Fritz Heine

Social democratic childhood

Fritz Heine was born in Hanover, his parents' only child. His mother, always delicate, died from Consumption during the First World War when he was just twelve. His father, Friedrich Heine, was an organ builder who had, like his brothers, joined the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) in its early days. Socialist political ideas were therefore part of Fritz Heine's childhood. Initially he underwent a conventional Protestant upbringing, but when he was thirteen he rejected Protestantism. His father did not try to prevent this, although much later, looking back, Heine suggested that his act of teenage rebellion must have embarrassed his father whose work, as a builder of organs, necessarily involved churches and churchmen. After his mother died his father remarried: his second wife was a distant cousin who had been widowed on 4 August 1914 when her first husband had poisoned himself in order to avoid having to fight in the war that had been launched a week earlier.