At the time I learned of Christian Science...

Horst Heinrich Braun

At the time I learned of Christian Science, I had reached the darkest days of my life. My mother had passed on, and suddenly at the age of nineteen I stood alone in the world, without brothers or sisters.

My parents were divorced, and after we had lost all we had, house and furnishings, during an air raid on Darmstadt, my father moved to another city. Four weeks before the death of my mother, after unspeakable difficulties, I had moved into our home in Bensheim-Auerbach/ Bergstrasse. In addition to all this, one lung had been badly affected by all that had taken place, so that when I was examined by the district board of health, the doctor prescribed the highest supplementary rations for me—the so-called tuberculosis supplement.

This depressed me even more, for I lived in the belief I had a hereditary disease—consumption of the lungs—a disease from which my mother had suffered for more than twenty years. That I was alive at all, being the child of a mother who had undergone thoracoplasty, an operation performed before my birth, was a miracle in the eyes of the medical world of that time, and it had been prophesied that I would succumb to this disease in my early childhood. Thus I was burdened with all these erroneous beliefs. I was weak and sickly, and added to this I felt that I had lost my mainstay, my mother. I was having constant difficulty with the authorities and with the people living in my house, and I was in the depths of despair. My training as a musician, particularly an opera singer, begun some months previously, was now seriously endangered.

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