OBITUARY Christa Ackermann Frazier December 17, 1936 – November 13, 2018 Healthy, sharp, talkative, a devout Christian, loving and beloved to the last, Christa Ackermann Frazier died on Nov. 13, 2018 at 6:03pm in Charlotte after being struck by a car while crossing Sharon Rd near her home, where she went for regular walks. She was one month short of her 82nd birthday.
Christa was born on Dec. 17, 1936 in Backnang, Germany, the first of six children to Ernst Gottlob Ackermann (1903-86), a leather tanner, and his wife Emma Karoline (nee Pfizenmaier, 1909-97). A fever in early infancy led to her emergency baptism in the days before Christmas, and so she was named Christa for the approaching holiday.
Her primary school years came during World War II, and her family frequently was forced to shelter in a root cellar during Allied bombardments. During one air raid she and brother Karl were blasted into the air by an exploding bomb, though both landed uninjured in a sheltered spot between buildings. Her parents, devout Lutherans, disapproved of the Nazis but could only quietly endure the regime.
Late in the war, when her father was drafted into Hitler’s army to be sent to the Eastern Front, he fled into the forest, hiding until the Allies occupied southern Germany. Nazis later came to arrest the family. But a French soldier, one of an advancing force, had been sheltering in the cellar, and emerged to stop the arrest and declared the war over.
Following her parents’ example, Christa lived as a person of conscience, believing in Christian values of truth and justice and in God as the only true arbiter of the goodness or wrongness of human actions. At the end of WWII, US forces set up a headquarters in her parents’ home, and she remembers their jazz, scrambled eggs and good humor. Ostracized by Hitler Youth for her bright red hair as a child, she found validation in American GIs who carried pictures of red-haired movie starlets like Rita Hayworth and Greta Garbo.
In 1955 at the age of 19, Christa emigrated the US, working as a secretary for Volkswagen in New Jersey. She married John G. Frazier III of Charlotte in 1966 in Prattsville, NY and became a naturalized US citizen in 1969. They moved through Knoxville, where she gave birth to two children, David (b.
1971) and Julia (b. 1973) and also Houston and Detroit before finally settling in Charlotte in 1978. In 1990 she divorced and never remarried.
She ran a Freshens Yogurt franchise for several years on South Boulevard. She placed the highest value on her religious and family life. She was an active, engaged and loved member of church congregations: at Sharon Presbyterian Church during the 1980s and 1990s and since the 2000s at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church on N. Tryon St, where she regularly read scripture to the congregation as part of church services, even in the weeks up to her death.
She was a God-fearing woman, read the Bible daily, followed current events via Public Television news, went on long walks through Beverly Woods and especially the Olde Georgetown subdivision, and frequently chatted with neighbors and spread good cheer. She was stubborn as a mule and held a heavy distrust of bureaucracy, yet she lived through kindness, compassion, sacrificing her own comfort on behalf of others, and was honest even and especially when it was to her disadvantage. Christa Ackermann Frazier was the epitome of a loving mother.
She is survived by two children, David Frazier (Doris Hung) and Julia Cicero (Marc Cicero); two grandchildren Caroline Cicero and Maxime Cicero; brothers Karl Ackermann, Hans-Jürgen Ackermann, and Manfred Ackermann; sister Margarete Pfefferkorn; ex-husband John G Frazier III; and many others who loved her. She is preceded in death by her brother Fritz Ackermann.
If you found any mistakes, or you would like to add/remove to this obituary, please contact us by email: info@obituary.memorial. We never ask money for this.
