Read more about the American politician, consultant, and political scientist Henry Kissinger and also find out if he has grandchildren.
Who is Henry Kissinger?
Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger on May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Bavaria, Germany, the son of homemaker Paula and Louis Kissinger (1887–1982), a schoolteacher; he had a younger brother, Walter (1924–2021), who was a businessman.
Kissinger’s family was German-Jewish, his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb having adopted “Kissinger” as his surname in 1817, taking it from the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen. In his childhood, Kissinger enjoyed playing soccer. He played for the youth team of SpVgg Fürth, which was one of the nation’s best clubs at the time.
In a 2022 interview, Kissinger vividly recalled being nine years old in 1933 and learning of Adolf Hitler’s election as Chancellor of Germany, which proved to be a profound turning point for the Kissinger family. During Nazi rule, Kissinger and his friends were regularly harassed and beaten by Hitler Youth gangs.
Kissinger sometimes defied the segregation imposed by Nazi racial laws by sneaking into soccer stadiums to watch matches, often resulting in beatings from security guards. As a result of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws, Kissinger was unable to gain admittance to the Gymnasium, and his father was dismissed from his teaching job.
On August 20, 1938, when Kissinger was 15 years old, he and his family fled Germany to avoid further Nazi persecution. The family briefly stopped in London before arriving in New York City on September 5. Kissinger later downplayed the influence his experiences of Nazi persecution had had on his policies, writing that the “Germany of my youth had a great deal of order and very little justice; it was not the sort of place likely to inspire devotion to order in the abstract.”
However, many scholars, including Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson, have disagreed and argued that his experiences influenced the formation of his realist approach to foreign policy.
Kissinger spent his high school years in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan as part of the German-Jewish immigrant community that resided there at the time.
Although Kissinger assimilated quickly into American culture, he never lost his pronounced German accent, due to childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak. After his first year at George Washington High School, he began attending school at night and worked in a shaving brush factory during the day.
Following high school, Kissinger enrolled in the City College of New York, studying accounting. He excelled academically as a part-time student, continuing to work while enrolled. His studies were interrupted in early 1943 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.
Personal life of Henry Kissinger
Kissinger married Anneliese “Ann” Fleischer on February 6, 1949, and they had two children, Elizabeth and David, and divorced in 1964. In 1955 he met Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann during a symposium at Harvard; the two had a romantic relationship that lasted several years.
On March 30, 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. They lived in Kent, Connecticut, and in New York City. Kissinger’s son David Kissinger served as an executive with NBC Universal Television Studio before becoming head of Conaco, Conan O’Brien’s production company, in 2005. In February 1982, at the age of 58, Henry Kissinger underwent coronary bypass surgery. On May 27, 2023, Kissinger turned 100.
Does Henry Kissinger have grandchildren?
Aside from the information about Henry’s children, there is no information about the grandchildren of the American diplomat, and political scientist.
source: www.ghbase.com
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