (CDU). At a private birthday gathering hosted by the businessman Harald Christ on 2 February, Scholz called Chialo’s role in the CDU that of a “Hofnarr” (“court jester”) and a “Feigenblatt” (“fig leaf”). Chialo, who has family roots in Tanzania, described the words as degrading and hurtful; after a telephone call he said he did not consider Scholz a racist and regarded the personal matter as closed. Scholz admitted both terms, denied any link to skin colour, and called the racism charge absurd. Focus editor-in-chief Georg Meck, who had been present, rendered the exchange so that Scholz was said to have snapped that “he, the Black one,” was no more than a fig leaf. Scholz’s lawyers treated that racial wording as a false quotation; the magazine stood by the piece.

In a press statement Klein accused Scholz of having called Chialo a “schwarzes Feigenblatt der CDU” (“Black fig leaf of the CDU”). Der Spiegel, drawing on a Tagesspiegel report that cited Scholz’s media lawyer Christian Schertz, wrote that this phrase does not appear word for word in the Focus account and that Klein named no other source for a remark by Scholz about Chialo’s skin colour. Klein and the Berlin state CDU then signed cease-and-desist declarations, which Schertz confirmed to the Tagesspiegel, and deleted the related posts on X. Klein said the declarations did not cover “Hofnarr” and “Feigenblatt” and that the criticism of Scholz stood. Scholz told Der Spiegel: “Anything can be held against me, but certainly not that I am a racist.”

In April 2026, five months before the election to the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin, Klein defended Wegner over cultural grants. The non-party culture senator Sarah Wedl-Wilson resigned after the Berlin Court of Audit had judged unlawful funding, in the millions of euros, for a series of projects against antisemitism. In remarks to rbb carried by dpa, Klein called criticism from the opposition and from the SPD lead candidate Steffen Krach “a quite transparent manoeuvre” and “election-campaign noise.” She said holding Wegner responsible was not appropriate, expressed respect for Wedl-Wilson’s decision, and called the resignation painful because Wedl-Wilson had, in her view, been a good and respected senator. She saw no coalition quarrel with the SPD, arguing that Krach spoke neither for the coalition nor held office in the state government.

Departure in 2026

On 10 July 2026 Wegner withdrew as lead candidate for the Abgeordnetenhaus election of 20 September. He said that criticism of his communication during a power cut lasting several days in January kept him from getting his themes across. On the first day of the outage, when about 45,000 households were without electricity, he later told Welt television that he had played tennis from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. “to clear my head,” while remaining reachable, after having said at a press conference that he had been on the telephone all day. A dpa report in Die Welt called the withdrawal the result of a months-long argument over contradictory and false statements about that crisis management.

On 13 July the state executive unanimously chose finance senator Stefan Evers, then 46, as lead candidate; the district chairmen had proposed him on the Friday. The board also made him acting state chairman, leaving the formal election to a party congress. Klein’s tenure ended at the same meeting. Die Welt reported that she was giving up the post and that, on Evers’s proposal, the board unanimously named the Bundestag member Lukas Krieger, district chairman in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, acting secretary-general. The Berliner Morgenpost, citing a party press release, wrote that she had to vacate the office, and quoted her: “For a credible new beginning I have today, in agreement with the new chairman, made my office as secretary-general available.” The paper called her a close associate of Wegner and, citing the B.Z., reported that the change strengthened Evers among several district associations.

Bundestag elections

2021 election

At the election to the 20th Bundestag on 26 September 2021, Ottilie Klein was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate in constituency 75, Berlin-Mitte. Each voter cast a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party’s Landesliste, a closed list for one Land whose order the party had fixed in advance.

In the original final count for Berlin-Mitte, Hanna Steinmüller of Alliance 90/The Greens won the constituency with 45,870 first votes (30.5 percent). Annika Klose of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was second with 34,072 (22.7 percent), and Martin Neise of Die Linke third with 21,291 (14.2 percent). Klein finished fourth with 20,002 votes (13.3 percent), ahead of Anna Kryszan of the Free Democratic Party (10,038; 6.7 percent) and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany (7,597; 5.1 percent). Turnout was 73.5 percent.

