M ANFRED WINNEWISSER grew up under extremely difficult circumstances as he struggled through personal loss and the deep deprivations of post-World War II Germany. Manfred's father Georg, a Ph.D. economist who spent time as a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University, New York, USA, then as an accountant and financial consultant, found a major client in depression-laden pre-war Germany, in a mineral water bottling company. He rented a house as a summer home for his family at a farm in Bad Peterstal-Griesbach, in the Black Forest in 1936, but left as an army draftee in 1939. His family soon moved there permanently from Karlsruhe to escape the bombings. He returned only once, on a brief two-week leave, before being mortally wounded on the Russian front in 1942. On that, his last visit with them in Bad Peterstal, Georg gave young Manfred a briefcase and instructions to take care of its contents, while he swam in the local pool. As one of the last encounters with his father, Manfred remembers with horror, accidently falling backward into the pool, briefcase and all. At age 8, Manfred became the oldest male in this family with three children, trying to learn as much as he could from the old farmer he called "Opa"-grandfather figure-about cows and tree farming, while keeping an eye on his five year old twin brother and sister, Gisbert and Ingrid.Following the war in 1946, the Winnewissers 1 were forced to abandon their Peterstal refuge in the French Occupational Zone, and were relocated to the American Occupational Zone in the ravaged city of Karlsruhe. Living hand-to-mouth in a half-ruined apartment, the family managed to survive through what was to be an extremely rough next six years. Manfred's ebullient personality and outlook on life seemed to transcend the Manuscript