When I was born in Berlin, the year 1925 was just fifteen days old. Fourteen days earlier the Apostolic Nuntius Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, had delivered the congratulations of the diplomatic corps to Reich President Friedrich Ebert. Nobody expected that barely two months later Friedrich Ebert would be dead. After his death the aged Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a living legend since his victory over the Russian army at Tannenberg, became President. Of course I knew nothing about all this; people told me later that I had enough trouble of my own getting into the world and staying alive. My mother was already seriously ill when I was born, and she died a year later.

She came from a family of solid Prussian craftsmen and farmers in Jersitz, a little village near the provincial capital Posen. It must have been a small revolution in itself when in 1910, aged twenty-five, she left for Berlin, the capital of the Reich. And there, of all people, she met my father, who came from a completely different part of the world. I know nothing more about their meeting. It didn't interest me at all as a child. Later I would have liked to know more, but by then both my parents were dead. My mother's relatives were no help either. Every time my father's name came up they went quiet. For as long as I can remember he was a taboo subject in my mother's family.

But I know from the stories my older brothers and sisters and relatives told that my mother was an intelligent, good-looking woman. She could even play the piano. Wherever there was a piano, she would sit down and play without sheet music. It was always a mystery to me how that could have happened. Her family in Jersitz could never have afforded a piano, let alone piano lessons.

I can only speculate on why she left she and my father married in 1915, she already had a son, Herbert. An illegitimate child in those days – it must have been very hard for a young woman. Maybe she thought it would be easier to get on with the boy in the big city.