Prof. Dr. phil. Helmut Franz Maria Kirchmeyer was born on June 30, 1930, at 1:00 p.m. in the Golzheim Clinic in Düsseldorf on the Rhine. He was the fifth and youngest son (the only survivor being his eldest brother Detlev, godson of Klara May, wife of the popular novelist Karl May).
His father, Peter Kirchmeyer (1889–1952), was a mid-level civil servant (mittlerer Beamter) in the social welfare administration of the Rhine Province. His mother, Franziska Kirchmeyer, née Habets (1896–1969), a native of Hoensbroeck (Netherlands), was a costume dressmaker and housewife who, at times, operated her own atelier together with two of her sixteen siblings. Paternal ancestors originated from Bavaria and Westphalia; maternal ancestors from the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
His grandfather, Peter Kirchmeyer, the eldest of five brothers, was a gifted mathematician who became a municipal surveying inspector after losing his position as a teacher during the Bismarckian Kulturkampf due to his status as a devout Catholic. The family, partially resident in Brühl near Cologne, was connected to the burgeoning automotive industry and produced several inventions (including an automotive oil pressure gauge).
The Dutch ancestors were exclusively large-scale farmers/landed proprietors in the Heerler Heide area, on whose land coal deposits were located. The Dutch great-great-uncle, Canon Habets, was a co-founder of the Order of the Daughters of the Cross (Töchter vom Heiligen Kreuz), established by the Blessed Marie Therese Haze, which also maintained a branch in Düsseldorf (Theresien-Hospital). In the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Habets lineage produced numerous priests, missionaries, and friars.
The German line of the Habets family, which had existed since shortly before the First World War, was extinguished by an English air raid on Düsseldorf on Christmas Eve (December 24, actually noted as Dec 19 in text) 1944. One of Kirchmeyer’s uncles served for many years as the Director of the City Treasury (Stadtkämmereidirektor) in Düsseldorf; a cousin was a banker and member of the Supervisory Board of Dresdner Bank.
Kirchmeyer, then residing at Keplerstraße 7, attended elementary school (Volksschule) on Clarenbachstraße for one year and on Helmholtzstraße for three years. In 1941, he entered the classical humanist Hohenzollern-Gymnasium (renamed Görres-Gymnasium after World War II). During the final two years of the war, Kirchmeyer was deployed as a volunteer dispatcher during bombing raids.
In the spring of 1950, he completed his Abitur (university entrance qualification) and enrolled at the University of Cologne in the summer semester. Following eight semesters of study in Musicology (under Fellerer, Kahl, Schneider, Ferand), Older German Philology (Hempel), Modern German Literature (Alewyn, Lange, Emrich), and Philosophy (Volkmann-Schluck, Koch, Liebrucks, Hessen), he received his doctorate in the summer of 1954. His dissertation, Untersuchungen zur Konstruktionstechnik Igor Strawinskys (Studies on the Construction Technique of Igor Stravinsky), was presumably the first German-language doctoral thesis on a living contemporary modernist composer.
Subsequently, he studied Law and Political Science in Cologne, focusing on the Middle Ages, criminalistics, and sociology (under René Koenig), as well as Ecclesiastical History in Bonn (under Hubert Jedin).
His private musical education began in the winter of 1934, initially with his mother and later with several piano teachers. While still a secondary school student (Untersekundaner) in 1947, he passed the entrance examination for the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Düsseldorf, directed by Prof. Dr. Joseph Neyses. He entered the master classes of Franzpeter Goebels (piano) and Jürg Baur (composition), where he remained until 1952. He later studied instrumentation for one year under Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
Kirchmeyer married a physician on February 5, 1966. The marriage produced four children.