Carter's family history and Genealogy New Zealand

When I received the news of my father's death - standing beside my mother - from my grandparents. I still see the pale face of my beloved grandmother in front of me when my mother opened the door. She looked at my grandmother and uttered only one word: "Karl-Heinz" - my father's name. I wanted to console her and said; "Mother, we'll manage with the children." It was 1942. I was seven years old and had three younger brothers.

Almost seven years later, I see myself walking along the avenue with my mother, leading to the train station, past the Klein-Flottbeker tournament grounds. It was a few weeks after the currency reform (1948), and she said to me, "Father's money is now used up; I have to work now. You can stay with me and have meals, but I can't afford to pay for your education." So I began financing my own violin lessons by tutoring, and my architecture studies I financed by working on construction sites and in the office during semester breaks. It always just about covered everything. It didn't weigh on me, but I later realised, of course, that my lack of in-depth studies during the semester breaks put me at a disadvantage compared to my colleagues.

Those were the two most important images in my childhood. The first biographical texts were created in response to a question from Elke, during a vacation trip to Heringsdorf on the Baltic Sea, not far from Greifswald. These autobiographical notes were then developed over the course of the years, partly written by myself, but for the most part, I would dictate them to Elke.

In Hamburg are places like the world-renowned entertainment centre "Reeperbahn", the Fish Market, the former Imperial Yacht Club (now the North German Regatta Club - whose members still demonstrate their exclusive society with the Prinz-Heinrich-Mütze), the Tennis, Hockey, and Golf Club Flottbek, the "Engagement Club" of the upper society, and the tournament grounds of the German Show Jumping Derby. From here to the west leads the famous Elbchaussee, passing by parks, mansions, and villas of merchants to Blankenese, a captain and pilot village for centuries. That was the residence of my classmates. To illustrate the customary lifestyle here, a brief episode:

An older rice merchant, with whom I played music, invited me one Sunday. He handed me a Guarneri (violin) and said, "Play on it for a few hours." He then recounted that in his active days in London, he invited Caruso for afternoon tea to enhance the company.

My life was predetermined as a participant in this social environment: You have money; you don't earn it. I grew up in a faceless non-city that owes its name solely to the accusation of being "all too close" to the major city of Hamburg due to its location: Altona. While not well-known in the larger world, it is nevertheless a significant engine that propels the major neighboring city.

MY PARENTS AND EDUARD PULVERMANN

My father, Heinrich Emil Julius PETERS (Karl Heinz), was born 5 February 1906 at Groß-Flottbek, Hamburg, Germany. He left High School at the age of 17 because he no longer had the desire for it. He wanted to do something. This was in the midst of the inflation period after the First World War. He learnt the trade of import and export merchant. After completing apprenticeship, young Hamburg merchants often went abroad, mostly to South or Central America, to secure their future. However, my father's employer, Eduard F. Pulvermann (1882-1944), sent him to China, where he stayed for five years, until 1931 - in Harbin in Manchuria. During his journey with the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow during the Stalinist purges, he experienced Lake Baikal and Mongolian railway robbers, the Chungusen, who attacked the train with horses, kidnapped travelers, and extorted ransom money. It was known that, for the identification of their victims, they sent their severed little fingers.

My mother, Helene PETERS (Lenchen), née LÜDEMANN, was born on 16 September 1908 in Groß-Flottbek. My parents knew each other from school. As far as I know, they were not engaged when my father went to China. Perhaps there was an agreement that they wanted to marry someday. In any case, an intense correspondence developed between the two. Before my father went to Asia, he arranged a secretarial position for her at Pulvermann's. I noticed later, when she worked for the tracing service of the German Red Cross after the war, that she could take perfect shorthand and write very quickly. However, while my father was in China, she underwent training as a sports teacher for children's gymnastics at the Sports University in Berlin-Dahlem.

After several years in China, my father returned home on vacation. He informed his parents that he had a Russian girlfriend. In response, they demanded that he immediately either break up with "Lenchen" or renounce his Russian girlfriend. He must have ended things with his Russian girlfriend from Hamburg because my father and mother began making plans for marriage in Harbin. They indeed were married in 1933 but in Riga. My father had gone to Riga in 1932 to dissolve a company from the Pulvermann conglomerate. There he dealt primarily with Jewish merchants. My mother, who was talented in acting, later vividly described to us some of these sales conversations, unfortunately tinged with a certain anti-Semitism. When they returned to Hamburg in 1933, the "Third Reich" was in full swing and was enthusiastically applauded. Like many others, the deeper ideals of people seemed to be exploited by the political leadership for their own purposes. Thus, the Nazi sports promotion in the "Third Reich" precisely met the needs of my parents. The 1936 Olympics in Berlin perhaps became the pinnacle of their short shared life. They traveled to Berlin, joined the enthusiastic crowd, and believed in a great German future. My mother later remained friends with some Olympic champions.

When my father's successful sojourn in China ended he became the Chief Prokurist (representative) of the Pulvermann trading company. His employer, Eduard Pulvermann was a show jumper and the designer of the tournament grounds in Klein-Flottbek in 1920. Anyone involved with horses and tournaments is familiar with the name because "Pulvermann's Grab (grave)" is considered one of the most famous and challenging obstacles in show jumping.

[(RC): It is obstacle number 14 on the Derby course in Klein-Flottbek. Although having designed the course, Pulvermann could never overcome this obstacle without making a mistake - hence it's name].

While my father managed the business, Pulvermann, with an 'open, 12-cylinder Maybach', and six horses, traveled on the SS "Europa" for polo matches in America. However, the Nazi regime and World War II changed everything. Pulvermann was half-Jewish (paternally) and had significant parts of his wealth abroad. In 1937, he said to my father: "Peters, you need to join somewhere to protect the company. Join the Reiter-SS. Those are my former friends. They're alright." So, my father became an SS officer to protect the man who treated him like a son and was in trouble due to his Jewish heritage.

[(RC): The paragraphs above and below should be read in conjunction with "The SS Cavalry Brigade and its operations in the Soviet Union, 1941-1942" by Henning Herbert Pieper]. Even if the truth is hurtful, the truth nevertheless is what you face in the end.

The war took my father, as a staff interpreter of the Waffen-SS, on horseback from Warsaw to Moscow - to the land and the people he loved. He spoke fluent Russian and wanted to move the whole family to Russia after the war. Indeed, he stayed there and is buried in Belarus, near Vitebsk, the birthplace of Marc Chagall. Pulvermann did not survive the Nazi regime either. The Gestapo arrested him in 1940, sent him to the Neuengamme concentration camp, and he died in the prison hospital in Langenhorn in 1944 from the effects of the abuse he suffered. The images from the social environment described above, together with the wealth of the bourgeois, the glamorous society, all faded away. The merchant's son, I suddenly found myself abandoned by all external social supports. A poor loneliness emerged through the Nazi, wartime, and post-war periods. With longing, the boy's eyes stared at fences that now separated him from the tennis courts, horse-riding tournaments, and influential families - who soon reestablished their worlds. In Hamburg, without money, one was nothing. But while everything that was so typically "Hamburg" suddenly vanished, for the future me, something cautiously but decidedly emerged from the rubble, and this likely belongs to the experience of Hamburg's deep fate.

BLANKENESE AND "DER LIEBE GOTT" (GOD)

The area between Altona-Central and the former fishing village of Blankenese, where retired captains and pilots settled, is known as the western suburbs of the Elbe. The term, "Elbvororte" encompasses the social spectrum of wealthy Hamburg residents. In the mid-1930s, my father, with his wife Helene and me, moved to Blankenese. At that time, a steam-powered suburban train was still in operation. Every day, my father commuted to Hamburg armed with his "Borsen-Stahlhelm" (bowler hat) which was almost mandatory for entering the stock exchange back then. We children, including my two younger brothers, would watch from our nursery window as our father waved goodbye with his bowler hat, on his way to the station. In the evenings, we would go to pick him up, initially with our mother, and later, just the kids. On the way to the station, I learnt about the crafts because the path was shaped by typical half-story city structures and in the basements of the houses were the workshops of craftsmen. We often lingered in these workshops, absorbing the intoxicating scent of pitch and leather from the cobbler, fascinated by his hammer with the flat, slightly rounded head with which he drove the wooden pegs into the heels. Or we played with the tailor's models under the tables, where the tailors sat and sewed.

On one of these paths, a conversation took place between my mother and me, which counts among my earliest and deepest memories. It was probably in the autumn of 1937, about the time of my third birthday. My approximately six-month-old brother Reimer sat in the baby carriage as our mother took us for a walk from our house towards the south. Near the sports field I suddenly saw, as if a large window had opened in the sky, God the Father looking down on me with an incredibly warm golden glow. I said to my mother, "I just saw God. He looked down on me". My mother kindly replied, "You cannot see God. But, of course, He can see you." I said, "Doch! look!" But when I looked up again the image had disappeared. The memory has remained, ever since, down to the details. Much later, I saw an image reminiscent of my experience at the Isenheim Altar in Colmar.

TWO BOOKSHELVES AS DOORS TO THE WORLD

There were two important bookshelves in my childhood: a mahogany shelf at my grandparents' and an oak bookshelf at my parents' - in my father's room. In the lower drawer of my grandparents' sturdy mahogany shelf lay a large red book titled "Bildersaal deutscher Geschichte". It was A3-sized and about 6cm thick. On visit days or birthdays at my paternal grandparents' house in Hamburg-Nienstedten I would always lie on the self-knitted wool rug and absorb the history narrated from ancient times to the 19th century, especially the Middle Ages. For me, this book was a treasure. I often looked at it, and I owe it my introduction to history.

[(RC): Some of the precious books from these bookshelves have made it to New Zealand: A very old and delicate Carthusian Monks Manuscript in latin, a family Gesangbuch (1784), Chronik von Hamburg (1820), Hamburg und Seine Bauten (1890), 2 smaller books from 1829 and 1854 which are descriptions of Greece from "Pausanias" (In German).]

In my father's bookshelf, alongside Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and Lion Feuchtwanger's "Jew Suss" - which did not interest me, I found three books that helped shape my childhood: "Aspasia" by Robert Hamerling, through which I got to know Athens, "Hypatia" by Kingsley and above all, Homer's "Odyssey". I read the Odyssey again and again - it captivated me for several years. My heroes were Telemachus, Odysseus, and Penelope.

I was born in 1934 at the Women's Clinic at Schlump in Altona. My brothers were born there too - Reimer in 1937, Henning in 1938, and Niels in 1940. My father insisted on living with his parents for another year after the long stay abroad. My mother entered my grandmother's magnificent cooking school. After a year they had enough of it and we moved to a new residential area in Blankenese. My father loved to eat well in the evenings, a habit he brought from Russia. One evening, after the children had bathed, I was sitting on the potty in the bathroom. I gradually worked my way on my potty towards my father until I sat beaming next to him. He didn't like that at all. He carried me back to the bathroom. The process started again, several times in a row. It ended with a smack on the bottom, and I landed on the seat.

We visited grandparents in Hamburg-Nienstedten by bicycle, with my father transporting me in the handlebar basket. On our last visit, my grandfather asked me when I would come back - he wanted to make Easter fires with me. The next day, it took me a while to convince our neighbor friend Dieter to ride with me on our tricycles to Nienstedten. Dieter was three, I was four years old. He had the better tricycle, made of steel and easy to ride, while mine was made of wood and ran heavy. But I found it socially balanced. On the next day, we rode again. It was important to find the pedestrian tunnel under the railway embankment. Here we were not allowed to continue on Schenefelder Landstrasse, through the large underpass, but had to turn left in front of the embankment, past the Pelikan works. A path accessible only to residents then turned right into the embankment wood. Before seeing houses again, we turned right and found the pedestrian tunnel. But I was alone. Dieter had turned back at the Pelikan works; a large dog had come, he said later. Instead of turning right at the large underpass, he rode through it into the Luftwaffe barracks. But that was our luck. Because the military was also involved in the search operation initiated after our disappearance, and the soldiers found Dieter right at their front gate. From the pedestrian tunnel, we continued straight ahead. It was a big break at school. The students of the 8th grade, the class of the "Mr. Principal," which had a backward entrance to the principal's apartment, hid me - as they often did - under a bench, where I then appeared in the middle of the class and said, "Grandpa, I am here too".

I mostly played alone. My mother said, "Why don't you invite the other kids into the garden?" So I did. I then sat and watched at the living room window. My mother said, "And now?" I replied, "Now I want to watch the kids play".

My first violin teacher was the daughter of the Senior Medical Officer Dr. Georg BONNE. For his services, Hauptstrasse in Nienstedten was renamed Georg Bonne Strasse.

[Note (RC): The anti-Semite Dr. Georg BONNE died in May 1945. His practice was in Klein Flottbek. He was an staunch supporter of Nazi ideology. In 2020 Georg-Bonne-Strasse was labelled a 'Nazi-burdened street name' and was subsequently renamed to Sophie-Rahel-Jansen-Strasse. In 1908 Sophie Rahel JANSEN was the first woman to be appointed as a public keeper of the poor. At the beginning of July 1942, due to her Jewish origin, she received the deportation order for Theresienstadt, after which the 80-year-old lost her life.]

We had lessons in Dr. BONNE's daughter's bedroom, which adjoined the parental bedroom. The old lady, her mother, lay in bed in a cloud of white hair, veils, and the smell of camphor and the students had to greet her every time. My violin teacher, the daughter Hedwig Bonne, occasionally fell asleep during lessons. She woke up and said, "Again!" and fell back to sleep. She was obviously terribly malnourished due to the war and like her father she cared for the poor. I didn't learn much but she deserves merit for dragging her students through various orchestras as substitutes. Thanks to this I started in the last row, worked my way up to the first desk, and through several orchestras until, during the time of my violin teacher Eva HAUPTMANN, I played in the first desk of the chamber orchestra Manfred MENZEL. One day during rehearsal the conductor wanted to hear the orchestra from a distance. He handed me the conductor's baton and said, "Now try". I got hooked on it. I conducted a whole "Kunst der Fuge" and it went well.

In 1941, I was with my brothers and mother on a vacation in the mountains of Austria. My father joined us, travelling from the war in Russia. It turned out to be his last holiday [he was killed-in-action in Russia on 26 September 1942]. Naturally, Tyrolean red wine was consumed at the Inn. My brothers and I always wanted some of that "Red Juice" but we weren't given any because we were told that "it stunts your growth". One day, our mother went on a mountain hike - our father hadn't arrived yet - and we children were left in the care of the Innkeeper. When our mother returned I ran to her in tears and exclaimed; "Reimer is not growing anymore. Uncle Trautwein gave him red juice". But he continued to grow.

While I had a close connection to my father's parents in Hamburg-Nienstedten, Reimer had a close connection to the parents of our mother, especially to our grandfather in Hamburg - GroßFlottbek. Our grandfather had been a crane operator in the Hamburg harbour or still was. He had a large workshop with many tools. Since there were no craftsmen anymore he did repairs for us during the war. Reimer was always present during the repairs, holding some tool in his hand, hammering or screwing something. Later, the connection to manual skills manifested in the upper grades of school, where Reimer painted, built models, and was involved in music.

Reimer attended the Waldorf School in the later grades, as it suited him more than intellectual learning. The school was located at the other end of Hamburg in the Volksdorf district and had an artistic-musical-practical orientation. Reimer had to commute at least an hour twice a day. I believe it was about this time that he first became involved with the Kind family, who lived near the school. I am not entirely sure since I was already in university in Stuttgart at the time. I learnt later that during the war, Johannes HEMLEBEN (1899-1984), a senior Pastor of the Christian Community Church, held meetings for the Christian Community at the Kind family's home. Wiebke Kind later became Reimer's wife. In the late 1950s, their son Ralf was born, who became my godchild. Ralf died at the age of three from meningitis.

During the war, we set up bunk beds in the cellar. We buried hot water bottles in straw sacks in the evenings to keep them warm. I had 'Karl May and the Odyssey' under my pillow. When the air raid sirens sounded, I was responsible for the younger brothers. I enjoyed the blackout hour if there was light. There was candlelight, and it was precious. We felt the howling of the bombs and the impacts, which continued in waves over the floor, like on a ship over the water. Once there was a particularly strong impact. The next morning, we found out that a bomb had landed directly next to our house on the only undeveloped plot in the entire area, not even 10 meters from our house edge. Of course, everything was cordoned off, but at noon, the police released the crater, and we had an additional playing field on the site, which was already our playing field, all semi-legal. There were 14-meter-high beech trees where we felt at home. We were called into the house for dinner at six in the evening, and at half-past six, a bomb detonated in the crater. I was on the veranda with a newly acquired football and saw the earth fountain of the exploding bomb. It sprayed up to the height of the eaves. The pressure wave apparently went upwards, at least everything remained the same with our dilapidated veranda. If the bomb had landed 10 meters further, no one would have come out of the house alive; if the bomb in the crater had detonated half an hour earlier, all the children would have been killed. Sven Lauritzen, who lived in the same house as I did and with whom I stayed in contact until today, called this incident "the miracle of Sobendieken."

