 Karl Theodor Jaspers was born on 23rd February 1883 in the North German town of Oldenburg near the North Sea, where his ancestors had lived for generations. He was the son of a banker and a representative of the parliament (Landtagesabgeordneten), Carl Wilhelm Jaspers (1850–1940) and Henriette Tantzen (1862–1941), who also came from a family that was involved in local parliament. Jaspers’s family milieu was strongly influenced by the political culture of North German liberalism, and he often referred to the climate of early liberal democratic thought as a formative aspect of his education. Moreover, although he claimed not to have been influenced by any specifically ecclesiastical faith, his thought was also formed by the spirit of North German Protestantism, and his philosophical outlook can in many respects be placed in the religiously inflected tradition of Kant and Kierkegaard.