Osnabrück, 1960: a political household

1960: Born in Osnabrück

Boris Ludwig Pistorius was born on 14 March 1960 in Osnabrück, then in the West German state of Lower Saxony, as it remains today. According to German biographical accounts, he was named after the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago.

Osnabrück is a mid-sized university and industrial city between the Teutoburg Forest and the Wiehen Hills. Its civic identity rests on the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, negotiated partly in its town hall, and it markets itself as the Friedensstadt, the City of Peace.

1972: A mother in politics

His mother, Ursula Pistorius, was an active Social Democrat. She was elected to Osnabrück city council in 1972, where she served until 1996, and sat in the Lower Saxony Landtag, the state parliament in Hanover, from 1978 to 1990. Born in 1933 in Frankfurt an der Oder, she died in 2015.

His father, Ludwig Pistorius, was born in 1923 in Packebusch in the Altmark region and died in 2009.

1976: Joins the SPD at sixteen

Growing up with local party politics at the kitchen table, Pistorius joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1976. It was the era of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, of terrorism by the Red Army Faction and of the debates that would lead to NATO’s 1979 “double-track” decision on intermediate-range missiles.

1978: Abitur, with Russian

He completed his secondary education at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Gymnasium in Osnabrück, passing the Abitur in 1978. Russian was one of his examination subjects, an unusual choice in West Germany at the time and one that later gave him a working knowledge of the language.

Outside school he played football for the local club Schinkel 04 and became a lasting supporter of VfL Osnabrück.