In elementary school, I sat next to Sven Lauritzen from the first grade onwards. I copied things from his notebook that I otherwise didn't know, such as the Easter walk from Goethe's Faust. After the war, Sven Lauritzen suddenly disappeared. It was said that he had gone to a special school. I couldn't understand that because he was an excellent student. I asked my mother if I could go there too, but the school was far away, in Hamburg-Wandsbek, and my father wanted me to attend the school that he had gone to, the Christianeum, which was still located on the Reeperbahn at his time. So, I didn't join Heinz Müller's (1899-1968) class - one of the teachers called by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) to teach at the Rudolf Steiner School Hamburg-Wandsbek, founded in 1922 as the "Free Goethe School," the second Waldorf school after the original one in Stuttgart. Several people from this class later became important to me, such as Harmut Seyfert, who became one of the founders of the Waldorf School in Karlsruhe, or Meinrad von Gerkan, who also became an architect and an antagonist for my later work for the German Railways. Through Sven Lauritzen, I got to know the Waldorf School, which would mean so much in my life.

In the tough years after the war, especially after the currency reform in 1948, we had a household work routine: 4+1 and 2+3, named after the birth order of us four brothers. This meant that I had to work with Niels, and Reimer with Henning. My mother was out of the house from six in the morning until six in the evening and then usually came home heavily laden with groceries. She then cooked for the next day and washed clothes until late at night. When we woke up the next day, she was already gone. The rest of the day had to be organised in the agreed work routine, i.e., heating up food, washing dishes, cleaning, dusting - alternating each day with a partner. Since Reimer and I were often on the way to some music event in the late afternoon, we mostly saw our mother on weekends. She had a choleric temperament, which surfaced, partly due to her high stress levels and lack of self-control. There were dramas when we hadn't dusted properly or the children's room wasn't tidy. She had the habit of simply tipping over the messy play cupboards, so everything fell out and then had to be neatly rearranged. But raising four boys wasn't always easy. We received beatings for various reasons, and wooden rods, which occasionally broke during the hits, were particularly popular. Of course, although we were strong we were not allowed to defend ourselves. That would have been considered inappropriate.

THE FAMILY OF MY FATHER (PETERS ⚭ BIEGEMANN)

The father of my father, Willy Peters, was the headmaster of the elementary school in Hamburg-Nienstedten at the time of my birth. At that time, he had already been a teacher for 33 years. In 1901 at the age of twenty-one, he started his career teaching. He grew up as an orphan with foster parents in Pinneberg. His father apparently died shortly after his birth, and his mother in his early childhood. There is still a photograph from 1881 where he is one year old, in the arms of his mother, standing in front of her shop in Hamburg. Back then, the old buildings in the Hamburg harbour area were being photographed for documentation, as they had to make way for the Speicherstadt in the Free Port.

[(RC): Willy Peters was born 26 May 1880. His father, Wilhelm Emil PETERS died 5 May 1882 (Willy PETERS was 2) and his mother, Jenny Margaretha PETERS, née HOFFMANN, died 5 February 1892 (Willy PETERS was 11). All his grandparents had died by 1892.

My great-grandmother, Jenny PETERS (HOFFMANN) came from the island of Sylt. Her father and ancestors were sailing ship captains who had emigrated from Denmark. My grandfather was very proud that they were originally Danish nobility and had the right to register descendants in the Danish nobility register. As a conscientious schoolmaster, my grandfather completed this process for all descendants. He also conducted thorough genealogical research, but I was never interested in it.

When my father (Karl-Heinz PETERS) returned to Hamburg from China, after being there five years, my great-grandmother (Jenny PETERS) briefly looked up from her knitting and said, "Well, my boy, you're back already?" and continued knitting. If you passed through the lilac gate, you entered my grandfather's garden, and on the other side of the street was the electrician Dehling. He was already deaf but could fix fuses. His junk shop offered all sorts of wonderful items that fascinated a boy. My mother could also fix fuses. A bit further down the street "Schulkamp" you reached the fishmonger. He sold live fish and slaughtered them based on the customer's preference. I was always particularly fascinated by this, just as I was by the butcher's cutting of meat pieces. I soon knew the different roasts and innards. The entire area was rural and influenced by fishing, meaning that people knew alot about animals. My great-great-grandmother could say when my father, as a boy, brought home a piece of meat, "Dat bring hi mol wedder hin. Dat is ken Ossen, dat is ne olle Kow west".

My grandmother Anne, (Anna Selma PETERS), born BIEGEMANN, also came from the present-day Danish territory, born in Apenrade (Aabenraa). She was the most important person for me in the early years, She had a benevolent strictness combined with inner warmth. Through her, I could wonderfully experience how the good forces of age affect children in the first years of life. As a young girl she worked in a paper shop where my grandfather studied. The student purchased the papers and eventually a young Peters family ensued. My grandfather, conscientious, serious, with his Stalin-like mustache and athletic stride, and my grandmother, a soft, internally radiant, kind beauty. Since my mother quickly had four sons, it was only natural that the eldest was taken care of by the grandparents nearby. I was practically at home with my grandmother, grandfather, and Uncle Harald, my father's eight years younger brother. I lived in their house with my parents for a year after my birth and kept my room there until the outbreak of the war. The evening ceremonies remain unforgettable, as she warmed the feather bed in front of the heater before tucking me in and then sat by the warmed bed, reading the entire thick book of Grimm's Fairy Tales night after night.

I remember in these early years the magnificent garden around my grandparents' house and the large lawn areas where I would lie for hours, gazing into the apple trees . Many lilac bushes stood in front of the house, making it impossible to enter without noticing the intense scent in spring. The lilac bouquets were, of course, also arranged inside the house. The strawberries and the sour cherries were on the north-facing house wall. The family drank coffee in the arbor made of beech hedges (which I didn't like going into because everything was so sticky). All of this was the determination by my grandmother. My grandfather was merely the observer here. Nevertheless, he was very particular, his rake left behind stripes on the sandy paths, and accidental steps into the flower beds or on the freshly raked paths with the delicate patterns would make him upset. From my childhood room, I could see the schoolyard. The voluntary fire brigade also trained there in the evenings. There was a tower specifically for ladder exercises. It all took place with commands in the splendid blue and red uniforms. Another exercise involved reaching the hose ladder within a certain time frame. The confectioner Schulz had twice the girth of his colleagues, which resulted in him always being a number ahead of his colleagues on the ladder. This led to comments like, "Schulz, you're already way too early", with the consequence that the exercise had to be repeated. The water pump wagon was pulled by the milkman's horse, who distributed milk in the village.

In 1936, the Elbschloss Brewery, a large brewery at the Elbe's bottom in Nienstedten, caught fire. The voluntary fire brigade in Nienstedten was called into action. It was in the middle of the night, and the milkman's horse refused to pull the pump. When the voluntary fire brigade arrived at the Elbschloss Brewery to combat the fire, the professional fire brigade from Altona had already extinguished it. The next morning, my father met the school caretaker, who was also the fire chief. He told him the story and added, "Herr Peters, as wi do ankarnn, da har doch de alteno Fuerwehr unsere Hydranten besetzt" (When we arrived, the old fire brigade had occupied our hydrants). To this, my father responded, "Na, da habnse ja och fragen kunt" (Well, you could have asked).

The 'Volunteer Fire Brigade - The view from my window'. Sketch by Jens Peters 2013

My grandfather was for many years the representative of the Hamburg School administration for technical media in education. He was particularly engaged with school films and, in general, had a keen interest in technology. The school was designed in such a way that at the rear of his classroom, where he taught, was the corridor to the principal's residence. This allowed him to directly access his classroom from his home. During the long break, he would come into the classroom and have his hot chocolate. The classroom also served as the physics classroom. During visits, especially on birthdays, my brother, Reimer and I, would retreat to the classroom and play with various physics instruments that our grandfather handed to us from the cabinets. There were many secrets and boundaries for what was allowed. Magnets were particularly exciting. With awe, we would gaze at a large control panel, which was, of course, forbidden to us, but our grandfather would turn it on at our request, and we experienced the trembling of the instrument needles. Strangely, there was also a harmonium in this room. I often "played" there, experimenting with tones, registers, and sounds. The sounds captivated me completely, long before I started playing the violin. I owe my first violin to my grandfather. It was, of course, his own, which he gave me as a Christmas gift in 1943 or 44. At that time, it was part of the training for a Prussian schoolteacher to learn the violin and organ. My grandfather was the first teacher in the area who was not simultaneously a church organist. However, he occasionally served as a substitute. The oldest man: In the third house on Jurgensallee from Georg Bonne Strasse lived an old retired teacher who was read to by my grandfather. Teacher Ramke couldn't see anymore. Our father instructed us to always greet Ramke. He then told us how he marched with the soldiers in 1866 and sang, "Was machst Du mit dem Knie lieber Hans beim Tanz". In 1870/71, he was a soldier in the Battle of Sedan. He shook my hand, felt my hand and arm up to the shoulder, and said, "Mann o Mann, so gro bin ich mein ganzes Leben nicht gewesen" (Man, oh man, I've never been this tall in my whole life).

The rectory had a huge, mysterious attic. My grandmother took me up there when she ironed the clothing. While she was ironing I roamed the attic, where my uncle's tents and folding boats fascinated me, along with his photo equipment and numerous drawing materials. This must have been during the wartime. Before the war, at the beginning of his career as an architect, he lived in his grandparents' house. His room could only be reached through the unfinished attic. This room was a new aesthetic world for me, sparsely furnished, with low continuous shelves made of natural spruce, a large white drawing board on two easels, and a light natural sheep wool carpet. On the white walls, plans were sketched in pencil, colored with colored pencils, and a few pictures. It smelled of plasticine and tracing paper. I often visited him up there, and he would paint picture books for me, especially of knights and soldiers. He was already a horse enthusiast and could draw them exceptionally well; he handled colored pencils ingeniously. I was particularly fascinated by his ability to draw military riding boots that gleamed and, of course, all equipment and uniforms realistically, whether they were Uhlans, Hussars, or Cuirassiers of the Prussian Army or Russian soldiers with fur hats. He drew like the painter Menzel. Incredibly virtuous and objective. Triangles, rulers, erasers, tracing paper, colors. The order that prevailed there, the creative ability I witnessed in him, told me that being an architect must be something special. He never completed his studies because, in the last semesters, he won a competition in office practice that tied him to practical work, and he probably had no desire to continue studying.

After the war he became a partner in one of the largest architecture firms in Hamburg, Elingius and Schramm. He reconstructed the burnt-down castle in Friedrichsruh. He was friends with Princess Bismarck throughout his life. His best friend was Freiherr von Kittlitz whom he had studied architecture with and they were together in Russia during the war with the mounted artillery. Kittlitz was killed. Before his death, Harald had promised him that he would take care of his wife Jutta and their young son Arne. So he married the widow Jutta von Kittlitz, née Countess von Luckner, with whom he had three children in addition to her child Arne.

[(RC): Jutta Alexandra Hedwig Adelheid Else Felicitass PETERS, Widow Baroness of Kittlitz and Ottendorf, (born Countess LUCKNER - Daughter of Edgar Hugo Nikolaus Graf von Luckner and Margarethe von Maltzan Freiin zu Wartenberg und Penzlin) was born 1913. Jutta married Ortwin Freiherr von KITTLITZ und Ottendorf in 1942. They had one child, Arne, born 27 April 1943, who became a German Diplomat. Ortwin von KITTLITZ was born in Görlitz on 5 December 1911 and died 4 October 1943. Jutta and Harald PETERS married in 1946. Harald was born 1912. They had 3 children; Katrin. Eric and Holger. Jutta passed away in 2001 at age 88. Harald passed away 11 August 2007 in Ratzeburg, aged 94.

Until the war, he always rode his motorcycle to the city. In the mornings, he would sometimes ride around the schoolyard with me sitting on the tank. In 1938, when I was 4 years old he took me on a trip as his "son" with his "wife" Ilse Moses, his then-girlfriend, a Jewess. It was their farewell trip; she knew that she had to emigrate to England, and that associating with Jews was punishable. Harald told me much later that Ilse was the 'right hand' of the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society in Hamburg. Looking back on our shared life, I am aware that Harald and I encountered each other relatively infrequently, but, his unique way of life, and the environment in lived in, was a significant influence. Through him, I experienced my first impressions of aesthetics and modernity. The smell of materials, the new dimensions in the simplicity of design, and the horizontal nature of furnishings, I believe, were elements that later consistently supported my career goal of becoming an architect. When I graduated, I asked him to arrange an internship for me on a construction site. And one day, when he came to the construction site, we were pouring concrete in glorious weather, and he said to me, "You have it good here; I would like to be here now too". I was shocked because I wanted to go where he came from, to the architectural office.

In architecture, he embodied the solidity and quality of the generation before us, who were still trained by personalities and professors like Bonatz or Schmitthenner in Stuttgart (Paul Bonatz, 1877-1956; Paul Schmitthenner, 1884-1972) or Schuhmacher in Dresden (Fritz Schuhmacher, 1869-1947), where he studied. He had difficulties with Scharoun (Hans Scharoun, 1893-1972), one of my role models, but in recent years, he expressed to me that he took pleasure in my work.

THE FAMILY OF MY MOTHER (LÜDEMANN ⚭ HERWIG)

My mother's parents lived in Groß-Flottbek, a former farming village slightly north of Nienstedten. They came from farming backgrounds. My grandfather, Otto Hermann LÜDEMANN, was excluded from the inheritance. As the second son he became an industrial worker in the Hamburg harbour. During my youth, he worked as a crane operator and later emotionally recounted how he gave the departing Jewish ships their last water. Grandfather Otto also had a large garden. "his land", as he called it, where we often visited him on weekends after about an hour-long walk. Externally, he had a stern demeanor, but internally, he had a vulnerable disposition. He spoke only Low German (Plattdeutsch) with his wife. My mother also grew up speaking Low German. With us, he made quirky jokes, leading to years of uncertainty about what was serious and what was fun. At that time we all wore wide crocheted stockings - probably from my grandmother in Nienstedten - with tassels at the top. He always wanted to cut them off, so we were always afraid to wear the stockings when visiting him but we had to because they were our Sunday stockings. His workshop fascinated us. He guarded his tools, especially many Woodworking planes with various profiles in a large chest. During the wartime, he would come to Nienstedten on his bicycle to repair something, and my brother Reimer always participated in these repairs.

My mother, Helene PETERS (LÜDEMANN), was the third of four children. Her eldest sister was married to the motorcycle saddle manufacturer Schuhmacher. Her older brother was a ship officer and worked as an engineer. She also had a younger sister named Matten. By the way, my mother had also been a student of my grandfather on my father's side. He was a teacher in Groß-Flottbek before becoming the principal in Nienstedten - so my parents knew each other during their school days. My grandfather Peters must have been the chairman of the gymnastics club in Groß-Flottbek for a long time, which played a significant role in social connections. I saw him participate in gymnastics (exercises, singing during apparatus changes, etc - following the tradition of Turnvater Jahn) until 1954 when he was already in his mid-seventies. Although I had some enthusiasm for sports, the gymnastics of my parents and grandparents always seemed a bit dull to me. I preferred playing football in the schoolyard, even though it was forbidden. At the age of seventeen, during a competition on the sports field where I had my first remembered experience as a three-year-old, I suffered an acute heart and lung enlargement, abruptly ending my sports activities forever.

My mother sang with gusto but inaccurately, especially while doing the dishes. She always slipped into different keys. Nevertheless, Niels, Reimer, and I seem to have inherited some musical talent - probably from Grandfather Otto Lüdemann, who was the first tenor in the choir. He must have been a good tenor; at least, his "singing brothers" later still teased him about it.

My grandmother, Maria Helene Lüdemann, née Herwig, was truly stern, not just externally. She would lock out my grandfather if he had had too much to drink after a singing festival, which was quite common for a Hamburg dockworker. That was perfectly normal. Grandfather was a splendid figure with his snow-white long beard and always cheerful. He teased his wife as much as us grandchildren.

Drawing by Jens Peters 2013

I did not know my great-great-grandparents, but they are present in my mind through stories from my mother. My great-great-grandfather had a shop in the village of Schenefeld near Hamburg that was open on Sundays as well. As the Lüdemann family sat for afternoon coffee, it would often happen that the shop door made a "kling-kling" sound, a farm boy would place a coin on the counter, and say, "Een Piep", referring to a licorice pipe. After half an hour, it would ring again, and once more, you'd hear, "Een Piep". This could go on the entire afternoon. Great-great-grandfather was curious and had the habit of, at the window facing the street, pulling aside the curtain and asking Grandmother, "Kiek mol Mudder, kennst du jurn nich? Nobars kreigen Besoch", to which Grandmother, annoyed, would close the curtain again, saying, "Lat dat Vadder". Upon saying goodbye, great-great-grandfather approached his granddaughter (my mother) and secretly slipped a small amount of money into her pocket, saying, "Hier has 50 pen - brux Madder nich tu vertelln, de gif nich gem". Shortly after, great-great-grandmother came and also covertly placed some money in her pocket, whispering, "Hier has 50 pen, brux Vadder nich tu vertelln, de gif nich gem", which she did not do for her father's sake. So, she received her pocket money twice.

