Ralph Giordano was a German writer and publicist. Born to a Sicilian father and a Jewish mother, he was soon persecuted by the Nazi regime. His family survived the Holocaust by hiding in a friend's basement. After his experiences, he became a communist, but soon grew estranged because of his dislike for Stalinism and exited the German Communist Party in 1957. In 1982, he published his most widely known work, Die Bertinis, a semi-autobiographical novel portraying the experiences of a family of mixed ethnic heritage (including Jewish) from the end of the 19th Century through the end of World War II. In 1988, it was presented in a television series aired on the Second German TV network (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, or ZDF). Thereafter Giordano worked as a freelance writer and wrote numerous articles about his experiences in Nazi Germany and about the dangers of Neo-Nazi movements. He saw Islam as a threat: In a New York Times interview in 2007, he vehemently opposed the construction of a new mosque in Cologne, citing German mosques as "a symbol of a parallel society", and called the integration of German Muslims "a failure". Ralph Giordano died on Dec. 10, 2014, aged 91, in a Cologne hospital of complications following a hip fracture.