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 (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, …
Growing up as a bomb baby in Germany, as I did, it was common not to have a living father. About 2.5 million German children lost their fathers in World War II. Source. In my case, my father lost his life two months before I was born, so we never knew one another. From 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 …