HERINGSDORF, WARTIME, FIRST LOVE

It was probably in 1937 when I visited Heringsdorf on the Baltic Sea with my grandmother, for the first time. We went to see her sister, Aunt Frieda, who ran a children's home there called "Haus Jugendland". Later, I would travel there on my own, placed on a train in Hamburg, and Aunt Frieda would pick me up in Pasewalk. There, you had to change to the island train. The bridge in Ahlbeck, the scent - a mixture of tar, moss, and honey - I can still see and smell it today. Special treats were always the honey-drenched nut sticks that Aunt Frieda would treat us to. I was probably there from 1939 to 1942, attending school in 1942, to be away from the heavily bombed city of Hamburg for more than just the school holidays. In the children's home, I had a privileged position as the great-nephew of the director. Initially, I also lived in her apartment on the ground floor, right next to the entrance of the large house. The room connected directly to Aunt Frieda's living space and was dominated by a large cupboard that was always kept locked. Aunt Frieda had the habit of buying the first Christmas presents from January 1st onwards. They were all stored in the big cupboard, and, of course, everyone knew about it. At night, the door to the living room was left slightly ajar, and you could observe the sisters with the white bonnets playing Mahjong.

Mahjong was Aunt Frieda's great passion, which eventually spread to the entire family. I enjoyed being in the laundry, although it was forbidden. But Aunt Elsa, the head of household, had a big heart for little children. So, I achieved many things with her that went beyond Aunt Frieda's commands. I was particularly fascinated by the mangle. The rollers were covered with a green fabric, the ends of which were not sewn, allowing you to pull threads from the fabric if you grabbed it in time before it disappeared into the next roller. During one game, the thread also disappeared into the roller along with two of my fingers. Luckily, only the nails were crushed, immediately turning blue and needing bandaging. Despite all attempts to hide the hand with the damaged fingernails from Aunt Frieda, the transgression of the command could no longer be concealed.

In one year, probably 1941, my brother Reimer was with us. He was four, and I was six years old, still before starting school, as the school enrollment was in the autumn. We traveled on our own from Hamburg to Pasewalk, where we were picked up. On the train ride, as we passed through Lübeck, the sun set. Reimer brought back a great piece of news: "Now I know where the sun sets: in Lübeck behind the big tower". In the morning, the swastika flag was raised on a flagpole. Over a hundred children assembled militarily. The national anthem was sung. I never saw Aunt Frieda during this ceremony.

My great friend was Ali, her black German Shepherd. Every year, he warmly welcomed me anew, and I was responsible for him during the holidays. We walked together in the magnificent pine forest. I collected thick bark from the trees to carve cork ships. I have never found pine bark as thick as in Heringsdorf, and during our visit in 1997, I carved one for Elke. On the beach, we had our own wooden bathhouse, meaning changing cabins on stilts. We constantly got splinters in our feet from the wooden walkways.

In the last year, when I attended school there for one to two months, I moved from Aunt Frieda's apartment to the dormitories for boys. Each boy had a number. Since the floors - the 1st floor for boys, the 2nd floor for girls - were identically arranged, each girl also had a corresponding number. I was number 9 and then fell in love with the girl in the 9th grade above me, my first love at the age of 9: Christi Cranz. She was much older, probably 14. As a privileged ward of the home director, I not only had to march through the city in the first row before the entire children's group, as was done at the time, but I also sat at the front of the table at mealtime in the 1st place. Therefore, there was some excitement when I asked the supervisor if I could sit further back next to Christi. Christi could dance and whistle. She came from Dresden; her mother was a dancer. And at the farewell party, she whistled and danced like in a Vaudeville show in Berlin. Aunt Frieda had to flee in 1945. When she came to Hamburg, my first question was about Ali. Ali was not allowed to accompany them on the escape. He was shot and buried in the garden. We often visited Aunt Frieda in her small apartment in Hamburg and, of course, played a lot of Mahjong. She passed away in 1950.

From this time in Heringsdorf I wrote a letter to my father in Russia, informing him that two of my teeth were pulled, and I built a He 111 model plane. There were paper model kits back then, and you glued the parts together with Uhu to make paper airplanes that, of course, did not fly. I also wrote this letter to my mother.

During a trip with Elke to Heringsdorf, we rediscovered the "Haus Jugendland". Of course, nobody remembered the name anymore, but I was aware that it had been located at the highest point of Heringsdorf. In front of the house, there was a road, and beyond the road began the then untouched, beautiful pine forest. We climbed the hill. At the highest point stands a red pseudo-Gothic brick church, which puzzled me since I had no memory of it at all. But right across from the road was the white, well-maintained "Haus Jugendland," now an island clinic, with the windows of Aunt Frieda's apartment on the ground floor to the right and also the window of my small bedroom. The front yard was now fenced off by a terrible DDR railing, and the originally gravel-covered courtyard was now paved with concrete slabs. The large beech trees were still there, but the flagpole was gone. Beyond the road, you still stumbled over the protruding pine roots, although the forest access has been ruined by a camping and parking lot. We were able to enter the house. The interior has been remodeled, but Aunt Frieda's living room still existed. The doors to my room and her bedroom were locked. In the upper floor, there are now hospital beds, although not occupied anymore, as the clinic has just been closed. The house still made a magnificent impression from the outside. Inside, it seemed much larger in the past.

FAMILY LANDES, ESTATE HARLANDEN, AND ROTTMANNSHARDT

In the upper floor of the house (we lived on the ground floor) lived the family of a civil engineer from Ingolstadt. At that time, they were still a young couple without children. Every half year, children were born alternately, four downstairs, four upstairs, initially until the war. A lifelong friendship developed between the families, which was particularly significant for my mother during the challenging post-war period. The Landes family - we called them Aunt Gretel and Uncle Paul - with eventually eight children, returned to their paternal estate in Bavaria during the war. From there, especially when there was scarcely anything available, many provisions came to us in the city. As soon as travel became possible after the war, we spent our entire summer vacations there for many years, probably until 1952. We were even there during the war, amid the large bombing raids on Hamburg. Polish prisoners of war taught me how to ride a bicycle. However, I couldn't brake, and when I shouted for them to stop me, they all scattered, not understanding me. They probably thought they should get out of the way. That was the only and rather intense bicycle crash I remember. There, I also experienced the wildlife: milking cows, the birth of calves and piglets, the smell of horses, and the feeling when rapeseed kernels fell into the collar during the harvest and trickled through the clothing as we loaded the rapeseed sheaves onto the cart.

We still traveled to the city with horse-drawn wagons, and in the village, we were fascinated to watch how the glowing iron was shaped in the forge to fit the smoking hooves of the horses. There were no cars here. It took an hour to walk from the estate to the train station in Dolling or to travel by carriage when we wanted to go to Ingolstadt by train. Ingolstadt deeply impressed me back then with its city church and fortifications. The city must have been significantly influenced, especially by the Franciscans. By the way, Tilly died there from wounds suffered in the Thirty Years' War.

Bread was baked in the estate's wood-fired oven, using four-meter-long poles to slide the bread in and out of the oven. The morning meal always consisted of hot milk and dry wood oven bread. I can still taste it today. The father of Aunt Gretel and Uncle Paul was a Mennonite preacher, and they lived on two neighboring estates in Upper Bavaria, one in Harlanden near Oberdolling and the other in Rottmannshart near Manching, both close to Ingolstadt. Aunt Gretel's father had passed away, but we often attended the church service conducted by the elderly Mr. Landes. These gatherings always took place in the living room. The preachers were laymen and lived a deep, simple piety strongly rooted in their relationships with the earth, animals, and plants. Their profound empathy for our difficulties after our father fell in the war in Russia, and the practical help, such as sending food supplies or even the gift of a washing machine that we could never afford, left a lasting impression on our mother. She continued to attend Mennonite services with us even after the war. It remained foreign to me; I couldn't connect much with the nature-based spirituality and sometimes naive religiosity. Nevertheless, the people were remarkably kind. Later, American Mennonite relief committees came to Hamburg. Yet, this kind of "goodness" seemed somewhat out of step with the times. Above all, it was the strong family ties and the inclination toward a simple life, which contrasted with my later aspirations in music and the desire to break free from family constraints.

"Chester" - drawing by Jens Peters 2007

II. POST-WAR ERA

"IT WAS AS IF THE ANGELS WERE SINGING"

1944, when I was in the fourth grade, I saw a girl on the way to the train station wearing a gray loden coat and a thick braid. I was particularly struck by her walk - distinctive and determined - as if she wanted to stamp a hole in the ground with every step. She didn't look right or left. She was the new girl in our class, as I learned the same day. Apparently, she also made an impression on my classmates because a struggle ensued among the boys for the seat behind her in the classroom. She played the recorder wonderfully, and we teased each other on the schoolyard, but then I didn't see her for years. We later attended different high schools, both located on either side of the Othmarschen S-Bahn station. I encountered her again at the age of 16 - on the train station and on the way to school and we gradually developed a connection over several years. She lived at the other end of Hamburg, so she had to travel across the entire city to get to high school. I accompanied her on the train ride through Hamburg, facing each other at the sliding door of the train, exchanging glances. The relationship slowly deepened. I picked her up from school, and for that she was summoned to the principal's office since it was not appropriate at the time for a girl to be picked up by a boy. My brother Reimer and I went on secret bike rides just to see her. We peeked through the bushes at her home and rode back. Eventually, after being invited by her father, we played music together at her place - she on the recorder, and me on the violin. Once, it was already dark and misty, the street lamps had silver stars, and I took her in my arms. I can still feel the fabric of her trench coat, and I gave her a kiss. In that moment, the sky opened up, and I held an angel in my arms. We were both so deeply moved that we stood there like spellbound. I had never experienced anything more beautiful in my entire life.

This was my second, in a certain sense, extrasensory experience. From the first, I knew there was a Godfather, and from the second, I knew about the angels. We went on another bike ride with other friends, and after that, she said goodbye to work as an au pair in America. Later, her father told me she had married an Indian in Chicago. I never heard from her again. In the early 1990s, I was in Chicago three times for a downtown public transportation project. She lived only a hundred kilometers from Chicago. I hadn't thought of her for a second. It wasn't until 1998 that I inquired about her in Chicago again, and a beautiful, albeit not immediate, telephone and written exchange took place over about half a year. And once again, the thread was cut. Through the internet, I later learned that she was actively involved in the presidential election campaign.

THE VIOLIN AND EVA HAUPTMANN

A Sketch by Jens Peters

My otherwise not-so-good violin teacher, Hedwig Bonne, had the merit of dragging me and later Reimer into all the necessary amateur orchestras where she assisted as a violist. I worked my way up from the last desk of the second violin to the front of the first violin, only to repeat the process in the next higher orchestra. This gave me a broad knowledge of orchestral literature - my private "Waldorf music education". It started with early Baroque, and later, in the Schaffer orchestra, we played Beethoven symphonies. At the age of 17, after an audition, I joined the first violin of a chamber orchestra that performed concerts every two weeks on Sundays.

At that time, I wasn't clear about what my profession would be. During an evening audition at the music school, I boldly asked the famous Eva Hauptmann (1894-1986) if she could teach me. "Well", she said, "I could have ten students on each finger", demonstrating it vividly, "but come for an audition". I went to her and played the Bach E Major Violin Concerto. It might not have been good because she asked if I had learned it myself, which was the case. She took me, and, at a 50% discount, I visited her once a week until I progressed enough to only come every 14 days for the same price. At that time, I had no idea why she was such a sought-after teacher. She had been a Flesch student, and I now consistently learned the Flesch system, the chromatic conquest of the scale.

Wilhelm Melcher (1940-2005), the former first violinist of the Melos Quartet Stuttgart, later envied me for it. He hadn't gone through the school. It was the best there was. For lessons, she demanded three hours of practice each day, initially. I must have made good progress because it was noticed in the orchestra. Shortly before graduation, I had to give up lessons due to work overload. She firmly expected me to return for further studies after that. My last piece with her was the Hindemith Sonata 39. I played it as my graduation piece and in subsequent performances.

Eva Hauptmann was a fascinating personality. Much taller than me, she walked with huge manly steps and was married to the painter Ivo Hauptmann (1886-1973), the eldest son of Gerhard Hauptmann (1862-1946), whom I always presumed to be behind a door from which she emerged into the music room. One day she rushed through that very door, calling out excitedly to me: "Imagine, now I have to watch out for moths too!" She accompanied most of her students' pieces by heart on the piano. Her violin, a Guadagnini, was later played by Thomas Brandis (1935-2017), the first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, who was studying with her at the time. He was just starting to become a star in 1954. She taught as a professor at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, also covering literature, and knew everything.

In addition to playing the violin I sang, but only for two pieces in the choir: the B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach, each seven times. We had a pretty good school orchestra, in which I soon competed with Wilhelm Melcher at the first desk. Thanks to the violin, I had a special status in school. I could occasionally schedule an "important" rehearsal for school events during a lesson I didn't like. I also went through a good chamber music school. Eugen von Schmidt, winner of the Chopin Prize in 1938 and former accompanist of Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957), had, because of the war, arrived as a music teacher at the school. He taught everything by heart. We had the impression that he had all piano literature within him. He practiced trios with us - a cello, his piano student, and me - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. That's where I learned how to professionally work on chamber music.

THE WATER AND THE SIEVERTS FAMILY

Towards the end of the 1940's, when I was about 14 years old, a strong longing for water and sailing developed. Sailing in Hamburg on the Elbe is a special privilege of the wealthier Hamburg residents. Someone said, "Sailing is like standing under the shower and tearing up 100-mark bills". That was, of course, out of the question for the poor student. I read a lot, learned navigation, and extracted the most peculiar stories from the sky to convince friends who owned a boat to let me sail. Now, an old retired captain moved into the neighborhood. We discussed my problem and he said, "Jens, I'll teach you to sail; every boat has its soul. We'll start with the simplest dinghy and go through them all the way to the big yacht". He could say that because he was the chairman of the NRV (Norddeutscher Regatta Verein). So, he possessed the sacred key guaranteeing access to the most wonderful yachts. "We'll start next Sunday". The night before, he passed away. So, once again, sailing was out of reach for me.

Only the folding kayak of the old professor remained. That was quite a surprising turn of events. I had met Jan Sieverts while playing in the school string quartet. His father, Rudolf Sieverts (1903-1980), known as the old professor because he had snow-white hair at the age of 20, owned a folding kayak that he made available to the youth. He lectured on criminal and juvenile law at the University of Hamburg. This marked the beginning of my encounter with a special family. I hadn't experienced so much intelligence and education until then. We made music together. The daughter, Tina, played the harpsichord wonderfully. After a family discussion, it once burst out from Tina: "It's crazy; Tom just knows everything!". Thomas Sieverts (*1934), the future architect and urban planner who worked and taught primarily in Berlin, became my friend, to whom I am still connected today. The mother, a clever petite woman with gleaming steel-gray eyes, always had a questioning look in her eyes, became known to all as May. And May was the soul of the house.

Travel sketches - North Sea Island - 1995

"Travel sketches - North Sea Island - Jens Peters 1995"

Until I went to study in Stuttgart, this was something like my home. Rudolf Sieverts must have played a similar role for me in Hamburg as Rolf Gutbrod (1910-1999) did later in Stuttgart. His office hours were always fully booked. He also wrote the general reports needed for scholarships. So, my encounters with him were mainly the conversations we had for the assessments. Rudolf Sieverts had built a beautiful house for his family. He was busy in other ways too, and everyone knew it, but it was not discussed. It was part of the family's style to live with it. Not only did the folding kayak trips with Tom - on the Danube, the Baltic Sea, and from Gothenburg to Stockholm in Sweden - provide the experiences that an adolescent needs, I also anjoyed walks through the heath with May by my side - a blonde, blue-eyed, and enamored girl - with Arthur, the setter. May was a Ronnefeld - from the Tea House in Frankfurt. Even if in my inner self I was only open to Suse - the angel I had experienced - May always had a bit of the question in her gaze: Hopefully, Tina doesn't get attached to Jens. There had been generations of professors in the family. On our folding kayak trips, Ronnefeld's strong, racy Assam gentleman's tea always accompanied us. The sheet music we played from was stamped: Wirklicher Geheimer Rat Engel (Privy Councilor Engel [= Angel]). In this context, I probably wasn't quite the right one.

