[1][2][3] He grew up there, the son of an independent haulage contractor and former professional officer from a social-democratic dominated family.

[2] Schulz was active from the beginning in the Protestant church movements for peace, ecology and human rights.

[2][8] During the Peaceful Revolution, he was a founding member of the New Forum in 1989,[2][9] representing the group at the Round Table and contributing to its constitution.

After the reunification of Germany, he was a member of the Bundestag until 2005, as his party's CEO in parliament (Parlamentarischer Geschäftsführer) from the beginning and its economic speaker from 1998.

[10] When Chancellor Gerhard Schröder engineered the loss of a no-confidence vote in Parliament and asked President Horst Köhler to allow an early vote in 2005, Schulz and Jelena Hoffmann of Schröder's Social Democrats filed a complaint before the Federal Constitutional Court against the dissolution of parliament.

[13] Schulz was vice president of the council of the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship from 2003 to 2008,[14] and a member of the board of the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag from 2003 to 2009.

[16] The family lived in the Boitzenburger Land in Brandenburg, where he founded a support association for his church parish.