Early Life
Otto Ernst Lindemann was born on 28 March 1894 in Altenkirchen in the Westerwald, Rhine Province. He was the first of three children of Dr. jur. Georg Heinrich Ernst Lindemann and Maria Lindemann, née Lieber. Known as Ernst, Georg Lindemann was a probationary judge (Gerichtsassessor) and later president of the Prussian Central Land Credit Company, a Prussian credit bank.
Otto Ernst Lindemann was baptised into the Evangelical Church on 26 April 1894. The family moved to the Charlottenburg quarter of Berlin, where they lived at 6 Carmer Street, in 1895. His younger brother—Kurt—was born in 1896, followed by a second brother, Hans-Wolfgang, in 1900. The family relocated again in 1903, this time to their own house in the Dahlem quarter of Berlin, near the Grunewald forest.
In 1910, when Lindemann was 16, his uncle Kapitän zur See (Captain) Friedrich Tiesmeyer was in command of the light cruiser SMS Mainz (October 1909–January 1910) of the Imperial Navy, at that time holding the rank of Fregattenkapitän (commander). At a family reunion in Hamelin, Lindemann talked with his uncle and heard of his seafaring adventures in the Far East. These conversations gave Lindemann the idea of a naval career.
Lindemann graduated from the Bismarck-Gymnasium (secondary school) in Berlin-Wilmersdorf with his Abitur (diploma) late in 1912 with an average-to-good overall rating. For the next six months, he attended the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Richmond, London.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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