Robert Gernhardt was born the son of a judge and a chemist in Tallinn, where his family was part of the Baltic German minority. In 1939 they had to relocate to Poznań. In 1945 his father was killed in the war, and after the end of the war, his mother fled west with her three sons Robert, Per, and Andreas, finally ending up in Göttingen, where Robert Gernhardt finished school in 1956.
