Clara Schumann at the age of nine, Clara Wieck performed at the Leipzig home of Dr. Ernst Carus, director of the mental hospital at Colditz Castle. There, she met another gifted young pianist who had been invited to the musical evening, Robert Schumann, who was nine years older. Schumann admired Clara's playing so much that he asked permission from his mother to stop studying law, which had never interested him much, and take music lessons with Clara's father. While taking lessons, he rented a room in the Wieck household, staying about a year. He would sometimes dress up as a ghost and
Michael Wieck from the Nazi racist categories of half-, quarter- or smaller fractions of Jewishness. Following promulgation of the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Wieck and his sister were categorized, not as Mischlinge (mixed race), but as "Geltungsjuden" ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the Holocaust. After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933 the Wiecks experienced the gradual ramping-up of anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. First they were ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. Later they were later forbidden to attend classes at all. In 1938 Miriam was sent to a boarding school