But to Claudia?
Petra and Claudia Albrecht were both born in Berlin when the city and the nation were still divided east and west by the wall. After the sudden death of their mother when they were just toddlers, their father; a soldier in the East German army, sent them to live with his parents in Lebus. Though he wrote to them often, the girls rarely saw him as they grew up.
After the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s, the girls were sent to Boarding School in Munich. They were also reunited with their father, who moved to Munich after reunification. Having always been close; sometimes inseparable, Petra and Claudia became even closer in Munich. They also bonded deeply with their estranged father. But as time went on, things began to change, and the sisters began to grow apart.
Though she completed her studies and graduated with honors from the University of Munich at the age of twenty-two, Petra simply could not assimilate to the modern western world and clung firmly to her eastern roots and culture. She took work as a barmaid in Munich where she soon met Ernst Schulze. They married a year later, and Petra quickly became pregnant. After the twins were born, the family moved to Kiel, where Ernst worked on the docks. By the time the twins were old enough to walk, Ernst Schulze deserted his family; running off with another woman to Sweden. Nobody has seen or heard from him since. Then just days after, Petra and Claudia’s father died suddenly of a massive heart attack.
Heartbroken, penniless and on the verge of homelessness, Petra took her children back to Lebus where she found work as a seamstress and dressmaker in a local shop owned by a family friend. A few years later, Petra purchased the shop from the aging owners and her grandparents left her their house in Lebus and moved to Leipzig. Petra never remarried nor did she wish to. She created a very quiet, stable and secure life for herself and her children and was very content.
Claudia on the other hand; who dynamically embraced western culture, left Germany just after graduating from the University of Munich and enrolled at Oxford University in England where she ultimately earned a master’s degree in Business Administration. She then made her way to the United States, where she studied at Harvard University and earned a second master’s degree in Industrial Psychology.
Along with her native German, Claudia fluently speaks English, French, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and even Latin. An international businesswoman in the beauty and fashion industry; the C.E.O of her own company, as well as the editor-in-chief of a world renown fashion magazine, Claudia Albrecht has traveled the globe in her company’s Gulf Stream and netted millions of dollars in salary over the course of her illustrious career. With her main offices and primary home in Paris, Claudia also has offices and leased penthouse apartments in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney, Rome and Stockholm with a chateau in the Swiss Alps. She also owns a virtual fleet of luxury automobiles and a Yacht on the Mediterranean.