How and why I became an Author for Anthropology, Cultural History and Philosophy

When I was born in the late 1960s, I—like so many children from Catholic or Protestant households (in my case, a mixed Catholic-Protestant household)—became a pack donkey, scapegoat, and psychological trash can both for my parents’ hardships and for the social troubles my older brother experienced, who, unlike me, had still been disciplined with a broom.

Since my parents began to build up a own business, they had very little time for me, so that the resulting constant neglect turned out not to be a misfortune, but rather a blessing for me. By the age of 10, I was already able to escape from the family’s influence in a sufficient manner and shape my life of my own. Among other things the forest became an important calming refuge for me. So I could spare me many of the “normal” ideological and emotional poisonings that other postwar children have experienced. Since I had become accustomed at an early age to organizing my daily freetime largely on my own, I was also able to build relatively stable friendships with other children and thereby found a degree of social fulfillment through symbiotic relationships.

It was only over time that I realized how valuable this particular constructive escape from culture was. But like many children I was falling into the tempting trap of an apparent religious comfort. This was leading me into a supernatural longing for a paradise and in a susceptibility to self-pity and for bitter lamentaitions. This can render those affected incapable of leading a balanced, natural life.

As early as age 12, I began to study the cultural life that was a mystery to me—a life that could be as cruel as it was kitschy and always seemed to be steeped in an artificial intoxication of the supernatural, the sensational, and the unbearable. Today it is clear to me that this strange world of an artificially absolutized illusory life is characterized by the fact that it is precisely not natural, but always compulsively supernatural. This is both a curse and a blessing for all people today, since within such a culture, human beings can realize their innate, relative social nature only to a limited extent—or, in many cases, not at all. This is the true, ever-exorbitant price of traditional class culture, which is currently rising ever higher and is already so high for many people that it can no longer be accepted with inner peace and goodwill.

For these reasons, it became, as if by itself, a natural task for me to draw attention to these fundamental imbalances and irritations in culture and to the resulting difficulties in human relationships and organization.