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Tamara Trampe was born on 4 December 1942 in Voronezh, Russia, the daughter of a nurse and an officer. When Trampe was seven years old, her mother moved with her to the GDR. After graduating from high school, Tamara Trampe studied German language and literature in Rostock from 1962 to 1967. She then worked as a cultural editor for the weekly newspaper Forum until 1969. In 1970, she got a job as a dramaturge at the DEFA Studio for Feature Films in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In this position, she worked on several films by well-known directors over the next 20 years. Among them, Helmut Dziuba's children's film "Der Untergang der Emma" (1974), Egon Schlegel's "Max und siebeneinhalb Jungen" (1980) and Herrmann Zschoche's "Bürgschaft für ein Jahr" (1981). Together with the cinematographer Thomas Plenert, she directed the short documentary "Ich war einmal ein Kind" (1987), for which she also wrote the script.
In February and March 1990, before and after the first free elections in the former GDR, she made the documentary film "Im Glanze dieses Glücks" together with Johann Feindt, Jeanine Meerapfel, Helga Reidemeister and Dieter Schumann. Through interviews and impressions from some places in the GDR, the film shows the reactions of the citizens to the political events - both positive and negative. "Im Glanze dieses Glücks" premiered in September 1990 at the San Sebastián International Film Festival (Spain).
After the German reunification, Trampe began working as a freelance filmmaker, author and dramaturge. As a director, she made the documentary film "Der schwarze Kasten" ("The Black Box") together with Johann Feindt: Begun in 1990 and completed in 1992, the film features the former professor and Stasi officer Dr Jochen Girke with whom the filmmakers talk about his role as a perpetrator in the GDR, without falling into simplistic black-and-white thinking.
As a dramaturge, Trampe worked on the documentaries "Gotteszell - Ein Frauengefängnis" (2000, director: Helga Reidemeister), "Horst Buchholz...mein Papa" (2001-2005, directors: Christopher Buchholz, Sandra Hacker) and "Im Schatten der Blutrache" (2007, directors: Andrea Schramm, Jana Matthes), as well as in feature films such as the coming-of-age story "Meer is nich" (2007, director: Hagen Keller).
Above all, however, Trampe made a name for herself as a director, always in collaboration with Johann Feindt: for their documentary "Weiße Raben – Alptraum Tschetschenien" ("White Ravens", 2001-2005), about Russian returnees from the Chechen war who are perpetrators and victims at the same time, the two were awarded the prestigious Grimme Award. At the Paris film festival Cinéma du Réel, the film won the 'Libraries Prize'.
The poetic documentary "Wiegenlieder" ("Lullaby", 2010) traced the significance of lullabies in the lives of various Berliners. With "Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich" ("My Mother, a War and Me"), which premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in 2014, Trampe (again with Johann Feindt) made her most personal film: in it she depicts the search for her unknown father and the story of her mother, who gave birth to Tamara in a field on the Volga in the wartime winter of 1942, alone and in freezing temperatures. The film received very good reviews and won the Heiner Carow Prize of the DEFA Foundation.
Trampe also continued to work as a dramaturge, for example on Claus Wischmann's "Karneval! Wir sind positiv bekloppt" (2013) and on Lars Barthel's "get me some HAIR!" (2018). She also taught at various film schools.
Tamara Trampe had been a member of the Academy of the Arts Berlin since 2016. In 2018, she was awarded an honorary prize by the DEFA Foundation for her "outstanding achievements in German film"; in 2021, she also received an honorary prize for her life's work at the Prize of German Film Critics.
On 4 November 2021, Tamara Trampe died in Berlin at the age of 78.