Klein was third on the CDU Landesliste for Berlin, behind Monika Grütters and Jan-Marco Luczak. Grütters won Berlin-Reinickendorf directly, as did Thomas Heilmann in Steglitz-Zehlendorf and Mario Czaja in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, so those places were not used as list seats. The state returning officer recorded Luczak (list place 2) and Klein (list place 3) as the CDU’s two list members, giving the party five Berlin seats in all. Klein took her seat when the 20th Bundestag convened on 26 October 2021.

2024 partial repeat election

On 19 December 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court held that voting irregularities on 26 September 2021 required the Bundestag election to be repeated in 455 of Berlin’s 2,256 polling districts, including the associated postal-vote districts. The partial repeat was held on 11 February 2024. Because the annulled second votes were struck from the count until new ballots were cast, each party that had drawn a Berlin list seat provisionally lost one of them. For the CDU that seat was Klein’s: she was the last candidate on the Berlin list to have been elected in 2021.

A pre-election calculation by the electoral-law site Wahlrecht.de put the point at which the Berlin CDU would recover that seat at about 46,462 second votes in the repeat districts, roughly four-fifths of the 57,834 CDU second votes cast there in 2021, or 278,319 second votes across Berlin. Below a higher figure the restored seat could instead have gone to the party’s list in North Rhine-Westphalia. The certified result after the repeat gave the CDU 289,140 second votes in Berlin (17.2 percent), compared with 289,691 (15.9 percent) in the original count; citywide turnout fell from 75.2 to 69.5 percent.

The Bundestag recorded that Klein won her list mandate again, as did Luczak. All 12 Berlin constituency seats were unchanged, including Steinmüller’s in Mitte. Four other Berlin list members lost their seats: Lars Lindemann (FDP), Pascal Meiser (Die Linke), Nina Stahr (Greens) and Ana-Maria Trăsnea (SPD). The Federal Electoral Committee adopted the revised national result on 1 March 2024, and the Bundestag shrank from 736 to 735 members, with the CDU/CSU total unchanged. In the combined Berlin-Mitte figures, Klein’s first-vote total was revised to 19,216 (13.9 percent). She remained fourth, behind the Greens (42,443; 30.6 percent), the SPD (30,611; 22.1 percent) and Die Linke (19,764; 14.3 percent).

2025 election

After a redistribution of constituencies, Klein stood on 23 February 2025 in constituency 81, Berlin-Neukölln, and was placed second on the Berlin CDU list, behind Luczak. Ferat Koçak of Die Linke won the constituency with 43,413 first votes (30.0 percent). Klein was second with 28,487 (19.7 percent), just ahead of the SPD incumbent Hakan Demir with 27,266 (18.8 percent). Robert Eschricht of the AfD received 18,893 (13.0 percent) and Andreas Audretsch of the Greens 16,136 (11.1 percent). Of 192,506 eligible voters, 146,236 cast ballots (76.0 percent). On the second vote in the same constituency Die Linke led with 25.3 percent; the CDU took 26,183 votes (18.0 percent).

Klein did not win the constituency. The federal returning officer lists her as elected from the Berlin CDU list at place 2, with the Neukölln candidacy recorded separately, and the state returning officer likewise lists her among members returned on Berlin lists rather than in a constituency. Luczak was the other CDU list member. Adrian Grasse, Marvin Schulz and Lukas Albrecht Krieger won Berlin constituencies and were therefore passed over on the list. She sat again in the 21st Bundestag, which convened on 25 March 2025.

Work in the Bundestag

Committees and offices

Dr. Ottilie Klein has been a member of the Bundestag since 26 October 2021, sitting with the CDU/CSU. In the 20th electoral term the archived biography listed her as a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs, the Committee on European Union Affairs and the Joint Committee, and as a deputy member of the Finance Committee. It did not list the Committee on Culture and Media. Abgeordnetenwatch records the same standing-committee roles for 2021–2025.

In the 21st term that slate changed. The current biography, and abgeordnetenwatch, list her as a full member of the committees on labour and social affairs and on culture and media, and as a deputy member of the Committee on European Union Affairs and of the Finance Committee, entered on the biography as Finanzen. The labour seat and the finance deputy seat continued; EU affairs moved from a full seat to a deputy seat; culture and media was added.

The Joint Committee moved the other way, from a full seat in the 20th term to a deputy seat. On 26 June 2025 the groups nominated her among the CDU/CSU deputies in Drucksache 21/595, and the Bundestag adopted that nomination unanimously by show of hands. Under Article 53a of the Basic Law, the Joint Committee is an emergency parliament, two-thirds Bundestag members and one-third Bundesrat members, for a state of defence if the Bundestag cannot meet in time. Parliamentary news noted in June 2025 that it had never sat.

