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, …
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 …
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 …
On V-E Day (May 8 1945) I was three and a half years old. Since the Allied bombing had stopped, my mother pulled up stakes in Fürstenhagen and in the fall of that year we moved to Frankfurt/Main. To this day I am quite comfortable in small spaces. Very likely this stems from our first …
