Oral History with Leticia Andreas-Wolf
Sunday, January 15, 2012

“My birthplace is Dresden, Germany, year 1965. Despite growing up for my first 10 years in the old East behind the Iron Curtain, my childhood was rather happy and carefree. A dramatic event in 1974 changed the life of my parents and me forever. In 1975, we were forced to leave East Germany for West Germany, and settled in Braunschweig, and later in Wunstorf, near Hannover.

When I was 16, my parents sent me to the U.S. as an exchange student for one year, which I spent in Shillington, PA. Upon returning to Germany in 1982, I entered a vocational school and became a State Licensed Foreign Language Correspondent. Then the work life began, as an administrator. In 1991, I gave up everything save few memorabilia, and immigrated to the U.S. Living in Los Angeles for 14 years, I studied music at Los Angeles City College, then transferred to UCLA and received my B.A. in Ethnomusicology in 2000. I moved to Northern California in 2005. In 2007, I began to teach German part-time “accidentally.”

Upon one of several visits back to Germany, I visited Dresden for the first time again in 2007, after I had not been there in 21 years. This was the beginning of a new, emotional, everlasting, deep love for my birth city and ancestry. Now, I visit Dresden every time I am in Germany. My talk at Mündliche Geschichtsreihe will include life as I remember it as a child in the Old East; my birth city, and later the new life in West Germany; immigration to the U.S., and how being an immigrant made me become closer to my homeland and birth city than ever before.”