ABSTRACT
Born in Kassel, Germany in 1942, I still have dim memories of being evacuated to the countryside near the end of the war. I entered first grade in 1949. My father, having survived five years in a Soviet prison camp, eventually returned in the spring of 1950. My mother worked as a clerk for the U.S. military, which meant better food for the extended family. My brother and I lived with my grandparents until the spring of my father’s return. My beloved grandparents were old style socialists—my grandfather joined the Socialist Party about 1905, my grandmother in 1913. When she died at age ninety-seven, my grandmother had been a party member for over seventy years. My mother’s parents were also socialists, but her brother Gustav Boehrnsen and brother-in-law Willi Hundertmark were dedicated Communists. Willi was briefly in the notorious Sonnenburg concentration camp; Gustav was imprisoned by the Nazis in the late 1930s. The latter was eventually released to serve in punishment battalion 999, which covered Rommel’s retreat in North Africa. Luckily he was captured and shipped as a prisoner of war to Albertville, Alabama. Later a prominent Social Democratic politician in the city-state of Bremen, he achieved a measure of local popularity.