"Travel sketches - North Sea Island - Jens Peters 1995"

My last folding kayak trip through the Göta Canal with Tom ended for me with a 14-day hitchhiking tour as a ship's boy. The folding kayak had to go back to Hamburg, so I went to the harbour and asked if I could be taken to Hamburg in exchange for my services. When the captain then discovered that I had learned spherical trigonometry in the 13th grade, we sighted stars together for the A6 patent that the captain needed to finish at the navigation school. I then got off at the Brunsbüttel lock, and he told me, "If you weren't a Hamburger, I wouldn't have taken you with me". That was the end of my folding kayak career.

Much later, in 1979, sailing returned. After a Baltic Sea tour with my two sons Malte and Heiko in my brother Henning's yacht, I looked for a pedagogical project to improve the father-son relationship. In Holland, we bought a wooden kit for a warship which we could tow with our car on a trailer. The boat had 4 berths and was seaworthy. The double garage in our rented townhouse was expanded into a shipyard with laths and lattice film. Here, we spent 2 years building the ship. We found a berth on Lake Constance, where the boat lay for 10 years. During this time, we made family trips to the Adriatic, the Croatian island world, Sweden's west coast up to Stockholm, and the North Sea around the West Frisian Islands. The boat was in Bremen at the end. I had given it to my second son Heiko. After my last tour of the North Sea islands with Heiko and subsequently with Elke, there were so-called chaos days in Lower Saxony, and the workshop shack of the Waldorf school where the boat was stored was set on fire. That was the end of my sailing dream. But I had made the experience that I had yearned for as a little boy: to be the captain of my own ship, exposed to the elements of water and air, experiencing geometry that relates forces in nature and balancing them with the sheets and tiller.

I encountered Rudolf Sieverts once again later. When I traveled to Finland in 1961 after my studies I was standing in line in the cafeteria in Otaniemi when a distinguished elderly gentleman with white hair turned to me and said, "I don't care a bit, what are you doing here?" He had just been elected as the rector of the University of Hamburg and represented the university in this function. He was pleased to come across what he thought was an insider and immediately made plans for a joint sightseeing tour the following Sunday. However, I had to decline, my schedule was booked, I had made plans to meet Moiken Behrends, to whom I had just become engaged. He understood now and said, "I'll manage on my own". Rudolf Sieverts, being an educated person, naturally knew about anthroposophy. He shared that he had a brief encounter with Rudolf Steiner. He wanted to visit the first Waldorf school on the Uhlandshöhe in Stuttgart, which was much talked about at the time. To his surprise, he saw Steiner standing in the schoolyard, surrounded by a crowd of women, mostly dressed in violet. When Steiner noticed Rudolf Sieverts, he turned around in his black frock coat, made a brief bow to him, and then turned back to the circle of women.

STUDIES - ARCHITECTURE AND ANTHROPOSOPHY

In 1954, my hope, above all, was to break free from Hamburg and family circumstances. The only thing I couldn't study in Hamburg due to my interests was architecture since there was no technical university (TU) for it at the time. I aimed to go as far away as possible - Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, or Munich. I took advantage of my uncle's delivery truck, which made a weekly round through West Germany, to travel for free. In the early semesters, this became my regular travel route. It always took several days to reach Stuttgart. I slept in the back of the cargo area on the load, which was comfortable when it was still full due to suspension but less so when everything was unloaded. However, at that time, I didn't even have money for the train.

In the fall of 1954, when I came to Stuttgart for my studies, there was already a 50% numerus clausus so I had to take an entrance exam in the summer. Although I didn't have a clear image of what an architect did, glimpsing at the exam works of my colleagues gave me hope that I was in the right place. We were asked to draw a house according to our taste, and I saw several detached gable houses with a picket fence and cabbages in the garden. This was in contrast to my orientation toward the simple, single-story brick houses without a fence at the Klein-Flottbek train station by Bernhard Hermkes (1903-1995). As it turned out, my colleagues had taken exams at multiple universities, but I was confident that it would work out in Stuttgart, so I didn't even think of applying anywhere else.

The fateful threads of destiny quickly revealed themselves when, in the autumn, I came to Stuttgart and started looking for a room at the youth hostel. There I met someone whose facial features I vaguely remembered from my school days. He was two years older than me, and also looking for a room. Although I already had an offer for a double room, he insisted on living alone. Nevertheless, I gave him my address. I had already decided on the double room, and two days later, Uwe Kiecksee showed up at my door with all his luggage, saying, "I'm coming to you". That was the beginning of Castor and Pollux, as Johannes Tautz (1914-2008) later called us. We lived together for two semesters in Heslach, Stuttgart - on Türkenstraße - discussing Plato into the night, pacing up and down on both sides of the small table in our not-so-small room. Once I noticed that he was always going somewhere that he didn't seem to want to involve me in, until one day he took me along to pick up Ernst Lehrs (1894-1979) and his wife, Maria (1890-1969), from the train. With Ernst Lehrs, we then went to the anthroposophical student group at the university. Uwe studied mechanical engineering, later becoming a Waldorf teacher and the Godfather of my eldest son, Malte.

[(RC): See "Ein Film über die Waldorfschule Überlingen" Intervieweees include Uwe Kiecksee. Uwe Kiecksee played a significant role in the design of the School.

The encounter with the two Lehrs was an important turning point for me. They became something like my intellectual foster parents. I found an intellectual home with them in Eckwalden during my studies, especially through the direct reports of their life with Rudolf Steiner. They helped me to make connections through meetings and conferences in Holland and Switzerland (Arlesheim and the Goetheanum in Dornach). This allowed me to encounter many direct students of Rudolf Steiner, such as Willem Zeylmans (1898-1960), Max Stibbe (1898-1973), Dan van Bemmelen (1899-1982), Bernard Lievegood (1905-1992), Margarete Kirchner-Bockholt (1894-1973), Madelaine van Deventer (1899-1983), Heinz Muller (1899-1968), Albrecht Strohschein (1899-1962), Karl Konig (1902-1966), Henri van Goudoever (1898-1977), Eberhard Schickler (1895-1963), and finally, in 1958 in Odense, Arne Klingborg (1915-2005) and Jergen Smit (1916-1991).

[(RC): Albrecht Strohschein participated in Rudolf Steiner's 1924 "Heilpädagogis Kurs". Together with Sigfried Pickert and Franz Löffler, he founded the first institute for children who are "in need of soul care".]

The architecture studies in the lower level were a torment for me. I didn't understand Dockner, the professor for urban planning; Volkert, building theory, was too dull and conservative for me; Wilhelm, design, too slow. And Rolf Gutbier (1903-1992) had no time. I did a design with him. It went as follows: He had all the models set up in front of him on the table at a 1:500 scale and asked, "Who is the best?" Then he took the models of Nikolaus Ruff (1934-2002) and me, saying, "The others can go home; I won't correct them". That was not the teaching style I had imagined. He briefly looked at the work of Gundolf Bockernuhl, the son of the Stuttgart tram director, then pushed the work back to him with his left hand, making a bell-ringing motion with his right hand and said, "Bimmelimmelim, depart". This led to an insult lawsuit from old Bockernuhl. Gutbier at least had a good assistant - Hans Kammerer (1922-2000), from whom I learned the basics of designing. And then there was Maximilian Debus (1904-1981), a student of Laszlo Moholy Nagy (1895-1946), who taught us drawing through the Bauhaus basics and dealing with spatial and material structures.

"Exhibition Pavilion" - Diploma project by Jens Peters 1960/61

ROLF GUTBROD AND ERNST LEHRS

Then Rolf Gutbrod appeared in interior design. Even though he dealt with time like the other "Gods", there was the experience: Something new is being developed here. He solved the problems each student had by leading them back to an architectural law. This fascinated us so much that a circle formed around him during his corrections, similar to how Goethe described it when looking at the Arena of Verona, as the archetype of the theater. We sat on stools and tables, stood around him, and admired his correction as a creative act. No one left. It was exciting to see how other works were corrected. He wasn't particularly good at drawing, but we took his sketches, supporting his ideas, and puzzled over them until the next correction: What could he have meant? When a colleague questioned his correction, different from the week before, he replied, "You must also allow me to learn". That was my world. Simultaneously, Gutbrot brought the flair of the larger world to life by discussing his office works - competitions that ran internationally. All of this was very human, so I focused on his teachings.

In 1954, at that time, an architectural-aesthetic debate had erupted, centred around the philosophy chair of Max Bense (1910-1990): Is the future with Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) or with Hans Scharoun (1893-1972)? Rolf Gutbrod was not a theorist but a thoroughly artistic person. He tried to convince us that a rectangular space, divided by an incline, produced a higher functional quality for the two remaining areas than with a vertical division. This created a tremendous inner contradiction for us. We had to understand that. In our search for solutions, Nikolaus Ruff and I stumbled upon projective geometry, supported by a same-aged mathematician, Georg Gleckler, who later became the head of the Mathematical Section at the Goetheanum. Georg Gleckler had essential pedagogical skills that he brought from the Waldorf school. He had experienced Waldorf education firsthand and wanted to use it, aligning all his skills with education, with new pedagogy. We delved into this new way of thinking and observed that the conception of space had to change fundamentally. In Euclidean geometry, which referred to the point and the way into infinity, the physical object disappeared from consciousness. Through Gutbrod's cross-section, a structure emerged where there was no longer anything infinite. The object that vanished into infinity now returned from the infinitely distant plane, as envisioned, for example, in the hyperbola or lemniscate. However, it is no longer physical but returns as a thought. It returns simultaneously with the fact of coming back, and the consciousness changes. The object was there. It was there as a thought. It returned as a spiritual fact. We experienced this as a revelation.

The question of Mies or Scharoun was not an abstract question but a contemporary problem. We were no longer students at a school but stood at the centre of world events. We learned that projective geometry developed only in the 18th century, specifically in 1794, at the moment when Goethe and Schiller met. Goethe described his image of the archetypal plant to Schiller, who said, "But that's just an idea", to which Goethe replied, "Then I can count myself lucky to see ideas with my own eyes". A threshold of consciousness had been broken. This could not be contemplated in thought until then.

We continued to learn that this world, carrying the drive for life within it, was shaped according to the law of metamorphosis. The physical world and the world of thoughts were a unity. This immediately matched our anthroposophical studies. We discovered the consistent development of this idea for the first time in world history with Rudolf Steiner. Thus, all his buildings were subject to the laws of metamorphosis. A long and fascinating journey lay ahead of us: participation in world events and the formulation of an individual handwriting. We had to work this out for ourselves. And it filled us with fiery enthusiasm. On the one hand, we were forced to develop our profession. On the other hand, there was the clear goal of seeking and shaping life. The life path was clear.

During this time, I also got to know Ernst Lehrs better. Once a week, he did work at the university for students and interested parties on the course Rudolf Steiner had held in 1924 in Koberwitz for farmers. Over many weeks and months, we learned to know life in its depths. Ernst Lehrs had attended the "Agricultural Course". Here, biodynamic agriculture was born, which now operates in many thousands of farms worldwide and reaches consumers through the Demeter movement. It was the beginning of ecology in the twentieth century. Here, too, the goal was to understand life. Ernst Lehrs came from a Jewish family in Berlin, studied electrical engineering, and shortly after completing his dissertation, he was appointed by Steiner as a science teacher at the newly established Waldorf School in Stuttgart. He now became my anthroposophy teacher. Living on the edge of the Swabian Alb, he had to commute to Stuttgart by train. Requiring a place to rest, he would come to our student apartment on Bauschweg to relax and I would accompany him to the university, on foot. This became my extensive lesson in anthroposophy on the journey from Uhlandshohe to the university in the city centre. Ernst Lehrs possessed an Atlantean memory, introducing me to anthroposophy and bringing me closer, with reverence, to the great individual who had conceived this monumental work. He became my spiritual mentor.

As my studies were coming to an end, I experienced three significant and rather peculiar events on a single day, which seemed meaningful at the time, especially as I was engrossed in the study of Christian Rosenkreuz (See: "Chymische Hochzeit" by Johann Valentin Andreae, 1616):

I was traveling by train, and a gentleman sitting across from me unexpectedly said, "You're an occultist, aren't you?" He then spoke about the conditions of esoteric development, details of which I have forgotten, but concluded with, "You are on the right path!" Upon arriving in Stuttgart, I boarded a very old pre-war tram which had the technical installations under the seats. A battery under the seat next to me suddenly exploded, with flames narrowly missing my legs. Upon disembarking at Charlottenplatz, I walked on the north side towards the city centre on the Fullweg, which still existed at that time. From the direction of Degerloch, an open delivery truck loaded with gas cylinders approached at a considerable speed. As it navigated a turn, two cylinders, propelled by centrifugal force, detached and flew directly towards me. I could only save myself by instinctively jumping very high, to a height I cannot explain to this day, allowing the cylinders to pass underneath me. They could have severed my legs, or even worse, had I not reacted in that way.

END OF STUDY AND NIKOLAUS RUFF

I got to know Niko in 1954 when we started studying together. I see him alongside a female student in the first semester, a tall and elegant figure, who courted her in his reserved manner. She was the daughter of a professor and later married a well-known nephrologist (kidney disease specialist). We were supposed to plan a house for him in Karlsruhe, once he became the head of the Nephrology Clinic there. Nico and I both did internships in 1956 in Liestal, Switzerland, with Hans von Moos (1903-1979) [(RC): Max von Moos? The painter?]. He had a car, and with it we explored Switzerland, traveling to Ronchamp. Back then you still had to climb the mountain like a true pilgrim to ski. We visited the Goetheanum. Niko was initially quite taken aback by the architecture of the Goetheanum building. During the tour, we heard that Rudolf Steiner derived the external form of the second Goetheanum from the forces of geology. Niko's reaction: "Nonsense!" Afterwards we continued into the Jura to Soden and took a break in a quarry. Niko pointed at the rocks, saying, "Look, just like the Goetheanum!" Since then, I never heard any reservations from him. For him, it was evidently the experience that allowed him to enter anthroposophy.

I suffered during our collaboration at the office in Liestal at the time, which he perhaps didn't notice. He could simply do everything better. It was clear that he was training straightforwardly as an architect. His father and grandfather were architects, while I was always occupied with general life education issues, diverting me from specifics. I was involved with anthroposophy, music, and history. My connection to architecture was always very general. This resulted in the consequence that, from task to task, I had to start anew, while he drew from a repertoire, making him faster and more efficient. Fundamentally, the work attitude has never left me, but my connection to architecture only developed through practice, not during my studies. I remember well that my surroundings suffered because I committed late, attempting to keep decision processes open for a long time. There was dissatisfaction with some solutions because they didn't go deep enough. This led to conflicts late on in my own office in Stiuttgart. However, it also shows how the theme of our lifelong connection - over thirty years of collaboration - was already illuminated in the first moment of our encounter.

Hans von Moos had a new client for a single-family house and organised the project as an office competition. It was crucial for my self-confidence that my design was executed and not Niko's. I worked on it up to the construction plans and later saw it in its finished state. My first house in the Bauhaus tradition with an exposed, transverse staircase in the living room.

In 1958, I traveled to Holland for an anthroposophical youth conference. There I met Hans-Peter van Manen, who was studying history and working on his doctoral thesis. The wonderful heath landscape in eastern Holland invited hours of conversational walks where we exchanged thoughts on history - I mostly listened. Hans-Peter was extremely knowledgeable, especially about the history of the anthroposophical movement, which was entirely new to me. Surprisingly, he invited me to his family home in Wassenaar, a suburb of The Hague with large villas and parks that I knew from Hamburg. I was received exceptionally kindly in his family. No reservations against the Germans, among whom the Dutch had suffered greatly during the war. This open friendliness touched me repeatedly in the many years I had dealings with the Dutch. They were sociable. It was unthinkable for a conversation to happen without a cup of coffee - The Dutch had brought that habit from their former Dutch East Indies colony. The conversation was the important thing. During construction meetings my partners would later say, "That was a good conversation" and then would postpone making or executive decisions.

At the same time, my mother, Helene PETERS, was admitted to the hospital in Hamburg. I visited her and told her about the conference. A young girl named Friederike listened attentively to our discussion and was so enthusiastic about what I reported that she wanted to attend the conference the following year. The conference took place in Eckwalden and there she met Hans Peter from The Hague. They returned as engaged partners after a walk to Hepsisau and after marrying they settled in The Hague. I stayed in their hospitable home several times during my visits and discussions. Friederike and Hans Peter became my base for my activities in Holland. The first was the new building for the Waldorf School Duttendeel in The Hague.

After wonderful days in 1958 visiting the hospitable house in Wassenaar, I met Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven in The Hague. A lanky giant with a large head and a vehement eagle nose, seemingly confirming the content during lectures. He was the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society in Holland and had built the wonderful Rudolf Steiner Clinic with the architect Jan Buys. Not only is it a magnificent structure with outstanding details, but the social process of how the clinic came into being showed me that it is possible to conceive independent, high-quality, anthroposophic buildings.

