Jo Jastram was born in Rostock close to Germany's Baltic Sea (East Sea / Ostsee) coast.
  His father was a teacher.
He attended the St George School in Rostock where contemporaries included Walter Kempowski.
He began drawing at an early age, receiving encouragement from his teacher, the artist Thuro Balzer.
  Jo Jastram reached his seventeenth birthday a few months before the end of the war and was drafted into the national militia (Volksturn) which led to a period as an American prisoner of war.
After the war he worked in forestry and then as a trainee well-digger before switching to wood carving.
  This was followed by a period of study at the Technical School for Wood-art at distant Empfertshausen, in the south-west of the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany, an area now in the process of becoming the stand-alone German Democratic Republic, politically separated both from what the west and from the lands to the east of the Oder-Neisse line, now mostly incorporated into Poland and the Soviet Union as part of a larger post-war redrawing of the frontiers in northern-central Europe.
  During this time, in 1949 Jastram joined the young country's National Democratic Party (NDPD).
Still in the south of East Germany, Jastram then in 1951 transferred to Dresden where he attended the Fine Arts Academy, studying under Walter Arnold, before moving on again in 1954 to the Fine Arts Academy at Berlin-Weißensee where he was taught by Heinrich Drake.
Jo Jastram was born in Rostock close to Germany's Baltic Sea (East Sea / Ostsee) coast.   His father was a teacher. He attended the St George School in Rostock where contemporaries included Walter Kempowski. He began drawing at an early age, receiving encouragement from his teacher, the artist Thuro Balzer.   Jo Jastram reached his seventeenth birthday a few months before the end of the war and was drafted into the national militia (Volksturn) which led to a period as an American prisoner of war. After the war he worked in forestry and then as a trainee well-digger before switching to wood carving.   This was followed by a period of study at the Technical School for Wood-art at distant Empfertshausen, in the south-west of the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany, an area now in the process of becoming the stand-alone German Democratic Republic, politically separated both from what the west and from the lands to the east of the Oder-Neisse line, now mostly incorporated into Poland and the Soviet Union as part of a larger post-war redrawing of the frontiers in northern-central Europe.   During this time, in 1949 Jastram joined the young country's National Democratic Party (NDPD). Still in the south of East Germany, Jastram then in 1951 transferred to Dresden where he attended the Fine Arts Academy, studying under Walter Arnold, before moving on again in 1954 to the Fine Arts Academy at Berlin-Weißensee where he was taught by Heinrich Drake.
Jo Jastram