Wieck was born in
Königsberg, the capital of
East Prussia (now
Kaliningrad, Russia). He was the son of two Königsberg musicians who were widely known before the
Nazi era, Kurt Wieck and Hedwig Wieck-Hulisch. They were founders of the popular Königsberger Streichquartett (Königsberg String Quartet). Wieck was a grand-nephew of
Clara Schumann (née Wieck). After consultation with a local rabbi, his Jewish mother and his nominally Protestant, but in religious matters indifferent, father decided to bring up their children, Michael and his sister, Miriam (born 1925), as
Jews and enrolled them with the Jewish congregation in Königsberg. According to
Jewish religious law a person born from a Jewish mother is Jewish by birth. Following promulgation of the 1935 anti-Jewish
Nuremberg Laws, Wieck and his sister were categorized, not as
Mischlinge (mixed race), but as
Geltungsjuden ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the
Holocaust. After
Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Wiecks experienced the gradual ramping-up of
anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. First Michael and Miriam were ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. Later they were forbidden to attend classes at all. In 1938 Miriam was sent to a boarding school in Scotland in a
Kindertransport, taking the place of another German-Jewish girl who had gone to the United States. As a result, she survived the war. Shortly thereafter, young Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. In mid-1941 Wieck celebrated his
Bar Mitzva in the small Orthodox synagogue
Adass Jisroel, since the main Jewish synagogue of Königsberg had been destroyed in the Nazi
Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. During the pogrom perpetrators vandalized the interior of the Orthodox synagogue hall, but spared it from arson because it was housed in a residential building. Later the congregation restored a prayer hall in the building and used it until the few remaining Königsberg synagogues were banned. He stayed in New Zealand until 1968 when he returned to Germany. On his return to Germany Wieck settled in
Stuttgart. An accomplished violinist, he became first concert master of the
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, and in 1974-93 was also first violinist in the
Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart. In his memoir, Wieck muses on human nature and speculates on ultimate causes and the nature of the deity. Although he retained a strong emotional attachment to Judaism, he ultimately espoused a kind of deism, alluding to "a definite feeling of something 'lying behind it all' that always resists being put into words." Regarding human nature and humankind’s potential for good and evil, he said: ==Awards==