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 …
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, …
The Nicolaus family name has some mythical roots. My mother’s mother Lydia, her mind clouded by advancing dementia, maintained that it came from the Tsar, who on his travels had got the daughter of a German merchant pregnant, etc. A myth I like much better is that we’re descended from the original Bishop Nicolaus of …
I was born in Essen. My father was born in Kiel but raised in Essen. His mother was born in Essen. His father worked as an office supervisor for Krupp in Essen. My mother, who was from Berlin, married my father in Essen. My mother and I lived in Essen until sometime in mid-1943. My …
By Martin Nicolaus Among my mother’s papers was a letter she had written in May 1992 with some additional recollections. Pastor Wendlandt of the Gethsemane Church in Berlin, and his two daughters — his daughter Ruth, then a theology student like me, was a friend of mine — hid a young Jewish man, Ralph …
