What Did Leopold Aschenbrenner's Great-grandmother Live Through?

Leopold Aschenbrenner says his great-grandmother lived through the Nazi era, World War II, and most of her life under the East German communist dictatorship. She was almost 60 the first time she lived in a free, wealthy country.

She was born in 1934. As a child she saw the firebombing of Dresden from a country cottage. In 1954, during a popular uprising, Soviet tanks came in, and her husband told her to get off the streets and get home quickly. A son tried to ride a motorcycle across and was put in a Stasi prison for a while. Aschenbrenner's mother grew up in the former East and his father in the former West. They met shortly after the wall fell. He says the end of the Cold War is the reason he exists. He grew up in Berlin, and his great-grandmother, still alive, is very important in his life and raised him when he was young.

When he was a kid, she did not want him to get involved in politics. Joining a political party carried very bad connotations for her.