How J Cole ended up being born in Germany
J Cole grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but he truly came of age in Queens, his self-professed “second home.” But neither represented his birthplace. Cole wasn’t even born in America.
Cole arrived into the world in a country that, technically, no longer exists. His mother gave birth to him in Frankfurt, which was, at the time, a part of East Germany. The modern German state only formed five years later, after the Berlin Wall came down and East and West Germany unified.
Neither of Cole’s parents are German, so how did he end up being born in Frankfurt? It was down to his dad’s work, which entailed some travelling. He was a member of the US Army.
Cole’s mother, a white woman, worked for the United States Postal Service, but his dad, a Black man, was a military person who was stationed in Frankfurt. That’s how Cole ended up being born as an “army brat,” as he once put it to AllHipHop. He arrived on the military base.
“My mother and my father were in the army when I was young, so that’s how we ended up there,” Cole said of his German start in life. “It’s diverse, there’s a whole bunch of different types of people, [so I have had] a lot of different types of experiences.”
Cole’s father left his mother while the future rapper was still a baby, so he only lived in Frankfurt for a matter of months. By the time he was about eight months old, his mother had taken him and his older brother to North Carolina, where he grew up.
Life in America wasn’t immediately easy for Cole’s mother and her two young children. It took them a little time to work things out, as Cole reflected on NPR in 2011.
“I started off on a military base, and I remember moving—I guess this was after my parents got divorced—from there to a trailer park,” he said. “It was one of the scariest places I’ve been to, because I was always worried about my mother.”
Things, thankfully, eased for the family when Cole was in “fifth or sixth grade,” when they moved “to a nicer house” where Cole had his “own room.” He credits this unsettled childhood, in which he moved from place to play and from social class to class, as providing him with essential life experience. He “saw life at all levels,” as he put it.