Okay, I admit my pinboard looks a bit chaotic. But so is life, isn't it? And every thing, which I have pinned to my pinboard, reflects a certain aspect of my life, about which I want to discuss with anybody who might be interested in this worldwide internet community.

You can go back to the pinboard now and click on whatever you want – each symbol calls up a page on the given subject.

You can, however, also go on reading here where the pages of this website are embedded in a short biographical survey: My childhood in Hitler's Third Reich and its after-effects, my youth first with the Boy Scouts, then in an autonomous boy group, my experiences with Zen Buddhism, my passionate participation in the Movement of 1968, and my career as an engaged teacher for nearly three decades ... until the sudden outbreak of the CMT disease forced me to reorganize my life completely – so, if you like, you could follow this thread here now:

When does a human being start its own independent life? As an embryo? Or when it is born? – My own life started when I was 16. Then I joined the Boy Scouts – this was my first step into my independent and self-responsible life.

Until then I had lived completely in the security of my family. Since I was born in Hitler's Third Reich, my first impressions were those of the nazi era, and after the war they had never been corrected effectively. My philosophy of life was simple: Germany was good, and everything else was bad – that was what I had learned, and that was exactly what I had experienced:
First I had seen the glamour of the Third Reich, all the flags, and the uniforms, the pompous parades, and the castle whe lived in, with its huge park where I picked the flowers to decorate Hitler's bust in the knight's hall on "Leader's Birthday" – and then the frightening nights in bomb shelters and narrow cellar rooms, when the earth quaked from the bombs the enemies threw on our cities, when also we were made homeless and, after several miserable provisional accommodations, finally reached the house of relatives where we could spend the next years on the loft.
I was not the only one who longed back for the Third Reich, and I made no secret of my opinion: Ten years before, I would have been a smart leader of the nazi youth organization 'Hitlerjugend', my history teacher said in the eighth class, and I was naive enough to be proud of his statement.

This radical right ideology was simply wiped away by my new Boy Scout life. This exciting world of new experiences was so fulfilling, and the moral orientation on the principles of the Boy Scout Commandments were so positive, so directly understandable, and harmonic, that I simply forgot the political dimension of my view of life. My new tasks as a group leader kept me busy all the time. My family's influence on my thoughts and activities decreased. When I needed security, back-up, appreciation, or advice, I soon asked my Boy Scout friends earlier than my parents who became more an more suspicious about my scout activities anyway.

Nevertheless I still lived at home, and I even did not put their ideology in question – it simply was not interesting for me any longer. The perfectly organized world of the Boy Scouts and their firm ideals gave me back-up enough to live my life according to my own ideas and to give it a new – and for the first time a self-chosen – sense.

After three years I felt strong enough to look for a moral orientation of my own, beyond the Boy Scout ideals, and I joined the autonomous boy group dj.1.11 where they had neither any common ideals nor even an organization, but an almost borderless freedom for self-creation and self-realization which was secured by the autonomy that was claimed and fiercely defended by the group.

Our group was a collective of individualists. There was an atmosphere where each one felt challenged to realize himself, to try this and that, to recognize his strong points, to make the best of his talents, and to contribute something terrific new to the group life. So we developed, in common cooperation and interaction, a very special way of life, with a wide range of individual freedom, and with our own rituals, our own sayings and social manners, our own moral and our own laws. We were autonomous, and our own legislators.

The conventions of the adult world had lost their validity for us, and in consequence I left my family in order to defray my own independent life as a working student. And the experience of these years, that I can develop myself only in freedom from every tutelage, has sunk into my mind as deeply as the claim to scrutinize every traditional value and to reject everything radically which I personally cannot approve of.

When in the middle of the sixties a broad movement developed among the German youth to critisize the traditions of our parent generation in public, and finally to achieve radical social changes in the Revolution of 1968 I participated in this movement from the very beginning, because I felt that this argument touched my life in a special and very personal kind.

