You haven't spoken about your grandfather and mother yet.
My grandfather originally was ...
a farm worker from Mecklenburg,
not too far from Lübeck.
There he had been one of the first Social Democrats,
and then he became a factory worker in the city.
He represented
the solidity and the belief in the future
of the early labour movement.
He wasn't able to guide me, and this is no criticism,
when it came to more sophisticated intellectual and political ideas.
But he knew everything that had to do with the Party,
and the trade union,
and the Reichsbanner,
which was the organisation set up to defend parliamentary democracy.
My mother was also born into
what we called the labour movement.
But I didn't live with her, I just saw her once a week.
Therefore, the close relationship could not develop
that normally exists between mother and child.
But I loved them both very much.
I was able to see my mother often after the war.
My grandfather felt such grief about what happened in Nazi Germany
that he committed suicide in 1935.