About Holger Czukay
Holger Schüring (24 March 1938 – 5 September 2017), known professionally as Holger Czukay (), was a German musician who co-founded the krautrock group Can. Described as "successfully bridg[ing] the gap between pop and the avant-garde", Czukay also created early important examples of ambient music, explored "world music" well before the term was coined, and was a pioneer of sampling. == Biography == === Early life === Czukay was born Holger Schüring on 24 March 1938 in the Free City of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). According to Holger, his grandfather told Third Reich officials that their family "must be Aryan", and came up with a family tree supporting the claim. The family also changed their Polish last name "Czukay" to Schüring, a Dutch name. In early 1945, after World War II, his family was expelled from Poland. They booked tickets for a passage on the ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff, which was due to depart on 13 January 1945, but at the last moment his grandmother changed her mind and took them to the railway station, where they boarded a train carrying wounded soldiers to Berlin. The Gustloff was sunk by a Soviet torpedo, and almost ten thousand passengers died. The Czukay family resettled in Limburg an der Lahn, and when Holger was in his teens, moved to Duisburg, where he attended the Gerhard Mercator Scientific School and worked part-time in a radio and TV repair shop. While working at the shop he became fond of the aural qualities of radio broadcasts (anticipating his use of shortwave radio broadcasts as musical elements) and became familiar with the rudiments of electrical repair and engineering.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.