The Bundestag's Kunstbeirat page identifies Klein, in the captions of its official photographs, as a deputy member. Chaired by the President of the Bundestag, the board handles art in parliament, including installations in the buildings and works lent to members' offices; the CDU/CSU full members in the 21st term are Michael Frieser and Philipp Amthor. On 9 July 2026 the Bundestag elected her a member, not a deputy, of the council of the Stiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. Andrea Lindholz and Melanie Piepenschneider were elected deputies on the same CDU/CSU–SPD proposal. The biography records the seat as honorary from that date. By statute the council decides questions of fundamental importance and supervises the executive board. The foundation's purpose is to support work on the causes, history and consequences of dictatorship in the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR, and to keep remembrance of the injustice and the victims alive. Neither the Kunstbeirat nor the foundation council appears in the archived 20th-term biography.

Culture and media

On 13 May 2025 the CDU/CSU Bundestag group elected its working-group chairs and named Ottilie Klein for culture and media. The group's profile describes her as spokesperson and chair of that working group, with Johannes Volkmann as deputy chair, and the Bundestag biography also calls her the group's spokesperson for culture and media. The archived 20th-term biography does not record the spokesperson role. The same 13 May ballot made Anja Weisgerber a deputy group chair whose portfolio includes culture and media together with education, family, older people, women and youth. Klein's office is the specialist working-group chair, not that deputy leadership post.

The Committee on Culture and Media was constituted on 21 May 2025. Klein was one of six CDU/CSU members of the 18-member committee, and Sven Lehmann of Alliance 90/The Greens, then only a deputy member, was elected chair. The Bundestag describes the committee as responsible at federal level for cultural and media policy, including oversight of federal cultural funding, Deutsche Welle, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, national film support and historical sites of national importance.

Labour, social affairs and other bodies

Klein was a full member of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs in both terms. The 21st-term committee was constituted on 21 May 2025 with 42 full members, 14 of them from the CDU/CSU, including Klein. Its field, as the Bundestag describes it, is pensions, labour-market policy, support for the unemployed and the inclusion of people with disabilities, including the further development of social security from unemployment benefit to pensions. On the faction side she is listed as a member, not the chair, of the working group on labour and social affairs; Marc Biadacz was elected that chair on 13 May 2025. The same profile places her in the employees' group, the women's group, the group of expellees, Aussiedler and German minorities, and the Parliamentary Circle for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (Parlamentskreis Mittelstand).

She has been a deputy member of the Finance Committee since the 20th term. Separate from the budget, that committee considers items referred by the plenary in the fields of the Federal Ministry of Finance and normally leads on financial-market regulation, customs and tax policy. On EU affairs she moved from a full seat in the 20th term to a deputy seat in the 21st. The EU committee is the Bundestag's central forum for European policy — integration, institutions, strategy documents, the multiannual financial framework and enlargement — and it can in defined cases act in place of the plenary.

Political positions

Social security and child poverty

On 5 March 2026, in the Bundestag's final reading of the bill replacing Bürgergeld, Ottilie Klein told the House for the CDU/CSU that it was ending what she called a social-policy injustice: people unable to work would still be supported, but anyone able to work had a duty to contribute, because work was the best protection against poverty. From Berlin job centres she cited missed appointments of 30 to 50 percent and defended stricter rules as fairness to those who cooperated; even a supposed 1 percent of total refusers was, she said, too many, because each case eroded trust in the welfare state.

The Bundestag passed the law that day by 321 votes to 268, with two abstentions: the CDU/CSU and the SPD in favour, the opposition against. CDU general secretary Carsten Linnemann used the same formula of support and obligation; the AfD said taxpayers would barely gain, Alliance 90/The Greens called the sanctions inhumane, and Die Linke said they produced fear rather than jobs. Ferat Koçak, like Klein from Neukölln, said sanctions would worsen hardship and overload job centres; Klein answered that staff at six Berlin centres had said missed appointments blocked advice, and called that social populism. Adopted by the cabinet on 17 December 2025 and by the Bundesrat on 27 March 2026, the law took effect in stages on 1 July 2026, renaming the payment Grundsicherungsgeld and tightening placement, sanctions, assets and housing.

