Germany, 1921.
As the curtain of the Great War fell, and in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, a great recession hit the country. Unemployment flew to an all-new high, and inflation made things go from bad to worse faster than any of us could have dreamed it would. We had lost the war, so of course those damned British, French, and Americans thought that it was our place to pay reparation for it, leaving men without work and children to starve. The once-great streets of my homeland were filled with those who could not find a means to pay for themselves, soup kitchens running out of food faster than they could fill, and the occasional putrid smell of death and disease permeating the back alleys and sidestreets of my hometown.
As for myself…
My family had never known riches. My mother worked in the factories during the war, but before that she was a simple housewife. My brother left for God-knows-where years ago, but I haven't seen him since. The same happened to my father: he went off to fight, but nobody had told me what became of him. The two other men of the family, gone without a trace, no letter or even a telegram to tell what had gone wrong.
My mother held hope until she, too, was gone.
And so I remained.
As a scholar, with high test scores and a body too weak for fighting, I was kept away from the front lines, staying on the home front. I was 'too useful' to be wasted in battle, I guess. So with that, I had time to study my passion, to use my own talents in hopes to find a means to give my country what it had long-deserved.
Rocketry.
Imagine the sort of things that we could learn, simply by going to space! By flying to a world untouched and unsullied by the Earth below, learning from the inhabitants and taking that knowledge home. Think of how wonderful it would have been if Germany had found the means to do this first. Before the Americans, before the Russians. Before those other countries that looked down on us and spit on us after the war.
So I traveled, catching word of a man in Transylvania: Herr Oberth, who had studied at the University of Munich. He was German, and was looking for apprentices, to further study his craft.
I had to meet him. It was almost a necessity, like breathing.
I went on, hopping from train to train, leaving home and country behind in pursuit of a greater goal and purpose than what I had been living then.
You now, looking back on it now, it's funny what a man can do in pursuit of knowledge. And what a small spark can give to bring light to a man's delusions, changing his life for the better and bringing him things that he would have never imagined possible.