[2] Jürgen Scharf was born in Salzwedel approximately three years after the birth of the German Democratic Republic.

Salzwedel was a small town known for its "Tree ring Cake" located on the eastern side of the border dividing West from East Germany.

A few months before his birth the East German government blocked the frontier, and the ensuing three decades saw the construction of an increasingly sophisticated barrier created to protect the German Democratic Republic from western military aggression and/or from the flight of its own working age population.

Scharf successfully concluded his schooling in 1971 and went on to study Mathematics at the "Otto-von-Guericke" Technical University in Magdeburg, emerging with a degree in 1975.

1990 was also the year in which he was one of the co-founders of the Magdeburg Cathedral School[2] (actually the re-founding of a venerable institution which, prior to 1949, had been able to trace its origins back far enough to number Martin Luther among its alumni).