Suddenly, in 1960, Niko finished his studies, and I still hadn't completed any of the five required designs. I had simply studied too much anthroposophy and music, and I had an inner reluctance to throw myself into the mill of corrections. I had to finish now and actually managed to complete the five designs in a year, with four of them under Rolf Gutbrod, to his great surprise. For me, however, he was a source of humanity at the inhumane university, and I admired his pedagogical imagination when he corrected.

FINNLAND AND ENGLAND 1961 / 1962

My thesis didn't turn out particularly well because I was completely exhausted from the previous year. After completing my degree, I just wanted to get away, abroad, which I could never afford during my studies. With Gutbrod's help, I applied for a postgraduate position at Kenzõ Tange's (1913-2005) office in Tokyo to work on the Olympic swimming hall. However, the decision took a very long time, so I decided to take over Niko's position in Helsinki with Keijo Petäjä (1919-1988). At that time, we were drawn mainly to Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). Nikolaus Ruff had also tried to join his office, which was not possible. We tried to see everything Aalto had built. It turned out that his buildings were even more impressive than publications made clear. An incredibly lively rhythm in the mineral, almost as if they grew out of the granite. Brilliant details, incredibly simple but always individual. For example, the Cultural House in Helsinki, which we had studied the plans for, was now magnificent in detail on-site, but it did not convey a sense of community. It surprised me greatly and was important for our later work on Waldorf schools.

Kenzõ Tange - Olympic Pool, Tokyo

I observed that it had to do with the Greek theatrical form. Greek theater is a conscious, folk-pedagogical form to lead the people of that time to individualisation. In that moment, I suddenly understood why Rudolf Steiner corrected the trapezoid, which opens up to the bean, in the building application plan for the second Goetheanum. We are back at the intersection that Rolf Gutbrod made clear through his oblique cut, namely at the meeting point of Euclidean and non-Euclidean space. Here, it becomes dramatically clear how crucial the understanding of the educational task of architecture in social space is. Greek theater supports the goals emanating from the mysteries, forming the person through fear and compassion to become a self-acting personality. He was released from the community, from the guidance of the gods, to become an independent, responsible human being. Two thousand years of training were available for this until the end of the 19th century, when this principle of independent leadership was overturned, even turning malicious through the leadership principle emerging in 20th-century Europe, ultimately leading to the First World War. Since the beginning of the 20th century, old architecture can be solved in this way: through openness to the front, on the basis of a vibrant counter-space. It could be expressed formulaically: The Euclidean space of thought that closes towards the bean leads people to isolation. The new space that opens forward, the non-Euclidean space, which contains life forces within it, brings people together into a higher consciousness. It was clear to me that developing this space was my task.

What did the trip to Finland bring for me? I had found a woman who, like me, believed that our children should attend the best school available, a school supported by the forces of the counter-space. I had found new friends, the painter Arne Klingborg (1915-2005), and the architect Erik ("Abbi") Asmussen (1913-1998), both working on the same task. The renewal in architecture and painting that took place in Järna (Sweden) made this place, alongside Stuttgart, a second intellectual home for me. Fritz Fuchs (*1937), Arne Klingborg's former assistant, became my lifelong friend and partner in dealing with colour in architecture. In Järna, I saw sculptures by John Wilkes (*1931), with which he shaped and enhanced the formative power of water through the doubly curved surface of the sculpture, achieving natural wastewater purification by allowing dirty water to run over these forms. Architecture, sculpture, and painting had now become a unity for me, and the place for the pursuit of the visual arts was clear to me: Stuttgart.

Before Finland, through Rolf Gutbrod's mediation, I went to England for a short teaching assignment at the Leeds School of Architecture. I stood at Victoria Station and was happy. Here, one could stand and have a free mind. Despite all the beauty of Finland, the connection to natural forces was noticeable. In England, history had swept everything away. An honorable, partly humorous technology, a hundred years older than in Germany. The wonderful Art Nouveau train stations with cast-iron pillars and roof constructions, the Victorian empire, were still palpable everywhere. But habits were different than ours. For example, I had no seat on the train to Leeds. Seats on trains there are all pre-booked, or you won't get a ticket. I had to persuade the conductor, probably also with a tip, which was customary, to place me with my father's large overseas trunk and my violin directly behind the locomotive in the aisle. The trunk was indeed a problem. It was so heavy that I couldn't carry it. I needed a porter. They came in droves towards me, in uniforms and aprons, with their carts. The trunk had to go to the luggage storage, and I asked the porter naively, "How much is it?" The answer: "As you like it, Sir." I asked several times. I always got the same answer. I couldn't handle the foreign money yet and handed him a coin. It must have been significantly too little because when I picked up the trunk, a handle was missing. No one went without a porter; that was also part of the world empire habitus, to have one's servants. And the amount of the tip remained a mystery to me the entire time. Of course, the English knew what was appropriate, but that had to be learned. So, I continued to the north in my feudal trunk seat, for seven hours, and then I passed through the suburbs of Leeds, gray, cold, wet. Many back-to-back houses still stood that we drove past. The were heated with coal in an open fireplace. I was not used to this type of heat generation. In the front, you roasted, and in the back, you froze, with the result that I had to lie in bed with the flu for 14 days. I was accommodated in the house of a Polish urban planning teacher. Even the relatively sophisticated house was heated with open coal.

There is an expression in England: continental face. The English basic physiognomy seems initially relatively unindividual. A newcomer from the continent is recognized by the face and having a continental face was presumed to mean that one could do something. So, I soon noticed that merely being a Continental European meant that a special performance was expected of me. However, the school in Leeds was not particularly good, especially in terms of architectural education. The word art, or artistic needs, were not articulated at all. Architecture had developed there from trade and technology. I had brought my study works. These elicited astonishment from students and teachers, even though my diploma was mediocre. But I was welcomed everywhere very kindly, although it was not always entirely clear to me where the friendliness turned into habit because the English are always friendly. The many coloured people in London were unusual for me. The world empire was also palpable here. In the subway, which had fantastic organisation, all conductors were black. The passengers were mixed from all walks of life, from workers to lords with bowler hats and umbrellas. Closely crowded, they sat on the narrow bench seats or hung on the leather loops.

In my semester, there was the daughter of a general of the Persian Shah, who indulged in her connections and was so incompetent that she was soon sent away, and on the other hand, the little Chinese Lee, who jumped up from his chair after every correction, bowed before me, and said, "Yes, Sir!" At the end of my time in Leeds, I was asked if I wanted to stay there as a teacher, but I had already decided to return to Germany to start a family. Nikolaus Ruff and Johannes Billing were waiting for my return to found the office together. I finally wanted to build houses.

FAMILY FOUNDATION AND BEGINNING BPR

In Eckwalden, in 1958, I met Moiken Behrends from a distance. At that time, she already knew that we would get married someday - it became clear to me only in 1961 in Helsinki. Moiken was a Eurythmy teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in Helsinki and also conducted a community course in which I participated. I had a certain hesitation since I couldn't estimate her age. She seemed much more advanced and mature. We often attended concerts together. During one of our outings, we passed by a candle shop, and I mentioned that I wanted to give her a candle but didn't know which one. Her response was, "Then make an effort!" Typical Moiken. The woolen blanket in her neatly arranged room always lay at the same angle on the bed. At that time, I had a brief love affair with a Finnish student from our office, which ended when she revealed that she was the lover of our boss. Only after that could I approach Moiken freely. After a few days, just before I went to England, I asked her if we should get married.

Soon after, Moiken fell ill and had to go to the anthroposophical cancer clinic in Arlesheim with suspected cancer. I accompanied her there - London, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel. However, it was probably more her longing for me, as Alex Leroi (1906-1968), the founder and director of the cancer clinic in Arlesheim, couldn't find anything. I also had long conversations with him, the leading doctor in mistletoe therapy at the time. He was interested in Portuguese explorers, Heinrich the Navigator, and Charles Lindbergh. I then had to take a night train back to Leeds.

Moiken stayed in Switzerland until I finished in England. In the summer of 1961 we traveled together from Arlesheim into the unknown, with a feeling of unease - heading to Stuttgart. She sat in the corner of the compartment, in a light blue wool suit, still pale from the illness. She was afraid of Stuttgart. "Where are you taking me?" I had no job. We had no apartment. Nikolaus Ruff had allowed us to use his room, which he still occupied from his student days, while he moved back to his parents' place. This immediately caused problems with the landlady. However, Johannes Billing (1930-2015), our future BPR co-founder and partner, arranged for us to soon get a cheap 3-room apartment in the west, 3rd floor, with a tiled stove and wooden bath oven. Coal was stored in the basement. With the last money from England, we bought a used VW Beetle. Except for two mattresses, we had no furniture. The passenger seat was used as a chair, and an orange crate served as a table.

Our honeymoon in the newly acquired Beetle primarily served to introduce ourselves to our families. Moiken was reservedly welcomed by my mother, who later admitted that she initially didn't like her. She was quite jealous concerning me, even with Suse. Moiken's Sylt family was impressed by the "big dazzle." We then spent a few days in Denmark, and the endpoint was the lonely island of Fur in Limfjord. From there, we "brought back" Malte.

In Stuttgart, I tried to get work with Rolf Gutbrod but he had no work at the time so he sent me to Horst Linde (*1912), the head of the state building administration. He had just given Manfred Aichele (1934-2013) to Linde for the same reason. I then worked with him for about a year and a half at the State Building Office, developing the new building for the Academy of Fine Arts. Working there was practical mainly because, during office hours in the afternoons, we could participate in competitions. Aichele with Fiedler, and I with Ruff and Billing. At that time, there were numerous school building competitions, and there was great suspense over which of the two groups would eventually win a first prize. Nikolaus and I tried to familiarize ourselves with organic school construction, and, finally, we had the upper hand when we won the competition for the school in Wildberg in the Black Forest after 13 competitions. At that time, I earned 1,050 DM net. This was increased to an average of about 1,400 DM through prizes, which was the minimum necessary for living in 1962.

The time of expectation for Malte was very beautiful. We only had to care for the two of us, slowly building up our home with the essentials. Christmas 1962 was the most intimate festival I can remember. On May 6, 1963, I played the slow movement from J.S. Bach's A major Sonata for Moiken. Suddenly, her water broke. We didn't know what that meant, but then the contractions started. Quickly, we went to the hospital in the Beetle. On May 7, Malte was born. The world changed for me instantly. A heavy mantle of responsibility descended on my shoulders but I gladly embraced it. The world now became colourful and gained perspective. The drama began when Moiken fell ill. I had to take care of her and quickly learnt to change Malte's diapers - he once fell off the changing table - and in the living room, we were working on the school construction competition for Wildberg. Heike was born in 1964, and Silke in 1967.

The Peters Family
Moiken, Heiko, Malte, Silke

In November 1963, Wildberg was then decided. When we received the first prize and the commission we were able to establish our office. In early 1964, Johannes Billing and I began, with Nikolaus Ruff joining a few months later. Stuttgart, Ameisenbergstrasse 7, upper floor: Billing Peters Ruff - BPR. For Wildberg, I took over the project management with all architectural services. I wanted to carry out a building entirely on my own from start to finish. One only got this chance once in a lifetime, and I made use of it, supported by Johannes Billing in technical and execution matters up to the settlement.

III. PROFESSIONAL YEARS

ARCHITECTURE AND WALDORF SCHOOL - STUTTGART/UHLANDSHÖHE

The school building in Wildberg / Black Forest was our first commission. And it soon became apparent that we would be working extensively on school construction, especially Waldorf schools. Nikolaus Ruff was of the opinion: If we want to build Waldorf schools, we must become a reflection of the school organisation. We entered into a partnership agreement in which this was regulated. The crucial decision was to separate capital from labor and thus, through the structure of the office, prevent the emergence of egoism. So, for almost 40 years, we worked as non-profit entrepreneurs according to the rules and goals of social threefolding. We understood that the form of architecture, in connection with anthroposophy, cannot be arbitrarily found but must be the result of working together in this space of freedom.

We began to immerse ourselves intensively in anthroposophy. There was studying, carving, modeling in anthroposophical architectural work. It conceptually included ecology in its scope, so we properly established the group as an centre for environmental design. That was our university. Participants included Hans Beerstecher, Hans Pretzer, Johannes Billing, Nikolaus Ruff, occasionally Michael Trieb, Gregor Hafner (later a partner at BPR) who took over the Office administration. While I was occupied with the realisation of the school in Wildberg, Nikolaus Ruff built the Waldorf Teacher Seminar on the Stuttgart Uhlandshöhe based on a preliminary design by Rolf Gutbrod, which he had entrusted to him to support our young office. The clients were Ernst Weißert (1905-1981), the chairman of the Association of Waldorf Schools, and Ernst-Michael Kranich (1929-2007) as the seminar director. We used the contact with Kranich to learn a lot about pedagogy and to discover hints from Rudolf Steiner. He drew our attention to the information in the conferences (Complete Works of Steiner: Conferences with the Teachers of the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, 1919 to 1924, in 3 Volumes) and the relationship of the numbers 1 and 3, which we had discovered as a consequence of Rolf Gutbrod's cross-section: that humans (the 1) always need the 3 to inhabit space on Earth. Only the tetrahedron, the spherical triangle, forms space. It became clear that humans themselves are "constructed" from the 3. Every human bone is formed from the 3. What an astonishing parallelism between humans and architecture! The physical structure of humans for the human soul, in which their spirit lives.

The Partner's, Billing, Peters, Ruff

This human body develops to create the appropriate living space for the soul so that the spirit can unfold freely. Waldorf education means supporting this process. Here we were at the point where we could discover the laws for architecture. But first, they had to be studied. There were Rudolf Steiner's indications on coloring with the colors. These followed Goethe's theory of colors, or rather, Rudolf Steiner's expanded theory of colors. There were no indications for classroom shapes from Rudolf Steiner. But there is, for example, a notebook entry where he describes the effect of colors. Based on these concepts, we tried to develop spaces supported by color that could effectively assist the educational process. The child comes to school full of liveliness, inwardly warmed up. As a sign of the forces at work in their education, Rudolf Steiner has each child come to the blackboard in the first class and draw "a curve and a straight line" - as if to document that these two forces of forming have completed their work on the body, especially on the brain, now standing ready for the development of cultural techniques (such as reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.). There are only these two forces in formation, but one must make use of them, then one has the whole cosmos in one's hand. The class teacher's task now is to cool down this natural life (red) via life afterglow (orange), life loss (yellow), to form (green). The cool relationship to the world must be gained before the new surge from within breaks out in puberty.

Achieving this is the task of the class teacher. The new interiority is formed from the relationship of the world forces in the class community over blue and violet to indigo (life loss, life afterglow, being soul). As a fully developed soul that is now capable of self-study, the student is released into the world. This is the trench of the educational process as we experience it in the Waldorf school. To support this process, we built Waldorf schools. Here we have again the metamorphosis in the living world. It was the faculties of the schools in The Hague, Karlsruhe, Göttingen, and Salzburg, among others, with whom we repeatedly explored these relationships. It was about soul-functional forces and I proposed to designate this field of practice as the development of spiritual functionalism. Initially, this is very general. One must find the specific approach for each task. For example, Rudolf Steiner's colour indications for three different schools are different. But one understands this difference based on the life climate of the different landscapes. My friend and colleague Rex Raab illustrated this in a table, so that the diversity only confirmed the overall law.

In summary, I will briefly outline what we had already learnt about architecture. Triggered by Gutbrod's cross-section, we learnt about the counter-space, especially through the writings of Louis Locher-Ernst (1906-1962) and other authors. The structures of the counter-space must be considered as the laws underlying the living plant world. For the first time in world history, the structure of the counter-space appeared at the beginning of the 20th century in the first Goetheanum. Through the experience in Aalto's cultural house in Helsinki, it became clear to me that the social-educational force of the Greek theater space, centered on the point, had the task of loosening the individual from the community and placing them in their individual responsibility to support the development of thinking. Our task will be to design the upheaval of the Greek space, the trapezoid opening forward, in such a way that the feeling of the community is guided to the image of the imagination. In Holland, we had gotten to know Bernard Lievegoed (1905-1992). He had led therapeutic care homes for a long time and observed and described the conditions for the development of living, social structures and organisations. We studied his work and experienced and we confirm the correctness of his observations. He led the social-pedagogical institute NPI at the University of Rotterdam, where leadership forms and structures of living social systems were researched and taught. He had described his work in the book "Organisational Development" which we followed when setting up our office.

[(RC): See: "The Architecture of Waldorf Schools" and "Man as a benchmark in Waldorf Schools"]

DEVELOPMENT PLAN UHLANDSHÖHE

In 1964, the Waldorf school on the Stuttgart Uhlandshöhe was in a miserable condition structurally. The efforts of teachers in the many Waldorf schools established after the war diverted resources, resulting in numerous new school constructions, while on the Uhlandshöhe "assembled huts" remained. The terrain was highly rugged. The "Red Wall" to the east of the grounds was a coloured sandstone wall extending about 20 metres into the ground. In this quarry Stuttgart's vintners had extracted stones for their vineyard walls, even resorting to tunneling in the final phase. After the war, everything was filled in, both with war debris and refuse, creating an extremely challenging construction situation. Into this scenario came a letter from the city of Stuttgart's gardening office suggesting, in several steps, to return parts of the upper school garden to the city. What no one remembered was that the land - for which an hereditary building right existed, benefiting the city of Stuttgart - had originally belonged to the school association and had been converted into a hereditary building right during the Nazi era through forced sale.

