Jürgen Scharf was born in Salzwedel approximately three years after the birth of the German Democratic Republic. Salzwedel was a small town known for its "Tree ring Cake" located on the eastern side of the border dividing West from East Germany. A few months before his birth the East German government blocked the frontier, and the ensuing three decades saw the construction of an increasingly sophisticated created to protect the German Democratic Republic from western military aggression and/or from the flight of its own working age population. Scharf successfully concluded his schooling in 1971 and went on to study Mathematics at the "Otto-von-Guericke" Technical University in Magdeburg, emerging with a degree in 1975. 1975 was also the year in shich his wife gave birth to their daughter. In 1976 he joined the &lt;a href="Christian%20Democratic%20Union%20%28East%20Germany%29"&gt;Christian Democratic Union (CDU / "Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands")&lt;/a&gt;, a political party which in the eastern version of Germany was part of the National Front, an organisational structure that kept all political parties and mass organisations under the ultimate control of the country's ruling &lt;a href="Socialist%20Unity%20Party%20of%20Germany"&gt;Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED / "Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands")&lt;/a&gt; until 1989.