Trutz Hardo was born in 1939 in the East German town of Eisenach as the second son of the pharmacist and poet Dr. Karl Ernst Hockemeyer who was to achieve postwar notoriety under his nom de plume Molar.

After the war, the disabled and widowed father of four moved to what was to become the Allied zone of Germany, where he found places for his children in a variety of boarding schools and families.

Trutz Hardo attended nine different schools and six boarding schools. He passed his baccalaureate on the German Island of Wangerooge in 1960 and went on to study Germanic philology and history at Berlin and Munich university. It was in Berlin, in 1966, that he took his first degree.