Political clarifications were therefore necessary. For instance, Magda Maier, a teacher at the school and daughter of former Prime Minister Reinhold Maier, and I held discussions with Mayor Arnulf Klett (1905-197), who remembered the situation well from the Third Reich. Klett asked us to contact Building Director Christian Farenholtz (*1923). He expressed interest, from an urban planning perspective, in knowing whether the school really needed the land. He requested that we submit a development proposal for the final expansion. We were in a tight spot because there was no spatial program. Dietrich Esterl was born two days ahead of me in 1934. He was now a high school teacher at Uhlandshöhe and was asked by the faculty to create a spatial program for a two-story Waldorf school. This spatial program was significant as a building basis for the development of other Waldorf schools. Additionally, our collaboration marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship that continues to this day. Much could be inferred about the structure of the Waldorf school from this spatial program.

Upon completion of the program, the Waldorf School Association asked three architectural firms - Henning's office representing Rolf Gutbrod, Rex Raab's office, and Billing-Peters-Ruff's office - to submit proposals for the development of the grounds. Within BPR, I assumed project management. Nikolaus Ruff was occupied with planning the cultural center in Lüdenscheid. We had won a competition on behalf of Rolf Gutbrod, and Nikolaus Ruff was responsible for project management. This constellation led to my carrying much responsibility for what was built on the grounds of the Waldorf school Uhlandshöhe for 35 years.

The challenging decision regarding what had to be demolished internally, especially in the conference, led to considerable conflict. Since Rudolf Steiner himself had spoken to children and teachers in the main hall, it held special significance. However, the hall had suffered greatly from war, and the gallery was no longer usable. It was being used but it was only a matter of time - until the next fire inspection - before the hall would have had to be closed. Thus, the focus shifted to the main hall in the school's interest. There were many passionate discussions, but there was no way around the demolition of the gallery. The second sensitive issue was the main building - a non-attractive, massive structure that extended three stories in the middle of the grounds, utterly incorrect in urban planning, with classes that were much too small (48 sqm) and in which sometimes over 40 students were taught. One must imagine that this was double the density of a state school class. Teachers and students endured this situation for decades. The architects recommended the demolition of this building which sparked a huge uproar. We were accused of going too far with our assignment.

The main question was: Where to place the new main hall? In our opinion, it should be built in the center of the grounds, but that was a protected natural area. We prepared various alternatives for development to discuss with Christian Farenholtz. We did not dare to propose building the main hall in the middle of the grounds by the Red Wall because we received a vehement veto from the gardening office in response to a corresponding inquiry. At the location that organically lent itself to the hall, we suggested an outdoor amphitheater. Farenholtz looked at the plans and said, "Why not put a roof over it?" At that moment, bells started ringing for me. I told him it was a protected natural area, we couldn't do that, to which he responded that we could discuss it.

Another problem was the building right situation - which had to conform to the current building right of a two-story residential house - for the unusual form of the teacher's seminar. This could not remain as it was. We negotiated with the city, covered by the hand of the building director, to establish a special development plan with defined building boundaries and heights. As an urban planning idea, we conceived a series of interlocking courtyards. In the coming years, it became evident that this brought tremendous support to the intellectual and cultural life, especially during conferences and celebrations. The mass calculated from the program Dietrich Esterl created was, of course, somewhat large. No Waldorf school had been built with such a program yet, but the areas were drawn from the curriculum. The building committee of the city of Stuttgart's city council demanded, for demonstration purposes, that the mass be marked by balloons, which could then be judged from the various hills of Stuttgart. After the inspection, I went to the school with Prof. Farenholtz and asked him what he thought of the whole thing. He only said two words: Too big! Nevertheless, together with the city planning office, we managed to establish a special development plan within a year. Now the school had its own building rights.

TEACHER SEMINAR, UHLANDSHÖHE

Among the old "hut factories" the barracks held a special position. This was where the head of the Association of Free Waldorf Schools lived with his wife and 13 children. Due to its size, it blocked any possibility for further development and simultaneously had a corresponding social weight. The problem was solved by building a separate single-family house for the Weilert family on the edge of the property.

Rolf Gutbrod took on the task of designing the preliminary plan for the teacher seminar on behalf of the Association of Waldorf Schools. Clever as he was, he designed a two-story house, as the building plan required, but with huge attic spaces that were also permissible. "So", he said, "and when everything is approved, we'll cut off the roof overhangs". This way, we got a house with five usable floors but still with a sufficiently large roof. For the student rooms, he insisted that they be built with assembly walls and only every second wall as a load-bearing wall. In his opinion, it made no sense to build bedrooms on this site. Walls should be removable so that later office or classroom spaces could be created. The partition wall was angled, practically realising what had sparked our enthusiasm in our studies, and he was determined to demonstrate it. And he was right. There were other typical Gutbrod ideas expressed, such as the sculptural treatment of the large roof and the use of color inside. The rooms were stained, the ceilings painted in solid colours, and below the ceilings, various coloured stripes were applied to create a capital-like structure. The seminar's large attic hall was sculpted freely from the visible roof structure, specifically in natural wood, with plastered walls and stained in a cool red. Gutbrod came for an interim meeting when the walls were only half finished with the staining. He said, "Let's leave it like that; I have rarely seen such a beautiful, cool red". A light blue carpet was added. This hall was excitingly innovative. Unfortunately, after a few years, due to the criticism that accompanies any innovation, it was painted over so that all tension disappeared. The entire house was painted pink.

Ernst Weilert had asked Gutbrod if he would let us take over the further planning and execution. After completing the preliminary design, he handed over the task to our newly established BPR office, and Nikolaus Ruff took over the project management. Corrections continued, especially between Gutbrod and Ruff, as they later did with the festival hall between Gutbrod and me. The mix of assignments on this site led to public discussions: are these buildings by Gutbrod or not? Both are not correct because they are community buildings. And that is a good sign for social processes. Gutbrod also used to give projects to other employees leaving his office, allowing them to start their own businesses.

FESTIVITY HALL, UHLANDSHÖHE

The festival hall has been ideally tested and opened up perspectives in many respects, given the significance of the task. First of all, the dimensions and the costs. A hall for 750 seats is something many large cities cannot afford. Various uses were negotiated due to potential subsidies, for example, the festival hall was counted as two sports halls. That is, it had to integrate two sports areas to receive the necessary subsidy. This was solved partly through the stage and partly through a flat area roughly equivalent to the stage size.

We believed that a hall for a Waldorf school must "resonate". This means we set the goal that a first-grade child can be heard by 750 students and teachers without a microphone. This was achieved by forming the stage area in exposed concrete and creating the backdrops in relatively heavy wooden panels that are rotatable and movable on steel frames. Accordingly, the stage reflectors were built with tension-bent plywood panels. In the old hall, it was customary for only the first row to have a good view. During the inauguration, a teacher said to me, "And now every word is understandable!" Since we were also building the cultural centre in Ludenscheid at the same time I learned a lot about acoustics. The stage technology was designed and partially built by the metal-craft class teacher.

The hall seating consists of optimised 'physics classroom' furniture as folding seats. We cut corners a bit too much here - the backrests of the seats were not padded. In practice, the hall is too reverberant. Every acoustician knows this and in the seven halls that followed this one all the backrests of the seats are padded. The optimisation of the chair allowed for a row spacing of 80 cm. Unthinkable today for a theater but we had to accommodate as many children as possible. Through the trick we invented one could sit over the joint between two seats. In lower grades, three students could fit on two seats. There were also events with over a thousand people. Another mistake was the handling of the air conditioning. People were hesitant to spend money on cooling so they relied on higher-speed ventilation during breaks. This was sometimes challenging due to the ventilation pipes.

Otherwise, everything was kept as simple as possible. The hall even had daylight and ventilation through regular windows. Theater builders had told me that this was impossible. For example, Ludenscheid has no daylight but the Waldorf school is happy to be able to hold large events in daylight. Only a few areas were plastered; the concrete surfaces, externally impregnated and internally stained in colour, remain unchanged to this day (2014 since 1976). Naturally, this primarily represents savings. Many people delved into the problem, and the hall has had seven successors to date.

One of the most challenging problems was the colour. During this construction I got to know Fritz Fuchs. If you tell an architect to paint the interior of a 750-seat hall red he gets quite nervous. I knew from my visit to Sweden that only Fritz Fuchs was suitable for the colour design of the hall. The combination of these measures meant that the cost estimate could be adhered to despite creating an acoustically and aesthetically flawless building. The hall was awarded several architecture prizes (including the 1978 Hugo Haring Prize). This brought us a breakthrough, especially in the public eye. An anecdote from the time of hall construction: Rolf Gutbrod and Gunther Behnisch, both former students of the Waldorf School Uhlandshöhe, were frequently consulted by the client as external advisors. We had built the model of the new festival hall in plasticine 1:50 in our office. During the discussion about the west facade, Behnisch took a piece of plasticine and modeled it into the model. He said, "Something is missing here". We left it that way. It is still called the Behnisch corner, and it is really good.

[(RC): Silke Carter (Peters) completed her internship/post-study architectural work at Behnisch Architekten.

SPACE AND COUNTERSPACE

The discovery of the counter-space, this negative space arising from a disruption of three-dimensional space - and Rudolf Steiner's astronomical research did not resolve the question of Scharoun or Mies, of course. However, we had the right approach as the starting point for our work. The specific questions themselves then went much deeper. It surprised us that the buildings we designed - in dealing with counter-space (section cut, apex, curve, renunciation of the infinite) - elicited positive reactions from many clients. We won our competitions with solutions that arose solely from dealing with counter-space. Unlike the Euclidean space, determined by the physical laws of our perception, counter-space houses the laws of life. Since our primary concern was life, our daily professional life had to be related to counter-space. When dealing with life, one must say yes to life. In the following years, as we built many Waldorf schools where metamorphosis is a theme, many examples including color schemes, are informed by Rudolf Steiner himself. The new space triggered deep emotional responses. Many people found it good and beautiful and so our office grew surprisingly fast in the early years.

I will add a brief story here that may draw attention to the fact that counter-space and, above all, spatial order, represent a deeper spiritual reality that often leads to strong emotional reactions. Euclidean space exists in our world consciously but in most cases unconsciously. Counter-space is a realm of thought that omly becomes visible through conscious handling, and our interaction with the new spatial forces played a significant role in the emotionality our projects evoked.

This may have been the case for Reiner Maria Gohlke (born 1934), the First President of Deutsche Bundesbahn from 1982 to 1991. He welcomed the interior design of the first two ICE series, whose design was shaped by our BPR team (exterior design by Alexander Neumeister). However, his successor Heinz Durr (born 1933), from 1991 to 1997 the First President of Deutsche Bundesbahn and later Chairman of the Board of Deutsche Bahn AG, said to me, "I won't let you participate in the next competition. You win everything here. That's not acceptable. Moreover, your colour design is anthroposophy and it doesn't belong in the railway". The predecessor's concern went precisely in the opposite direction.

While some praised the room colours, others vehemently rejected them. This points to the duplicity of spatial forces, to life. It shows that the rejection is related to the effect of Euclidean forces, i.e., familiar conceptual frameworks that hinder the living oscillation of counter-space. Many people, however, long for vibrant spaces, and it was our intention to create them - and often, we succeeded. That we thereby came into conflict with an unartistic-technocratic DB executive board was only logical. This tension was our daily bread. We lived in art, but when art is forbidden by a dictum, as described above, there was nothing to be done.

RAILWAY AND DESIGN

"I have been 'married' to the German Railway since 1980. Karl-Dieter Bodack (*1938), an engineer and designer who worked in management positions at Deutsche Bahn (DB) between 1970 and 1995, had social ideals and wanted to make the travel experience beautiful for passengers. As the founder of the planning company for innovative vehicle equipment within DB, he developed an intelligent interior and seating system for the InterRegio, which replaced the older D-Zug cars. Bodack recognised the high demands for the design and the necessary model construction necessary and sought help from Nikolaus Ruff, whom he met at an architect conference in Dornach. Nikolaus Ruff passed on the request to me as he had just started his professorship at FH Stuttgart. So, in proxy, I took on a task that would soon occupy me extensively and evolved into unforeseen dimensions over the years.

Initially, it was about transforming the InterRegio from an old passenger train car. We conceptualised the InterRegio based on a new colour scheme we had learned in Waldorf school buildings. Green and yellow for second class, red and blue for first class. This extended to the bistro, where we used the three human movement possibilities - sitting, standing, and squatting - as the basis for developing seating arrangements. People could stand by the pillar and talk, lean against reclining seats, and sit properly on benches. This system proved to be extremely fruitful for social communication. InterRegio communities formed, organising together on short trips, for example, from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart. Bodack's seating system for the vehicles was developed from the conversion of old passenger train cars. Bodack removed one seat from the too narrow six-seat compartments, creating a lot of freedom of movement by creating gaps in these five-seat compartments. This allowed the old cars to be economically utilized as they were still usable and approved for another 35 years. In Weiden, Upper Palatinate, Bodack secured the construction of a factory using zone boundary funds, where these old cars were converted for many years - Realising and showcasing Bodack's innovative social ideas.

I had no knowledge of the railway and even less of plastic technologies therefore I had to learn everything anew. Nobody knew this, and together with Karl-Dieter Bodack, we quickly achieved remarkable results. We were urged by DB President Gohlke: "If the project fails, I am in trouble". Bodack wanted new beautiful spaces and I tried to approach the project with motive and metamorphosis. Gohlke eventually liked the train so much that he invited us to participate in the first ICE competition. And we won. We also tried to incorporate Europe's largest railway project into metamorphosis. Many woke up, no one had expected that we could win the competition. The industry was extremely cooperative; we met many new managers, and soon orders for other rail types followed: trams, subways, locomotives.

As the TGV had a technical advantage over the ICE, we were to conduct comparative studies. A travel phase began. I traveled to Paris several times while Simultaneously we had to go to The Hague, Amsterdam, and London, to work for the ING Bank. Here, strict professionalism was required, ensured through cooperation and the establishment of the design department. The enthusiasm of the beginning lived on, but we also had to deal with the criticism of the 'professionals' and deliver corresponding quality. Besides Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Berlin now played a special role. Unforgettable are the trips to Madrid. We were supposed to work on the interior design of the Talgo night train. The then CEO of Talgo, Carlos Palacios Oriol (*1952), said to me: "We provide you with a train that you cover with paper, and then build the new interior on it". I replied, "We will need about a week", to which he exclaimed seriously: "What, a week? I usually do that during dinner with my wife!" The Talgo night train was converted in Berlin. Additionally, the Variobahn was added as a basis for large vehicles in road traffic. In the mid-1990s, the electric locomotive of the series 101 for DB, the Regio-Shuttle, and the diesel-electric locomotive 'Blue Tiger', especially suitable for steep stretches, were added. Overall, the railway engagement resulted in a large scope of work, making Berlin a second location for my activity - simultaneously, Elke worked in the construction management of the Reichstag renovation.

IV. PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

ELKE AND THE END OF BPR-ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

When I met Elke, she was studying architecture at Alanus University near Bonn. She had gained considerable experience (preliminary design) at the University in Berlin, traveled to India, returned to Berlin, encountered anthroposophy, switched to Alanus University but did not find what she was seeking. We discussed this and I offered her my assistance. Having observed her talents and shortcomings during the course, I recommended that the architecture students at the Anthroposophical Summer School find personal teachers, just as I had found Rolf Gutbrod as my personal teacher. It's about the individual expression of each person, and it cannot be realised in an abstract university setting. Art is always individual; there is no universal artistic expression. Hence, art education must also be individualised.

Elke Schmitter and Jens Peters

To my surprise, at the end of the course, Elke approached me, asking if she could be my student. I hadn't expected to be taken so literally but agreed because I had observed both her talent and her educational gaps during the course. She remained at Alanus University for another three-quarters of a year and during that time, as I was overseeing the Waldorf school in Aachen, I corrected her designs either at the Cologne train station or at the school in Aachen. Apart from feeling a personal connection with Elke since our first meeting in August 1988, we have continuously collaborated and tried to work from the impulses of organic architecture. After Elke switched to the University of Stuttgart in 1989, I devised a rigorous study plan for her. With her diligence and my support, she managed to complete her main studies, including her diploma, as the top student with distinction within two years. The quality achieved paved the way for our continued shared professional and life journey. After receiving her diploma in 1991, Elke spent a year in Graz in the office of her professor, Karla Kowalski (*1941). We planned that she would return to Stuttgart afterward and work at BPR, and we didn't want to keep our relationship a secret anymore.

