Postwar Germany, according to the writer Manfred Jurgensen, who grew up there, was “a period which often posed much more danger than the war itself. Severe deprivation, starvation and death were everywhere. This generation grew up without any real parental guidance and direction, and living through the years where all norms of society were virtually …
(Continued from About my Father (2)) The ink was hardly dry on Albrecht’s BK ordination certificate when the official church got wind of it and took steps to prevent a repetition. In a letter dated May 7, 1941, while Albrecht’s regiment was nearing the Soviet border, the then president of the Konsistoriat in Düsseldorf, the …
(Continued from About My Father (1)) Those “trials by fire” were not far off. After a year of study in Basel, in 1938 Albrecht returned to Germany. He spent approximately a month in Berlin, finishing his theological studies. In early summer of 1938 Albrecht spent almost a month traveling in the UK, visiting London and …
Being German and therefore having to begin with beginnings, I started writing my life story by writing the life story of my father. My father’s life story, though brief — he died at age 27 — was very wrapped up with the German Bekennende Kirche, the Authentic Church, so that in order to understand him, …
This thumbnail profile of my father appears in Protestantische Profile im Ruhrgebiet: 500 Lebensbilder aus 5 Jahrhunderten (Protestant Profiles in the Ruhr Region: 500 profiles from 5 centuries), edited byMichael Basse, Traugott Jähnichen and Harald Schroeter-Wittke, Hartmut Spenner publishers, Kamen (Germany) 2009, pp. 592-593. The author is Hartmut Ludwig, a church historian and Doctor of …
