Hans Zacher was born in Erlach am Inn, Lower Bavaria, in 1928, the son of a village schoolteacher. „The village we lived in was small and impoverished,“ he says. Yet his house was a little treasure trove full of books. Very austere conditions but an appreciation of education and culture: „a wonderful foundation upon which to grow“. The nearest „little town with any sign of an urban culture“ lay on the opposite bank of the Inn, in Austria: Braunau. The nearest city was Passau, 60 kilometres away. „My early childhood had nothing to do with law,“ he would later write in an autobiographical draft. „Social norms, religious standards, customs and constraints“ – but not law.
President under the influence of German reunification