Richard von Weizsäcker family Weizsäcker family
Early life
Childhood, school and family
Richard von Weizsäcker was born on 15 April 1920 in the New Palace in Stuttgart, the son of diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker, a member of the Weizsäcker family, and his wife Marianne von Graevenitz, a daughter of Friedrich von Graevenitz (1861–1922), a General of the Infantry of the Kingdom of Württemberg. Ernst von Weizsäcker was a career diplomat and a high-ranking official in the Foreign Ministry in the 1930s. The youngest of four children, Weizsäcker had two brothers, the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Heinrich von Weizsäcker who fell as a soldier in Poland at the beginning of World War II. The sister Adelheid (1916–2004) married Botho-Ernst Graf zu Eulenburg-Wicken (1903–1944), a landowner in East Prussia. Richard's grandfather Karl von Weizsäcker had been Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg, and was ennobled in 1897 and raised to the hereditary title of Baron (Freiherr) in 1916. His term in office ended in 1918, shortly before the monarchy was abolished in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. However, during the following years, he still occupied an apartment in the former royal palace where his grandson was born in an attic room.
Because his father was a career diplomat, Weizsäcker spent much of his childhood in Switzerland and Scandinavia. The family lived in Basel 1920–24, in Copenhagen 1924–26, and in Bern 1933–36, where Richard attended the Swiss Gymnasium Kirchenfeld. The family lived in Berlin, in an apartment in the Fasanenstraße in Wilmersdorf, between 1929 and 1933 and again from 1936 until the end of the Second World War. Weizsäcker was able to miss the third class of his elementary school, and entered a secondary school at the young age of nine, the Bismarck-Gymnasium (now the Goethe-Gymnasium) in Wilmersdorf. When he was 17 years old, Weizsäcker travelled to England to study philosophy and history at Balliol College, Oxford. In London, he witnessed the coronation of King George VI. He spent the winter semester of 1937/38 at the University of Grenoble in France to improve his French. He was mustered for the army there in 1938 and moved back to Germany the same year to start his Reichsarbeitsdienst.Education, marriage and early work life
At the end of the war Weizsäcker continued his study of history in Göttingen and went on to study law, but he also attended lectures in physics and theology. In 1947, when his father Ernst von Weizsäcker was a defendant in the Ministries Trial for his role in the deportation of Jews from occupied France, Richard von Weizsäcker served as his assistant defence counsel. He took his first legal Staatsexamen in 1950, his second in 1953, and finally earned his doctorate (doctor juris) in 1955. In 1953 he married Marianne von Kretschmann. They had met when she was an 18-year-old schoolgirl and he was thirty. In 2010, Weizsäcker described the marriage as "the best and smartest decision of my life". They had four children: Robert Klaus von Weizsäcker, a professor of economics at the Technical University of Munich, Andreas von Weizsäcker, an art professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Beatrice von Weizsäcker, a lawyer and journalist, and Fritz Eckhart von Weizsäcker, chief physician at the Schlosspark-Klinik in Berlin. In the late 1970s, his son Andreas was a student at the Odenwaldschule. When reports about sexual abuse there surfaced in 2010, it was speculated in the media that Andreas might have been one of the victims, but this was denied by the family. Andreas died of cancer in June 2008, aged 51. Weizsäcker's son Fritz was murdered by a man armed with a knife on 19 November 2019, while holding a lecture at the Schlosspark-Klinik in Berlin, where he worked.Weizsäcker worked for Mannesmann between 1950 and 1958, as a scientific assistant until 1953, as a legal counsel from 1953, and as head of the department for economic policy from 1957. From 1958 to 1962, he was head of the Waldthausen Bank, a bank owned by relatives of his wife. From 1962 to 1966, he served on the board of directors of Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company. It was involved in production of the Agent Orange. This fact is speculated to be the motive behind the murder of his son in 2019, though the suspect has been sent to a secure hospital unit due to a "delusional general aversion" against the victim's family.
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