A choice of route

Berlin 1958 – 1960

Pen and ink drawings

The trail of evidence begins in my student days in West Berlin in the years between 1957/1958 and 1960. My childhood, marked by the experience of war in the badly bombed Bauhaus city of Dessau, years in the Soviet-occupied zone and the GDR, dispossession, flight, school years in Starnberg, Bavaria, and, finally, in West Berlin, lay behind me, and I had decided to study chemistry at the Freie Universität Berlin.

From an early age, my brother and I had drawn and painted a lot – inspired and encouraged by our artistically talented mother, whose conservative father had not allowed her to study at the Bauhaus – and I even flirted with the idea of studying art at the Berlin academy. But unlike my brother, who eventually did go down that route, I was ultimately more tempted by the natural sciences, which offered me the perspective of gaining a better understanding of the world and to make it count towards the progress of humanity.

Berlin – perennially under threat – was an island of libertarianism, jazz and the arts. The jazz club Eierschale was one of the hotspots for jazz fans, the academy staged the infamous Schräger Zinnober carnival party, which went on for several days; artists and intellectuals rubbed shoulders at the Volle Pulle and the Paris Bar. We went to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in East Berlin to see Brecht productions.

Spanish impressions 1959

Travelling with friends during the university holidays, I explored the still untouristy Costa Blanca in Spain as well as Paris – always drawing, painting, my eyes wide open.

Kassel 1959

Pen and ink drawings

I saw documenta II in Kassel, where I was just as inspired by the atmosphere of Park Wilhelmshöhe and a specialist fair for exotic birds, which most documenta visitors passed by.

Rochester, New York 1960 – 1961

I may have been a chemistry student, but I was part of the Berlin scene. I spent time with artists from the academy, wrote short stories for Berlin newspapers and exhibited.
In 1960, however, my scientific interests took me to the US as a Fulbright student. At the University of Rochester in New York State, I supported myself by working as an assistant to the professor of physical chemistry and through the sale of my works on paper. I still have a couple of newspaper photographs of some of them, but unfortunately very few sheets of that time are still in my possession.

Hvar 1963
Pen and ink drawings

But I missed the cultural buzz of Berlin and my friends, and so I returned to write my diploma thesis in the field of radiation chemistry at the Hahn Meitner Institute. During this period, I travelled to the then little-known marble island of Hvar off the Dalmatian coast of what was then Yugoslavia and today Croatia. It was one of the happiest times of my life; my companion, a drama student, delighted in my constant drawing with which I sought to capture our bliss. Unfortunately, it came to an end soon after, as our paths diverged irreconcilably.

Paris 1964–1968

The results of my research at the Hahn Meitner Institute, which held the promise of revolutionary new possibilities in chemical synthesis, fascinated me so much that I decided to do my Ph.D. on a radiation chemistry subject at the very university where the chemical effect of nuclear radiation had been discovered, namely at the Sorbonne in Paris. I became a doctoral student under Professors Michel Magat and Adolphe Chapiro, the successors of Marie and Pierre Curie, at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

I lived in the small artists’ village of Marly-le-Roi on the outskirts of Paris; my institute was in Meudon overlooking the Seine. My area of work was polymerisation in the crystalline state at -196° C with the help of gamma rays, and the result were isotactic and syndiotactic polymers for semi-permeable membranes.

I spent four years researching and writing my Ph.D. But it was not only my thesis I was working on, I was also busy writing two novels – Erdwürmer and Grillen (Earth Worms and Crickets) – in which I addressed my being torn between my existence as a scientist and an artist. Apart from numerous small drawings, more like doodles, for the novels and a few gouaches about the appearance of crystalline polymers under an electron microscope, I did not produce any paintings during that period. On weekends, a group of painters and writers gathered at the studio of an artist friend in a farmhouse in Burgundy, inspired each other and encouraged me to keep up my painting.

Scribbles from the manuscripts of „Earthworms“ and „Crickets“

Portaits oft he artist’s children