IADL Review: Thank you for accepting this interview by Mail and for answering the following questions from the IADL Review “International Review of Contemporary Law”.

Your CV is impressive: starting with your childhood and adolescence in the GDR. Could you tell us and younger generations more about your family members in the resistance against the Nazi Regime and about the Stauffenberg group? And who was Fritz Werner von der Schulenburg and in which circumstances was he executed at Plötzensee on 20 August 1944?

Two members of my Schulenburg family, Fritz-Dietlof and Friedrich-Werner, took part in the failed Stauffenberg coup against the Nazi regime and were brutally executed by hanging on piano wire at Plötzensee in 1944. I descend from the Russian branch of the Schulenburg family: my father was born in St. Petersburg, my mother in Riga during the Russian Empire. At the age of just fourteen, my father was imprisoned in a Bolshevik labor camp and lost much of his family during the revolution. It was Friedrich-Werner—who personally knew Stalin and who was later executed—who helped him escape from the Soviet Union in 1925.

During the Nazi era, both my parents were classified as “non-Aryans.” This may also explain why they chose to move to the GDR in 1953, I was still born in Munich. Our family endured many of the profound upheavals and tragedies that marked the first half of the 20th century. I believe such experiences and traumas are carried forward into subsequent generations, and much of what I do in life seems subconsciously shaped by this legacy. Although these matters were never openly discussed, the family was firmly anti-Nazi, yet never anti-Russian.