Immanuel Kant
Kant was born on April 22, 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia. Baptized 'Emanuel', he later changed his name to 'Immanuel' after learning Hebrew. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. His education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant maintained Christian ideals for some time, but struggled to reconcile the faith with his belief in science. In his "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals", he reveals a belief in immortality as the necessary condition of humanity's approach to the highest morality possible. However, as Kant was skeptical about some of the arguments used prior to him in defence of theism and maintained that human understanding is limited and can never attain knowledge about God or the soul, various commentators have labelled him a philosophical agnostic.
Hermann Kant
Hermann Kant was born on June 14, 1926, in Hamburg, Germany the son of a factory worker and a gardener born into poverty. His younger brother, Uwe Kant, became a well-known children's author. Because of the impending bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War, the family moved to Parchim in 1940, where his paternal grandfather lived as a master potter. After passing elementary school he began an electrician apprenticeship in Parchim, which he completed in 1944. On December 8, 1944, he was drafted into the German Military. He became a Polish POW, was held in Warsaw's Mokotów Prison and later was transferred to a labor camp, which was located on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. He was the co-founder of the antifascist committee and teacher at the Antifa Central School. During this time he met the writer Anna Seghers, who would have a lasting impression on him. After being released as a prisoner of war in 1949, he moved to East Germany and joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.