On 28 April 2022 she called child poverty a sad reality—almost every second child in her then constituency of Berlin-Mitte, and almost every fifth nationwide—and described a €20 monthly supplement as only a financial plaster, arguing for education and local advice rather than transfers alone. The Bundestag biography, based on members' own disclosures, lists her as an honorary board member of the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk.

Culture, remembrance and antisemitism

On 3 December 2025 Klein opened debate on a CDU/CSU–SPD motion for a memorial to Polish victims of the Second World War and the German occupation of Poland. She cited more than five million dead Polish citizens, about a fifth of the population, and said about half the victims of the Holocaust had been Polish citizens; a permanent site should replace the provisional marker at the former Kroll Opera, where she said the war began, and Germany should refuse to play that responsibility down. The motion also told the government and Berlin to find a site for a German-Polish House of historical education and exchange, separate from the monument. The House adopted it with the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and Left; two AfD members voted no and the rest abstained, after Götz Frömming accepted the suffering but disputed what it required of later generations.

Later that day she described a visit to Sachsenhausen and said the federal memorial-sites concept affirmed the singularity of the Holocaust while keeping other victims, including those of the SED dictatorship, and that pupils should visit both Nazi and, where possible, SED sites. In October 2025 the Bundestag, on a joint CDU/CSU and SPD motion, pressed for a memorial to the victims of communist rule in the Spreebogenpark by early 2029.

After the 2026 Berlinale, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that filmmaker Abdallah Alkhatib, holding a Palestinian flag, accused the federal government of partnership in what he called an Israeli genocide in Gaza; SPD environment minister Carsten Schneider left the hall. Klein said public money was an advance of trust, not a blank cheque, and that an antisemitism clause was needed so tax funds would not support hatred of Jews; federal support had risen from €10.9 million to up to €12.8 million, and the culture minister's office did not rule out consequences.

On 23 September 2026, in a current-affairs hour reported by dpa and the Tagesspiegel, Klein spoke of an "unholy alliance with clan crime, Islamism and hatred of Jews" in the Berlin Left. Gregor Gysi conceded that some colleagues' criticism of Israel was excessive but accused other parties of misusing antisemitism against Die Linke; SPD interior spokesman Sebastian Fiedler said no government could be formed with the Berlin Left. On 31 October 2026 Klein wrote on X that her constituency office (Bürgerbüro) in Neukölln had been hit by what she called a "cowardly attack" ("feiger Anschlag"). She asked whether CDU politicians were meant to be silenced when they targeted extremists, antisemites and criminals, said she would not be intimidated, thanked the Berlin police for their quick help and stated that a criminal complaint had been filed.

Media and digital policy

In October 2025 Die Welt reported that a technician at a Gaza production firm used by ZDF had been a Hamas member and was killed in an Israeli strike; ZDF ended the cooperation and said he was not its employee and had no journalistic role. Klein called it a scandal that shook trust in public-service broadcasting and said such partnerships must stop if terrorist links could not be excluded, because licence-fee money must not cross-subsidize terrorism; CDU foreign-affairs chair Armin Laschet took the same line.

On 25 February 2026 she called ZDF's use of artificial-intelligence imagery a serious error that had cost trust, while noting that the head of news had admitted it and drawn consequences. Democracy depended on fact-based reporting, she said, and she accused the AfD of opposing public broadcasting because it reported on dangers from that party; Green and SPD speakers agreed the mistake was a breach of care but not a reason to attack ARD and ZDF as such.

On 9 July 2026 she opposed an AfD motion for a Bundestag enquiry on the information order: the Basic Law, she said, gave the federation no power over public-service media or media supervision, and pledges to abolish the licence fee were false because the fee and its level did not depend on one Land. Broadcasters still had to develop, but within Länder, federal and European competences; the CDU/CSU rejected another forum for what she called AfD falsehoods about them.

Other offices

Cultural and memorial foundations

Since 24 June 2025 Ottilie Klein has been an unpaid member of the Kuratorium of the Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, which lists her as a CDU/CSU member of the Bundestag. The foundation is a federal public-law body in Berlin for remembrance of the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. It maintains the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the memorials to Sinti and Roma murdered under National Socialism and to homosexuals persecuted by the regime; Kuratorium members are unpaid and receive only travel expenses.

