Zapf biography

Te Lifestory O Her=ann Z apf%

I’ve been asked to tell you about myself and my types.

My story begins in Nuremberg, where I was born on the 8th November 1918. Those were turbulent days. On theday I was born, a workers‘ and soldiers‘ council took political control of the city. Munich and Berlin were rocked by revolution. The war ended, and the Republic was declared in Berlin on the 9thNovember 1918. The next day Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland. To add to the chaos, the Spanish flu took hold of Europe in 1918 and 1919. It is estimated to have killed some 20 million people, more thanthe total number of lives lost by Germany and the Allies put together during the First World War. Two of my siblings died in the flu epidemic of 1918.
My school years A famine hit Germany, reaching itspeak in 1920. In 1925 my mother was relieved to send me to school, where I received a Quaker meal each day. This was a program organized by Herbert Hoover, who later became president of the USA.During my school years I was primarily interested in technical subjects. The librarian in my local library was surprised by all the publications I wanted to read. One of my favorite books was the annual»Das neue Universum« (The New Universe), which was a wonderful way of acquainting oneself with all the latest inventions and discoveries. One of the things I did during those years was to build adetector radio, otherwise known as a crystal set, together with my brother, who was four years my senior. At night we listened to the radio under the bedclothes. Naturally we had to keep all our antics asecret from our parents and to ensure that we could do what we liked without being found out, we set up

My school years in Nuremberg
various warning systems in the house – door handle contacts forexample, low voltage of course. Our ingenious system worked perfectly, sounding a warning bell in the cellar as soon as the garden gate was opened. This went on until the day my father discovered...