• I had grown up in a nazi world, I had been one of them still as a youngster, and I recognized the die-hard nazis even in their civile clothes of the post-war era by their supramacist behaviour and their pithy words. They were sitting everywhere, in the administration and in the political parties, they were collegues and neighbours, and were elected for mayor and President of the Republic – but now the youth revolt did away with the nazis in our public life, and i did away with the nazi in me.
• When I was a pupil I had volunteered to the Federal Army to become a naval officer after my studies. But now the war in Vietnam waked me up – my protest against the Vietnam war at the same time was the parting from the naive dreamer in me who over his seafaring romanticism had forgotten that also with the marines a soldier's practice is nothing but murder and destruction: I gave back my pay book and refused all war services in general.
• I had become a teacher in order to try a better instruction than I had experienced myself. My first action was to dissolve the obligatory frontal seat arrangement in my classroom and to place the tables in groups, and alone this started a small revolution at my school. With every new method of instruction I provoked common scepticism and resistance of the pupils' parents, of my collegues, and of the school aministration – but I found back-up and affirmation in the Movement of 68 which promoted the modernization of the whole educational system.
• Sexuality had been an absolute taboo in the prudisch post-war society: It was not spoken of, the facts of life were not reveiled, there even were no books on that subject, and penalty laws and strict morality were maintained to forestall all sexuality before marriage – we did it nevertheless, of course, and by breaking this taboo with enthusiasm, and no longer keeping it secret, we delivered us from our ignorance and inhibition, and at the same time liberated the whole society from the common hypocrisy, the obsolete laws, and its petrified morality.

This always renewed experience of the harmony between individual deliverance and social liberation made me a political man who has to answer for the free society in order to protect his own personal freedom. It was this experience which mobilized millions in those days, and which finally made the Revolution of 1968 irreversible: A whole youth generation had liberated itself, and had established an own style, a new feeling of life, and was determined not to give away this freedom any more.

The occupation with Zen Buddhism resulted in a deliverance of another kind. In our autonomous boy group dj.1.11 we were inspired by the austere, impressive Zen style: The peaceful harmony of the raked Zen gardens; the sentimentality of the haiku poems and ink paintings; the tamed impetus of the calligraphies and the karate punches...

We sensed something cryptic behind all this, and I wanted to come to know it. Soon my student pad looked like the cell of a Zen monastery. I meditated almost daily, often for several hours, and read and reread a thick and riddlesome book of the Zen master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.

And then, after about two years, I had my Zen experience, not in the semi-darkness of my meditation corner, but on a quite normal saturday morning of my last semester in the mensa when I just incidentally read in Suzuki's book and again tripped over a sentence which I did not understand ... It was the most terrific experience of my life which brought my search for God to an abrupt end and stood my view of this world literally from its head on its feet.

Then I was a teacher and was endeavoured to try a non-authoritarian education, was engaged in the trade union for better working and learning conditions, was elected by the pupils to be their confidant teacher and by my collegues to be shop steward, was spied on by the government as a "radical" and yet promoted to be "senior teacher", and when I retired after 28 years of service I was honored for my "loyal services for the German nation".

I was 48 years young then, and had just reached my dream position: After five hard years of avocational continuation studies I had qualified myself for special education, and in the following years I had made myself acquainted with the instruction and education of intellectually retarded and maladjusted children and now liked this job more than everything I had done before – when suddenly CMT overtook me, an almost unknown muscle atrophy disease, which made me a severely disabled pensioner within hardly one year.

Since then my life is more leisurely. I am sitting all my livelong day at my wide open window, where my neighbours pass by, friendly greeting, and casually stop for a small talk, and when it's raining their cats hop in and have a little nap on my window sill. I am sitting at my computer, travel around the world via internet, or correspond with my e-mail friends from alaska to new zealand, I write programs, and texts, and do graphic works ...
This wonder machine is so versatile that my long day in front of the screen always turns out to be too short to realize all my ideas ...

These things are also parts of my life, and they are so important to me that I have pinned them, too, to my pinboard. I hope to find someone who is interested to discuss these things and perhaps to exchange some useful experiences.

Maybe it is you who wants to exchange some thoughts about one of these subjects? Then, please, click on this little icon and write me an email. I would be very glad to send you my answer.

But these are the most important stations of my life – stations like magic gates, where you enter, and come out as another one. And with great interest I am waiting for the next station, even if it should be the last one – the "transformation", as the buddhists say.

For nothing is eternal in this world, everything is changing permanently. "Everything is flowing", our great philosophers say, "the big things won't stay big, and the small things won't stay small", and "the first ones will be the last ones" – the world is in motion, the thread will be spun forth, life remains interesting...