From 15 September 2025 the register lists her as an honorary member of the Stiftungsrat of the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, operator of the Humboldt Forum. On 9 July 2026 the Bundestag elected her to that council with 495 votes in favour, 61 against, 34 abstentions and 13 invalid ballots. The foundation develops the forum’s programme, exhibitions and education work; its council is the highest decision-making body and includes representatives of the Bundestag, the federal government and Berlin.

From 24 November 2025 she is an honorary member of the Stiftungsrat of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, founded in 1957 and carried by the federation and all 16 Länder. It brings together museums, libraries, archives and research institutes, including the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The council has nine members from the federation and the Länder; four Bundestag members attend with an advisory vote. Since 6 November 2025 she has been an honorary deputy member of the Kuratorium of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Germany’s national history museum. That body, the foundation’s highest, has five members each from the federal government, the Bundestag and the Länder.

Two further unpaid posts began on 15 July 2025. She advises the Deutsches Musikinformationszentrum, the information service on musical life in Germany run by the Deutscher Musikrat, through its twelve-member board, and sits on the Kuratorium of the Amateurmusikfonds at the Bundesmusikverband Chor & Orchester in Berlin. The Bundestag created the fund in November 2022 to support amateur choirs, orchestras, bands and other ensembles.

On 9 July 2026 the Bundestag also elected her to the Stiftungsrat of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, a parliamentary appointment recorded as honorary from that day.

Child-welfare organizations

Klein is an unpaid member of the board of the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk in Berlin, first recorded on 13 January 2023. Its board, drawn from democratic parties in the Bundestag, works without pay on children’s rights, child poverty and participation.

She is an honorary Kuratorium member of World Vision Deutschland e.V., a Christian aid association in Friedrichsdorf focused on children, families and their surroundings; the entry is dated 25 July 2023 and shows no fee. The Otto Benecke Stiftung e.V. in Bonn, a nonprofit founded in 1965 for the social participation of immigrants and their descendants, lists her on the Kuratorium that advises it, an unpaid post first entered on 25 October 2022.

Personal life

Family and residence

Ottilie Klein was born on 14 February 1984 in Villingen-Schwenningen, in the Black Forest in Baden-Württemberg. The Bundestag biography, based on information she supplied, records that she is married and lists her occupation as Abteilungsdirektorin (departmental director). On 15 April 2025 the Berliner Zeitung reported that she had become a mother for the first time: that morning she wrote that a daughter had been born a few days earlier. The report did not name the child or her husband, and stated that she has lived in Berlin with her husband since 2012. A Börsen-Zeitung profile in July 2021 and a Heilbronner Stimme profile in February 2022 both placed that household in Moabit, which Stimme put about three kilometres from the Reichstag; she told the Börsen-Zeitung that she felt rooted there.

She is the daughter of Russia Germans. In the Stimme account, her grandparents belonged to the Black Sea Germans, many of whom were deported under Joseph Stalin to remote parts of the Soviet Union, and her parents grew up in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Her father wrote for a German-language newspaper, and an application to emigrate was followed by repression. In the early 1980s the parents were allowed to move to the German Democratic Republic, where the pressure continued, and in 1983 they reached West Germany; Klein was born in Villingen-Schwenningen the following year. The Berliner Zeitung gave the same route, with arrival in the West at the end of 1983.

In a first-person account published in April 2021 by Migrationsgeschichten, Klein said that ancestors from southern Germany had followed an invitation from Catherine the Great to the Black Sea more than 250 years earlier, and that her grandparents were deported from the Odesa region and from Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, to the east of the Urals. She wrote that her parents’ Soviet qualifications were not recognised in Germany, that they took work below that training, and that the family started again with nothing. She called herself the first person in the family born in Germany, said she identified as German for that reason, and added that the Russia-German history “remains a part of me.” She has tied that biography to the view that success should not depend on social origin. Speaking to Stimme, she called the reception of people from German minorities in the former Eastern Bloc one of the Federal Republic’s major social achievements—“not outdated folklore” and not “endless dwelling on the past”—and said she is especially drawn to the Brandenburg Gate as a symbol of freedom, because democracy “has to be defended over and over again.”

Public interests

The Börsen-Zeitung wrote in 2021 that kickboxing was among her passions and described her as a “fighter by nature” partly for that reason. The standfirst of a Der Spiegel profile of 8 September 2023 stated that she can kickbox and does not own a car.