Her mother, Almuth Falcke, had trained and qualified as a nurse, but as soon as the first of her five children was born, in 1957, she had abandoned her career in order to focus on looking after her family. In a country that had been left desperately short of working age population by the slaughter of war and the emigration to the west that had taken place since 1945, it was widely considered "old-fashioned" to a fault for married women to give up paid employment in order to concentrate on their children. As the children became less dependent she returned to work as a "community nurse", although she had been unable to obtain the full nursing qualifications, due to her failure to meet the appropriate political requirements. The Falcke children enjoyed a varied musical education and were encouraged to read extensively. standing as a theologian and church minister meant that the family were less isolated from western Christendom than most East German children. Thanks to the smuggling talents of some of their more ingenious visitors from the far side of the ever more militarised internal frontier, Hildigund became familiar with the children's books of traditionalist socialist writers such as Erich Kästner, James Krüss and Astrid Lindgren, none of whom would have appeared on any list of the party's preferred authors. Both Heino and Almuth Falcke had lived in the west in the past, but during the 1950s they had become convinced that God had placed them in "the east" to preach The Gospel to brothers and sisters in Christ. Regardless of any considerations of legality and the real risk of being shot by East German border guards, none of the Falcke's five children would have dared attempt escaping to the west, for fear of incurring parental wrath.