Welcome!
My books range from European History of the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century. They include three poetry books, a novel, monographs including about my immigrant experience in New York City, farm and urban women during two wars and German women's elementary education from Martin Luther to the 1980s. Some works are autobiographical.
The upper photograph on the right in the center shows the farm on which I grew up and on which I learned to walk and speak the local Middle-High German dialect. It is in the Dolomite mountains of Italy. I was not born there, but, like so many children who are born into a war, my parents were able to place my brother on I on this farm; we were safer there than in any city in Germany or even Italy. It makes me empathise with children in Ukraine and Gaza.
The lower photograph is of Bass Lake near Blowing Rock, NC, where my wife and I live and where we like to walk on competently maintained gravel roads.
The women on the farm and farm life centered me and became the focal point in life.
A rigorous education in gymnasiums became my home away from home before I emigrated....Latin, Greek, history, etc. When you read my texts, I hope you will do that, especially the poetry, you will detect my background ... the beauty of nature, the love of animals, the drive to work hard, the determination to understand the past (and thus teaching of and writing about history), the disdain for pompacity and overbearing, and falsehood, the lure of beauty (as in art and music).
These points are well represented in the Festschrift in my name in the journal Clio's Psyche." (vol. 30, #2, Winter, 2024). There my colleagues talk about me as a historian,
psychohistorian really; that is the reason for my photograph on the left of a small section of the bishop's castle in Salzburg, Austria. Psychohistorians dig with the psychologist's tools below the surface stories of the past to discover what is underneath and then and bring it forward to our listeners and readers.
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The Writer in Me
I arrived in the U.S. in 1957 at age 17 and almost immediately set out to continue the education I had started in Europe and obtained B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in European and Russian History at New York University at night. I taught European history at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC from 1968-2006. In addition, I led several programs, including the university's faculty and staff development center and headed Appalachian’s Faculty Senate and the UNC system’s Faculty Assembly.
I taught at several other institutions, including for ten years in the S.C. Governors School at the College of Charleston, for seven years in the Summer Institute at Palacki University, Olomouc, the Czech Republic, and one semester at North Ossetian State University in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia.
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After retiring, writing remained one of my most meaningful activities and I enjoy presenting it widely both nationally and internationally in word and text. My first book after 2006 was Der Vater und die SS (The Father and the SS, 2007) is now sadly out of print; it explored my relationship with my father, an SS-officer/diplomat.
The struggles during the 20th century of the women in Italy and Germany, In the Face of Evil whom I call my mothers followed in 2014; it is a historical exploration of their courage, steadfastness and care for their families and me.
The decade flew past since then; each one of the books that are available became more in depth, with the three poetry books offering me the greatest pleasure and variety of topics to explore. I hope they do you. Most presentations and articles are in psychohistory related venues.
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