Michael Wieck (1928–2021)

Michael Wieck was born in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was the son of two prominent musicians, Hedwig Wieck-Hulisch, who was Jewish, and Kurt Wieck, who was not. His parents were founders of the popular Königsberger Streichquartett (Königsberg String Quartet). Michael was a grand-nephew of Clara Schumann. His childhood was filled with the delights of music, family, and the smell of pines and the sea. Following the issuance by the Nazis of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Michael and his sister Miriam were categorized as Geltungsjuden ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the Holocaust. In 1938, Miriam was sent to a boarding school in Scotland as part of a Kindertransport and there survived World War II. Shortly thereafter, young Michael was sent to compulsory factory labor. His parents were spared deportation and ultimately genocide, but their lives became more and more deprived as the war dragged on. In August 1944, Königsberg was repeatedly fire-bombed by the Royal Air Force, and much of the city's center was destroyed, gutted or heavily damaged. When the Red Army took the city in April 1945 after a bitterly fought siege lasting nearly three months, it had become a vast graveyard of rubble. The Soviet authorities did not recognize the few surviving German Jews as victims of the Nazis, and initially treated all German-speakers as enemies. Michael Wieck was confined to a Soviet prison camp. In 1949, the Wiecks finally were allowed into the Soviet Zone of Occupation in divided Germany. Michael left the Soviet Zone as soon as possible and lived first in West Berlin, where some of his paternal relatives had survived. Afterwards, he lived for seven years in New Zealand and became an instructor in violin at the University of Auckland. He returned to Germany and settled in Stuttgart. There, as an accomplished violinist, he became concert master of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, and in 1974-93 was also first violinist in the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart. His 2003 memoir, A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin: Memoirs of a "Certified Jew" (first published in German in 1989 as Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs or Witness to the fall of Königsberg) was a bestseller in Germany. In 2005, Michael Wieck was awarded the Otto-Hirsch-Medaille and in 2016 he received Germany's Order of Merit.