I was born on 1 August 1962 in Wismar. After completing my apprenticeship at the Piesteritz chemical combine and my military service in the navy, I studied Energy Plant Engineering through a distance-learning programme at the Technical University of Dresden. My interest in political education was sparked early on by the pervasive politicisation of everyday life in the GDR. My first novel, A Sense of Life, reflects these experiences and the living conditions in East Germany.
I also wove into the narrative the political upheaval of 1989 and the years immediately following reunification, attempting to offer insights that extend beyond my personal story. My interests, however, have never been confined to the political sphere. They reach into philosophical questions as wellquestions inevitably shaped by the social realities I encountered, in close connection with my own lived experience.
From this grew my second book, which explores various aspects of what it means to be happy, placing selected elements of this vast subject into thematic contexts. Its title, Well Then, Good Luck!, expresses the hope that each of us might make the best of our lives in order, ultimately, to be happy in some form. My third and, for now, most recent book seeks to answer a central question: how did our present social order, with its increasingly pressing problems in almost every sphere of life, come to follow such a negative trajectory? All too often, we stand in our own way and the better we become at doing so, the gloomier the prospects for the future appear.
With this in mind, I pose a question to civil society as a whole: Is this really the best we can do? The future suggests or rather, makes plain that what we have achieved so far will not be enough to meet the challenges ahead.
I also wove into the narrative the political upheaval of 1989 and the years immediately following reunification, attempting to offer insights that extend beyond my personal story. My interests, however, have never been confined to the political sphere. They reach into philosophical questions as wellquestions inevitably shaped by the social realities I encountered, in close connection with my own lived experience.
From this grew my second book, which explores various aspects of what it means to be happy, placing selected elements of this vast subject into thematic contexts. Its title, Well Then, Good Luck!, expresses the hope that each of us might make the best of our lives in order, ultimately, to be happy in some form. My third and, for now, most recent book seeks to answer a central question: how did our present social order, with its increasingly pressing problems in almost every sphere of life, come to follow such a negative trajectory? All too often, we stand in our own way and the better we become at doing so, the gloomier the prospects for the future appear.
With this in mind, I pose a question to civil society as a whole: Is this really the best we can do? The future suggests or rather, makes plain that what we have achieved so far will not be enough to meet the challenges ahead.