At the end of her last day in Graz, after a construction meeting in Salzburg (we had worked together on the design of the Rudolf Steiner School throughout the year), I flew to Graz. Elke had always regretted that I had never visited there. I hadn't inquired about it, so it was a big surprise. It was already quite dark. We visited Elke's friend Elfrun, who was already in her nightgown, ready to sleep. Elke had already given up her apartment. The next day, I didn't return home at the planned time. Moiken said to me, "But now something is different". I said, "Yes, that's how it is. I was in Graz with Elke, and I want to continue living with her". Consequently, Moiken asked me to leave our house.

I moved to Elke's student apartment in Stuttgart, equipped only with a toothbrush. That was in 1992. The office was running at full capacity. I was constantly on the move, now living with Elke, and I essentially had no home. That needed to be created now. Elke joined us in the office and an intensive period began, filled with conflicts but also very productive as we could continue working on shared architectural goals. The work achieved the desired outcome: the architecture improved, grew, the handwriting became softer and Elke became more independent in many aspects. All of this made me very happy. Elke brought many inspirations and improvements that were not present at BPR before, arousing envy from colleagues and partners. We were unable to include Elke as a partner at BPR, as I had intended. From this tension and to broaden her experience in construction and site management, she left our office after four years in the summer of 1996 and applied in Berlin to work on the construction management of the Reichstag building conversion into the seat of the German Bundestag. Jürgen Scheele was a partner in the construction management office leading the Reichstag conversion, and he included her in his team.

Rudolf Steiner School, Salzburg 1994

Now, a new phase of extensive travel began for me. Berlin (train, Berlin Waldorf schools in Märkisches Viertel and Klein-Machnow) and Stuttgart became the two centres. This life posed challenges in many ways. We were aware from the start that the physical distance would not be easy. In 1997 I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, Elke was excessively challenged in construction management and fell in love with a young colleague. We struggled for a year with our relationship and because I couldn't and didn't want to be alone, I started a relationship with a Hungarian woman who had been Professor Ludwig Hilmar Kresse's (1914-1985) chief secretary. With her, I traveled to Budapest learning a lot about Hungarian culture, especially getting to know Imre Makovecz (1935-2011), whom she translated for me because he only spoke Hungarian.

But soon, we found each other again completely. Elke terminated her construction management job in Berlin with the completion of the Bundestag building in the spring of 1999 to return to design and planning. In May, we embarked on a five-week trip to Greece (Peloponnese). I left the BPR office at the end of 1999 because, at the request of the junior partners, our age limit had been reduced from 70 to 65. Elke and I founded the Peters-Schmitter Architekten office on January 1, 2000. Simultaneously with the establishment of the new office, an inquiry came from Karlsruhe for the planning of the Parzival Schools, and in Stuttgart-West there was a request for the renovation of the historical residential ensemble on Knospstrasse.

ART, ARCHITECTURE, GOETHEANUM - KLANG (SOUND)

I have already mentioned in several places about my encounter with music, the amazing exploration of tones and sounds on the harmonium in my grandfather's class, the violin my grandfather had given me, my poor violin lessons which found compensation when my teacher dragged me into amateur orchestras. In the end, I became a violinist and violist, taught by one of the leading pedagogues at that time, and a path into the professional music world could have been conceivable. My brother chose this path and I struggled for a long time with the decision of whether I should do the same. I made a different choice. My schoolmate at the time, Wilhelm Melcher, mastered the great violin concertos at the age of 12. I struggled. I could not catch up to his lead. At the end of my schooling and before saying goodbye to Eva Hauptmann, my violin teacher, I had to make the decision: musician or architect? Eva Hauptmann would have liked me to stay, and was somewhat sad when I left, but the decision was the right one. At the age of seventeen many people have an intuitive relationship with music and they are gifted - but they don't know what music is. I'm beginning to sense this now at the end of my seventies. I still don't know it precisely but the encounter with sound has taken place throughout my entire life and has constantly changed. I did not want this to happen in a musical profession. I encountered sound in architecture.

The connection between architecture and music is to be found in an existing relationship between form and tone in a wisdom-filled bond. A sound.

The cosmic harmony from which everything is built is a mathematical sound. Being connected to it is an experience that is difficult to describe. Whether I stood at the helm of a sailboat, feeling the geometry of cosmic forces flowing through my body, or whether I brought forth the harmony, the sound of colours and shapes in the visual arts, or whether I conducted Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, everywhere I sensed in the background the spiritual formation, the force that created the body.

During my studies, the great violin works, such as Bach's Violin Sonatas, the violin concertos, Bach's Art of Fugue, and the string quartets from the third volume, accompanied me. But that was not enough for me. Through my orchestral experiences, I had already encountered the great orchestral works, so I did not need to establish a connection with them now that I knew them. I learned that human movement has tone quality, and I began - when my physical limitations due to illness were already advanced - to make this movement my own through conducting the great works of the music literature. Thus, I can say: I can conduct a large part of classical music. I began around 2008, initially with the works of Bruckner; especially his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies were my favorite pieces. About "conducting," I must say the following, as it may seem peculiar without this explanation: I wanted to experience the inner gesture of a work through the sound and connect it with the movements of the limbs. This expanded my knowledge of music much faster and more extensively. In the first years of this attempt I had to work a lot on it. Later, it became easier. Brahms's symphonies, Mendelssohn, Mozart were added.

During my stay at the Nikolaus Cusanus House (2009-2011), I had the great fortune of being able to use the concert hall. At that time, I reached the point where I believed I could conduct the works from memory. Conducting from memory, in this case, means connecting with the gestures of the music through the limbs. I got to know new works, such as Beethoven's symphonies, Mahler's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. The fourth soon became my favorite symphony. The work was supported by studying the scores and found a certain conclusion when I had the feeling that the musical gestures were coming towards me. Listening to music became easier over the years, so that in the end, I could connect entire operas by playing through them once or twice, such as Don Giovanni, Die Walküre, Tristan and Isolde, Parzival.

In the 35 years at BPR (1964-1999) what mattered to me was the moments this sound permeated my architectural and design tasks in the background. Aphoristically, I could try to say it like this: Aristotle made sound conceivable in the category of behaviour. Euclid determined the direction. The Earth was in the centre. With the modern era, the sun moved to the centre, and from the centre thinking extended into infinity. Humanity had to be formed in a consciousness in which it learned to think from a point to the infinite. Otherwise, the Earth would not have been conquered. However, the polar-Euclidean space disappeared from consciousness. But at that moment, towards the end of the eighteenth century in Weimar-Jena, when Schiller and Goethe met, and Schiller received Goethe's response that he could see ideas with his own eyes, the polar-Euclidean space, the counter-space, became conceivable again. Goethe discovered metamorphosis as the basis of the living world.

Rudolf Steiner introduced this metamorphic idea into architecture and that is his original contribution to architecture. The construction of the first Goetheanum shows where it leads. You have to look for it in the future; you cannot live from it. Our problem at the university was not personal. The contradiction between Mies and Scharoun was an expression of the newly experienced total space. Suddenly we were in the center of world development. It is a problem of our time, whether it evolves into the counter-space.

The twentieth century showed that the life of the world is in danger of being extinguished. Today, humans can destroy the world themselves but they cannot create life. However, it is about life and thus about learning the metamorphic form down to the smallest task. What must have taken place as a great cosmic result around the turn of the twentieth century is now conceivable for humanity. Perhaps again in other words: The most important thing is to learn to deal with development. Getting to know the counter-space, and the fact that consciousness of it faded, points to a development that starts from the garden (paradise) and leads to the city (Heavenly Jerusalem). The fruit from the tree of knowledge that humans were allowed to take from paradise has a threefold structure and is completely liberating, but it demands action from which the Heavenly Jerusalem can be built. And this activity, which ultimately unites the Three into One, preserves people or creates their freedom. We need not worry that we could not express ourselves individually. Every artist will find his own style one day. This is desired by the gods, or, if you will, demanded by the cosmic order, and he will have to work it out. It will be recognised that style formation is always an expression of a fundamental structure, and the individual expresses itself in the way of the interconnection of the three basic elements. This style is not ideological; it is not even international; it is more. It is human.

Architecture, sculpture, and painting are the three basic elements of this style; they shape the fruit from the tree of knowledge that leads from the garden to the city. Opposite them in the interior, in the soul of the human being, stand thinking, feeling, and willing. Depending on where the self places the emphasis, his art arises - the art that then reflects spiritual life in the development of human social and life relationships. For us, especially for Nikolaus Ruff and me, it was clear: there is an individual path of development, of transformation; there is a sound. Hearing this sound is based on experiences, and they underlie our architecture; nothing is theoretically devised. The non-devised, the non-theoretical spiritual is based on experience. As a three-year-old, I saw the foundation of the world. I experienced the angel. No one could take that away from me, and the rock-solid certainty that a spiritual world exists is based on experience, not on theory. This may not convince the individual, but the conviction that becomes the content of life from these experiences will be preserved, if it goes well, in success, otherwise in the consequence of one's own work.

The counter-space was decisive, for example, in the auditorium of the Stuttgart Waldorf School. The space resonates, you can see from all places, and it is probably the first space after the Goetheanum that widens from back to front. From now on, this principle permeated every spatial form that we were to build for the counter-space. I have often been criticized by colleagues for being too dogmatic at this point, but it revolves around the centre of architectural development, which must consistently penetrate into the living space, into the counter-space. All art lives in its creation as well as in its experience from individuality and individual judgment. As such, it forms the tension between architect and client in every building decision. And this decision will be transferred in the future to more and more shoulders; it will increasingly be made in a social or dialogical process because it is clearly observable that architecture is becoming more and more a communal task. It will probably take centuries for the dimension of an organically conceived architecture in this sense to become visible. The construction of the first Goetheanum, like the largely unexplored development or metamorphosis from the first Goetheanum to the second, is like a view from the future, and building as a community task will mean a path into this future. It is said that Goethe sought Greece in Italy. Greek architecture differed significantly from Roman - the Greeks, it is said, did not copy. Lysippus (4th century BCE), the sculptor and portraitist of Alexander the Great, did not copy but was copied a hundred and a thousand times himself. There seems to be a general law in art, in architecture, that copying has no fruitful consequences, that it serves only practice, not creation.

Where are we today? It is not easy to answer, but one thing has become increasingly clear: the decisive factor in art is the individual statement. Every person has their own artistic task. What one's own art is - that is the big question. From what is the measure gained? It took me my entire life to understand it for myself. As students, we encountered a copied architecture. Colleagues continued to copy and I always had the impression: as long as you copy, no quality emerges. That was like a thorn in the flesh. It is not about copying but authentically creating, forming. Even in anthroposophically or organically inspired architecture, I felt much more copied than created. The enthusiasm for the sculptural form of the second Goetheanum carried us over this problem in the main creative time of BPR. We did not want to copy Rudolf Steiner; his work inspired us. Only in the later years did our architecture condense into an anthroposophical statement. One of our problems was lightness. This also prompted us, among other things, to seek lighter architectural forms in the festival hall of the Salzburg Steiner School or the Parzival School in Karlsruhe - and they immediately lost the familiar anthroposophical character.

Connecting architecture with lightness, sound, and movement is by no means easy but more necessary than following an existing style or styles. So, if one asks today: What is an anthroposophical building? What is anthroposophical or organic architecture? Then I cannot give an answer, except: lightness, committed to metamorphosis. The goal I had set for myself personally is to formulate a specific architectural appearance determined by me, derived from metamorphosis, and committed to its function, its purpose. I tried to realize this, for example, in the Waldorf school buildings in ever-new forms, firstly in the transformation of form from the first to the twelfth grade, from round to angular and then back to round; secondly, in the layout of the entire building with a structure into class wings and the progression into the higher-order rooms such as the hall and eurythmy; finally, in the development of a contemporary assembly room in polarity to the Greek theater. Lightness, the longing for a musical lightness in architecture, only came in the later years of my professional practice and the Parkinson's disease gave me a surprising opportunity to develop this musical experience as I described it.

THE COLOURS AND FRITZ FUCHS

The colours, however one applies them, have a highly individual character. There are opaque colors, through-coloured materials, and translucent colours. Each colour quality has a different effect on the human soul, and it is also perceived differently by different people. We have experienced this often enough in discussions about the use of glass or in the discussion of textiles in Waldorf schools, and in railways, where the assessment of colours in a community can lead to the greatest disputes because the colours described in words evoke different experiences in the observer. I have dealt with this for a long time and have learned a lot from Fritz Fuchs, who was Arne Klingberg's assistant in Jena. Goethe describes the origin of colours from the deeds and sufferings of light and forms from it a great work: his Theory of Colours. During my first visit to Weimar, I was surprised to see that the rooms of the house on Frauenplan were painted like the Waldorf schools.

The most astonishing thing for me was that people apparently judge the colours (as they are described with words) so differently. So when the dispute arises: Is this now a lilac or a violet? It is not only a dispute about the name and concept but it is actually true that the colours are experienced differently. This also applies to distances, for example, and is not just a question of the sharp-sighted eye. I have a special ability there, which I experienced, among other things, while sailing when I always recognised objects first. This applies to both colour and the object. Given the complex structure of human sense organs, it is essential to work with patterns that are documented and signed like a law. There are tools for practical use. These are the colour systems: NCS, RAL, and RAL-design, if you don't consider printing colours. But these are also just tools; in any case, samples must always be created and arranged in all three dimensions until the impression arises of how the colours resonate together.

Sketch JP 2009, Passage Knospstr. 1/3, Mural F. Fuchs

I encountered Fritz Fuchs because I absolutely needed a color consultant. Especially in the construction of schools, you have to assume that certain qualities are present that are not readily known. Why is a music hall painted blue? And the movement rooms yellow? Why is the sky blue and the sun red? Goethe describes the colors red and blue as the deeds and sufferings of light. Goethe has demonstrated in his Theory of Colors how red arises through a turbidity of light, but blue when no turbidity is present. Early in the morning, when the air is enriched with haze and moisture, the sky is red; during the day, the red quickly turns into blue, the turbid medium disappears; in the evening, the process is exactly reversed, the air descends, and the most wonderful reds emerge. It is one of the most beautiful experiments to observe nature closely. One realizes that light is something existent in itself, and colors are its shadows.

I worked with Fritz Fuchs in almost all of my projects. A lot of technical expertise is needed to handle colours professionally and it can be noted that people like Fritz Fuchs experience the greatest differentiation. I once asked him why the large classroom I specified looked so sulfurous. He told me on the phone: "You probably used a sulfur salt in the colour mix, probably Ultramarine". That was correct. He also said: "The sulfurous will disappear immediately if you use, for example, iron oxide green". That was also correct. That was professionalism. That's what I was looking for. When we then came to the colour designs of the railways we had a new phenomenon to deal with: the colours were all wrong when unbuilt. We had to select the panes that, when installed, provided the colours we wanted, and these were never the ones in the colour samples. In the interior, the large light of the safety glass mixed with the colours emanating from objects. There was often a dispute between us and the clients. It was hard to understand that one had to specify a wrong colour so that in the installed state in the room, the desired atmosphere could be created. One had to pre-feel the colour harmony without being able to see or show it.

BPR PERFORMANCE AND COLLEAGUES

Nikolaus Ruff was born with the aim of achieving individual plastic architecture. In his encounter with Rolf Gutbrod, this goal was largely fulfilled. It was an independent sculpture that affected the entire structure of space and challenged the one-sidedness of the right angle. To me, this seems to be an enormous achievement that has not been properly acknowledged to this day. After completing major projects such as the Teacher Training Seminar Haussmannstrasse, Theater Ludenscheid, and NMB Bank Amsterdam, he withdrew. Part of this decision was influenced by a severe heart attack in the early 1990s, which forced him to hand over the ING Bank project to me. I sensed a certain resignation in him; a sadness permeated his entire being.

He had to pass on significant responsibilities to me twice, first with the railway project and then with the interior design of the ING Bank. The deeper meaning of it all is challenging to fathom. I often suffered under Nikolaus Ruff during our time in school because of his great talent and the architectural legacy within his family. His father, Walter Ruff, built extensively for the evangelical church, and his grandfather was also an architect. In contrast, I approached architecture with a significant distance and was uncertain about becoming an architect at all until my encounter with Willem Zeylmans changed that, revealing that an individual, highly qualified, anthroposophically inspired architecture could be created.

In this, Nikolaus Ruff and I found common ground; our ideals converged and became a measure: individuality, quality, and organic unity. BPR's true achievement lies in our decision to work based on these ideals. Initially, during the early days of our office, I did not see eye to eye with Rolf Gutbrod. One could perhaps say that I believed I understood him, but I didn't feel understood by him. After completing the hall construction at Uhlandshohe, he couldn't appreciate the building. We had a significant disagreement on the topic of symmetry and asymmetry. For Rolf and Nikolaus, asymmetry represented the expression of new freedom in architecture. I understood this as well, but I believed we needed to establish a new symmetry or return to a different symmetry. I couldn't envision a young person, a student, growing up in a purely asymmetrical space. Therefore, I fought to preserve the symmetry axis of the hall, giving rise to a new concept: an escalation from asymmetry to symmetry. This concept ran contrary to the historical process, where the world evolved from symmetry to asymmetry, and people gained individual freedom. The hall at Haussmannstrasse is an illustration of how the asymmetrical environment evolves, so to speak, towards a new symmetry. It speaks to me as an individual; in this sense, the hall reflects my personal influence.

