Concept
Regine Hildebrandt (née Radischewski; 26 April 1941 – 26 November 2001) was a German biologist and politician (Social Democratic Party of Germany). Regine Radischewski was born in Berlin during the war, the second of her parents' two recorded children. Her father was a pianist who worked as an accompanist at the National Ballet Academy. Her mother would later own a small tobacconist shop. When she was two the family were evacuated from central Berlin to countryside far to the east of Germany, and shortly after that they were bombed out, losing most of their material possessions. The war ended in May 1945 and the family ended up back in Berlin. For the first five or six years of her schooling she attended a school in a western occupation zone of the city ("West Berlin"), but as the political division between the Soviet occupation zone and the western occupation zones became more stark and, it seemed, more permanent, her parents opted on her behalf for a school in the Soviet zone in what had by now become known as East Berlin. The family home was in the city centre along Bernauer Straße ("Bernau Street") which formed the (initially hard to spot) political border between East Berlin and West Berlin, and afforded Regine a ring-side seat in the cold wall drama until September 1961 when the family were forcibly relocated in connection with the building of the Berlin Wall. In October 1961 she co-founded and joined the interdenominational choir at Berlin's (Protestant) Cathedral, which now flourished under the musical direction of a man called Herbert Hildebrand. From 1959 to 1964, she studied biology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. She had never joined the Free German Youth (FDJ/Freie Deutsche Jugend), which was in effect the youth wing of the young country's ruling SED party. Her failure to join seems to have been a result of timetable clashes involving her commitment to singing in the church choir.
