Adenauer credited his strong health in older age to the use of an infusion of barley water taken at night, but also maize stigma, mallow, sage, and yellow roses, which he used for coughs he was prone to. He was greatly interested in the use of medicinal herbs, according to famous French herbalist Maurice Messugue, whom he met and befriended. Adenauer had ill health as a young man, had been rejected for military service at age 20 because of his lungs. He graduated in 1900 and afterwards worked as a lawyer at the court in Cologne. He was a member of several Roman Catholic students' associations under the K.St.V. In 1894, he completed his Abitur and started to study law and politics at the universities of Freiburg, Munich and Bonn. The Prussians are Obotrites, Wends, Slavs and the like who put together their state by theft and violence."" Īdenauer's biographer Hans-Peter Schwarz argued that given that Adenauer was a member of the social circle from "staunch Catholic families" described by Lehmann, and in view of the marked anti-Prussian views that he was later to display, that it is quite likely that he shared the anti-Prussian views held by the social circle described by Lehmann. I can still vividly the day one of my schoolmates told me: "We Rhinelanders are the true Germans. After history lessons pupils would engage in debates in which the idealisation of Frederick the Great was criticized, with references to Onno Klopp and other historians, and Bismarck's cultural policy was vehemently condemned.I did not detect any real sympathy for Prussia among my Cologne-born fellow pupils from Catholic families and this, for the first time, made me aware of the differences among the German tribes. "At the Gymnasium I had a circle of friends who, for the most part came from staunch Catholic families which had-at the very least-a critical approach to Bismarck and the Prussianisation of Germany. At the Gymnasium that Adenauer attended, one of Adenauer's close friends, Heinrich Lehmann recalled about their social circle that: One of the formative influences of Adenauer's youth was the Kulturkampf, an experience that as related to him by his parents left him with a lifelong dislike for "Prussianism", and led him like many other Catholic Rhinelanders of the 19th century to deeply resent the Rhineland's inclusion in Prussia. His siblings were August (1872–1952), Johannes (1873–1937), Lilli (1879–1950) and Elisabeth, who died shortly after birth in c. Konrad Adenauer was born as the third of five children of Johann Konrad Adenauer (1833–1906) and his wife Helene (née Scharfenberg 1849–1919) in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia, on 5 January 1876. The Cologne years Early life and education