Nikolaus Ruff and Jens Peters

Disorder is developing in the present. Today, one can build anything but that is not the crucial aspect, nor is it necessarily freedom. The essential aspect is how the law operates and this law is no longer visible in many constructions. Yet, in its visibility, it can gain its freedom, applicable to both organic and general architecture. Another aspect that has occupied us frequently and still resonates within me is the connection between art and technology, beauty and utility, the interaction of a highly technologised world with the elements, with the beings of the elements, the elemental beings. I came to suspect more and more that here, too, sound, pure harmonic sounds, like geometric proportions and their relationships, are of great significance. An immeasurable future lies here. This brings me to my final theme: the beauty of technology.

It can be the technical element in its geometric relationship and it can be the colours. Therefore, we worked with this artistic tool in the colour and proportion relationships of the Interregio and the ICE. The introduction of the odd number five into the railway system by Bodack was an element that did not exist until then. We worked with the harmonic ratio of the golden ratio. Another phenomenon is the peculiar power of the tetrahedron to intervene in the organic world. Ton Alberts (1927-1999), the Dutch architect, delved deeply into this theme. He built transparent pyramids from Plexiglas and placed an apple in the middle, which easily remained for months. BPR functioned as an anthroposophical architectural office from the mid-1960s until the turn of the century. Many people contributed this to the success - measured by the scope of the projects alone - of the office.

Johannes Billing (1930-2015), the grandson of the famous Art Nouveau architect Hermann Billing (1867-1946) from Karlsruhe. He had worked as a construction manager at Haefeli Moser Steiger (HMS) in Switzerland. The purpose was for him to participate in his father's Stuttgart office. We founded our firm, BPR (Billing Peters Ruff), in 1964 after winning the competition in Wildberg. Johannes Billing took over the office management, construction supervision, and also brought assignments from his father's office. Ruff continued to work for Gutbrod's office on the festival hall of the Stuttgart Kraherwald School, and I took over the project management for Wildberg. Initially, we only hired one secretary, Miss Sinzinger. She brought in morning coffee with rolls and pretzels, and it remained this way for all those years. Nikolaus insisted that we abandon the office on Stiftstrasse, where we used a space within the Hermann Billing office.

We wanted everyone to be equal; no one should have a claim to specific assignments, and project management should be discussed in joint conferences. To achieve this, we developed an unusual partnership agreement outlining the goals and handling of compensation, which was not based on performance but on necessary support each of us required. The office covered school fees and music lessons for the children and later also study fees. Over the years, we had over a hundred employees. Through the school-building seminars many foreign relationships were established, such as those with Jamaica, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Japan. Many employees contributed significantly to the development of our work - I'll highlight just a few.

When our daughter Silke started school (at Uhlandshöhe) an architect approached me in the schoolyard asking if he could work with us. Gunther Steinbacher became an essential team member, especially in Waldorf school projects. He handled things I didn't know, such as tendering processes, and would say, "Leave that to me; I'll take care of it". Gunther Steinbacher had a good way of interacting with his colleagues. Many technical matters were processed by him before being brought to our attention, and he maintained good relationships with the Waldorf school faculties.

Early in our office days, a technical draftsman, Gisela Gluck, applied to work with us. She was still in training and sought contact with the Waldorf school movement, as she already knew she wanted to become a teacher. I was fascinated by her youth and beauty. We became friends; she was twelve years younger than me. She left the office soon after to attend the Pedagogical Academy in Reutlingen. Our friendly connection, including her later husband Erhard Gross, has persisted to this day.

The tasks in the railway technology sector necessitated bringing designers into our office. We established a design department initially with Thomas Konig and Frank Schuster, later expanded by Max Ruhdorfer and Andreas Panik. Many other dedicated interior architects and designers joined, some of them through studying under Nikolaus Ruff at the university. Interior architect Claudia Schienbein worked in the design department for a while and worked on the Karlsruhe Wildpark Stadium - I enjoyed her enthusiastic vitality. In the architecture department, our office was complemented by Gregor Hafner and, a few years before my departure, expanded by Lothar Bracht to support Johannes Billing in office leadership. They became partners at BPR, and the name was changed to bpr-architektur und design. The new partners joined the partnership agreement but it was felt that our original BPR trio had a special foundation. In this tripartite relationship we had to learn a lot and often found it challenging among ourselves, but it was a vibrant and purposeful community.

WORK WITH STUDENTS AND TEACHING

I have taught throughout my entire life, either alongside my professional practice, on commission (as in Leeds), or because it naturally emerged from my work. The office did not officially allocate specific teaching hours or another professorship, as that role was already fulfilled by Nikolaus Ruff as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. At the university, one must teach a program dictated by the curriculum, which often included topics that did not particularly interest me. I did not want my working hours to be consumed by school programs. What mattered to me was advancing in architecture and being able to address teaching topics in connection with my work. Building always took precedence for me.

My experience with the higher education system in England was not positive. The teachers were poor and lacked motivation. My interaction with students focused on assisting them with their design problems. I did not want to continue in this isolated manner. Therefore, in England, I decided to decline the opportunity to enter the higher education system. When you have completed your diploma, you don't know what a tender is, what construction management is, or what billing means. I wanted to learn all of that to become a true architect.

I only resumed teaching in Delft after I already knew what a construction project was and had started building Waldorf schools. The teaching focused on school construction. My approach to teaching was that it should take place between teacher and student based on experiences. In other words, one should only teach when there is a practical connection. Additionally, a certain age is required. Rolf Gutbrod and I had discussed this extensively, and that's why he only granted the university professorship to Nikolaus Ruff when the time was right - Niko was actually already too old.

However, I was interested in having individual conversations with each student, similar to what we experienced with Gutbrod. Wherever students lacked experience and skills, the teacher's involvement was necessary. In the 1980s, we already had a significant level of skill and experience in our architectural firm BPR, providing a solid foundation to build upon. Of course, one must also be able to teach. One must have a heart for challenging other people. Therefore, I tried to connect teaching, on one side, to practical experience and our own objectives and, on the other side, to continually educate oneself because I had experienced deficiencies in skills in England, in Delft, and at the university. I simply enjoyed teaching, but I had no interest in an official position or program. Others should handle that. I had to create and build. You are on a common course with students when you teach based on experience, and the teacher continues to seek new goals that can inspire students. We had experienced dealing with the Medell model with Rolf Gutbrod but university architecture was black and white. I always tried to encourage students to sketch their designs in colour, incorporating the soulful quality into the design process as early as possible. Colour is a real element in construction, and that's why we should also work with it in teaching.

BEAUTY AND FRIENDSHIP

There are two people from my professional relationships who have become particularly deep friends. Through them, I experienced much of what friendship means. This cannot be valued highly enough. The first has been with me since my early professional activities - the teacher who provided me with the program for the Stuttgart Uhlandshöhe school. A continuous friendship emerged that continues to this day. This friendship is still capable of discussing new problems together. For this, I thank Dietrich Esterl.

Since the late 1990s and from an invitation to an architectural colloquium at the Goetheanum, a profound relationship developed with Bodo von Plato. He became a great friend, and a teacher in anthroposophy - more than an architect. I appreciate how he stands by me and Elke. The three of us are connected in life and spirit.

In both friendships, I experience something related to beauty. A beauty of togetherness and encountering each other. I experienced the power of beauty when I selected tones on the harmonium in my grandfather's classroom. The aesthetic quality is what allows us to look into the future. It did not leave me in peace. The incomplete tone of the harmonium was not enough for me. There must be something in the future that is different. The mystery of beauty is connected to the future. There must be something in the future that does not allow the present to come to appearance. It seemed to me then with the beauty sense of the Greeks, which was formed by nature - it transformed into a sense of beauty in human togetherness. Or in music, for example, my shift from Haydn to Mozart. Something wells up from within that lets us sense a mystery.

Greek architecture was too dull for us young architecture students at that time; it was the new era that led us to seek different ideals, not copied but created in collaboration. I envisioned a unity that is brought to completeness through the diversity of appearance. Unity through diversity, but not copied, but internally brought forth. That was absolutely new. This is how I experienced Hans Scharoun and Rudolf Steiner. Both found unity through diversity. And that became my role model.

"Form follows function - fff" (Horatio Greenough, Louis Sullivan) emerging from within. That became my ideal for building: finding the internally experienced in the external form. This became the basis for our BPR buildings in general, especially for Waldorf schools. We found this connection in metamorphosis; there, in the law of the living, beauty was at home. Some do not understand this, or they do not experience it. It remains a mystery for the future.

AGE AND BIOGRAPHY

Despite the hardships, old age offers a chance to slowly work on a gradually clarifying image of one's life. One sees life events, successes, and hindrances from the other side. One senses a force, even if it is not clear. To fully comprehend it will probably only be possible after death. But there is a secure feeling of destiny as an effective foundation for human life - and it grows.

Much has changed in recent decades. Not only on a societal level do we sense new things, but more so when we observe individual people, truths emerge that were not as clear before. The mystery surrounding the human destiny grows, becoming more of a question for many, and the number of biographies and autobiographies continues to rise. In the past, biographies were written about someone or allowed for self-writing when the personality was deemed valuable to culture. The content of what transpired in life, the accomplishments, rather than the personality itself, was essential. This old cultural concept, grown with history, shattered in the last and present century, particularly in the present. It had become old. Modern times have aged. Something much younger is surfacing. Young people, unburdened by reverence for the old, rejecting everything, breaking free from obligations, young nations wanting above all to be free for themselves, to live for themselves - this has led to wars and catastrophes but also to new perspectives since the beginning of this century. At the moment, something is transforming, and there is hope that from these catastrophes, unexpectedly, new and peaceful visions for the future will emerge. Looking at my biographical notes, it's not about the contents but about depicting images of concrete processes, independent of their contents. And it's about better understanding what were the truly moving questions or motives in my life. It's not about what has been but how it transformed. The decisive factor is not the content of the images but how they arise and pass away. Therein lies a force that continues to carry. For the sake of these processes, I wanted to document some things.

V. LETTERS TO CHARLOTTA

And I would like to conclude with two images. Images that were addressed as letters to Charlotta, the four-year-old daughter of Elke's brother Knut and his wife Manuela.

Letter of January 26, 2014 - The Round Trip of the Archtic Terns

Dear Charlotta,

Bodo and I, we are two good friends - Arctic Terns. Of course, we don't have cell phones, but we are quite old and can read and send thoughts. So, I sent a thought to my namesake in Stuttgart, asking him to make a drawing of us both - he can do that, showing us taking off for our flight back to Europe.

We always spend Christmas in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. There, you find the most amazing salmon. And since we are a royal Arctic Tern couple, we can wear shoes. I usually go barefoot, but Bodo loves good shoes, and guess what, for Christmas, he had specially crafted excellent little Arctic Tern shoes made. Whenever I'm somewhere with Bodo, there's a distinctive shoe sound, klack-klack, and I know it's Bodo. So, I sent a thought to Jens, and it worked quickly - because the drawing is already on its way to you. But now, we are first flying from Tierra del Fuego over Chile, where we rest on the cliffs, to Lake Titicaca in the Andes. There, we are really close to the sun. We want to be with the sun at Easter. The sun loves us, and we love it. The lake is so high, 5000 metres high, that many birds can't fly here anymore. The air is thinner, and some birds are too heavy for the thin air. We enjoy the sun and the delicious crabs. Then, we continue to the Indian city of Cusco, where we soar along the walls of the Inca. Then, with a big sail jump into the vast plain of the Amazon. There, where the Amazon flows into the ocean, we cross the Atlantic and look for the way to the sources of the Nile on the south side of the Sahara.

Bodo and I, we are quite old. We have been leading the Arctic Tern migrations from the north to the south and vice versa for many years. The young Arctic Terns born in the Elbe mudflats last spring are now on their way back from Tierra del Fuego. From Africa, different Arctic Tern streams are coming, all with the goal of reaching the Elbe mudflats to start their young families there. Of course, Bodo and I have nothing to do with that anymore, but we advise our young friends on all travel matters and family founding, in nest building. But first, we are flying in increasingly strong flocks along the Nile to the pyramids, then to Athens, where we will hold another sailing course for the young Arctic Terns from the cliffs of the Acropolis. At the Acropolis, we will also meet our architect friend Elke, whom you also know. She is currently on vacation there, and we are very happy to see her, and she is writing the letter to you for me. Then, we travel along the route that the Crusaders traveled in the Middle Ages, via Venice, Augsburg, Frankfurt, to Lüneburg and Hamburg. Near Lüneburg, Bodo grew up in the small village of Grabow, and he still has his siblings and his mother there.I sail on to the mudflats of the North German island world. I reported that Bodo is a count among the Arctic Terns. You can tell by his name. It's similar with me. You could see it too. My ancestors were called de Hoffmann. "De" means something like "von" in German. But my great-great-grandparents quarreled with the Danish Arctic Tern king, and then they gave back their "de." They are now called just Peters.

Up here, there's a lot going on. Arctic Terns come from all over the world to find their brides and build their nests. There are also other bird species that have developed a high flying culture in this area. You will get to know the stories about Nils Holgersson's flight on the wild geese and Peter Junk's flight on the Silberrnowe. If you can't read yet, Knut can read them to you.

I'm sending two drawings with it, from the Elbe mudflats. A few years ago, I asked the architect Jens Peters to make some more drawings of me and the Elbe mudflats. He did it right away. So, you know what it looks like here. The little Arctic Tern chicks grow up quickly, and soon it will be the time to fly back. Because we will be with the sun at Lake Titicaca for Easter. We fly a bit differently than on the way here, over Cologne and then down the Rhine through the Burgundian Gate, along the Rhone to Marseille on the Mediterranean. There, on the coast not far from Spain, are the wild horses, and the little Arctic Terns then enjoy the mosquitoes.

Bodo is with us in everything. We lead the migration together and take turns in finding the way, but we have flown so many times and know our way around well. We probably won't fly over the Amazon, but directly from Africa to Brazil and then further south from the Amazon to Lake Titicaca. We have a long time there. The whole summer, the little ones grow up and learn from Bodo and me.

At Christmas, we'll be back with the fat salmon in Tierra del Fuego. Maybe I'll get a pair of shoes this year. I have to discuss that with Bodo; he makes them himself.

So, that was our little report on the drawing so that you also know that we always think of you and your parents. Ask Knut and Manuela if they can show you our flight on the map. Maybe I can still manage to send you a sketch of the world from above.

Your Uncle Jens

Letter from May 2014 - Continuation of Terns and Quacks

VI. JENS DEATH

21 NOVEMBER 2014

Jens,

When you left, it was morning, early morning. For us, a new day began. For you, a new life.

Elke was there - as she always was for you in the many years,
as you built, as your illness increasingly
confined you.
She was there for you, and you carried your constraint without complaint -
in the last days, months, years.
"I have to give up a lot," you told me.
No complaining. Stating a fact.
"Love and friendship remain with you and grow," I told you.
You nodded. They grew. They remain.
In a different everyday life.
Now, you are liberated.

As you were before - in music.
It became your world, the one that stayed with you, that grew.
You lived in it for a long time, from childhood onwards.
Now it began to live in you. Trembled in your fingers.
It shared with you your imprisonment, which became
tighter over the years.
It was your openness, your window. You conducted.
And learned to listen.

You were serious, actually. And yearned for lightness.
For the lightness that only comes through transformation.
You wanted to transform completely.
That is not easy.
It seemed impossible to you in the life that had become
yours over decades.

When you saw Elke's searching, her gaze, her unpredictability,
it seemed possible to you.
She saw the transformation of form in your vision, in your
drawing, your building, in your aesthetic power.
That connected you so closely in life, then in your dying, the
slow one.

In what had become Anthroposophy for you over decades,
you sought it, the transformation. And believed it existed
somewhere there.
And at the latest in our encounter, you sensed that it can
actually only begin between people -
and from here, it comprehends everything.

Only love and friendship transform completely.
In our everyday, in life. In death. Into a new life.

Bodo van Plato for Jens and Elke on 21 November 2014.

JENS PETERS - LIFE IMAGES

The connection between architecture and music is to be found in
an existing relationship between form and sound in a wisdom-filled context.

A sound.

JENS PETERS - LIFE IMAGES

The connection between architecture and music is to be found inan existing relationship between form and sound in a wisdom-filled context. A sound.

The connection between architecture and music is to be found in
an existing relationship between form and sound in a wisdom-filled context.

A sound.