Overview

The inspirational story of a young German orphan who escaped a war-torn Berlin to rise to the highest ranks of the European legal system. When Konrad Schiemann escaped his home in Berlin to begin a new life in England, he didn’t know what life awaited him there. An orphan who had lost both of his parents at the end of World War Two, he reached this new country to start again with the help of relatives. Grown up, he decided to practise as a barrister in England and became a judge of the Appeal Court and finally of the European Court of Justice. After having his family and life in Germany torn apart by conflict, he forged a career around his desire to help in the construction of a peaceful Europe. It was only late in life that he came to realise the extent of the extraordinary family into which he had been born. A great-great grandfather who presided over 5 parliaments and the first German Supreme Court, a great-grandfather who was a friend of the last Kaiser and a grandfather who joined the Nazi Party despite the opposition of two members of the family later recognised by Israel as Righteous among the Nations for saving Jews from the Nazis. He learned of his mother’s close acquaintance with one of the plotters of the assassination attempt on Hitler and it became evident that there was a powerful family history to be traced, and a story to be told. Piecing together extensive correspondence from the war years, A Dual Perspective is the moving memoir of a German orphan who built a new future away from home, and the story of the family he loved and lost along the way.

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9781915036667

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Sir Konrad Schiemann was born in Berlin in 1937. He was orphaned during the war and came to England in 1946 where he was brought up by his uncle, who had married an English wife before the war and had spent the war here. He attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham and was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers, serving in Cyprus. He holds a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from Cambridge University and is an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. He practised as a barrister from 1964, became a Queen’s Counsel in 1980, a High Court Judge in 1986 and a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1995. He was a judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union between 2004 and 2012. He married the daughter of German and Austrian refugee parents and has one child, who was brought up in England and married an Englishman. They have two English children.

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