Aug 10
A Song for Gaza: The Ballad of Rivka and Mohammed Performed by Leo Rosselson. Featured on the website of the Stop the War Coalition (UK), originally on www.leonrosselson.co.uk Lyrics: I was watching the news from Gaza And I fell asleep on my chair And when I awoke from my slumber A young girl was standing there. She said, …
Aug 28
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 …
Jul 30
(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 …
Jul 28
(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 …
Jul 21
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, …
Jul 21
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 …
Jul 12
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 …
