Dieter Duhm
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1942 born in Berlin/Germany, sociologist, psychoanalyst and art historian. Diplomas: B.A. in Psychology (1969) and Doctorate in Sociology (1973). Author of numerous socio-critical books. Co-Founder of the Tamera Peace Research Center in Portugal and Initiator of the "Plan of Healing Biotopes", a strategy for global peace.
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[edit] Life and Work
The experiences of his first years of life in the nights of bombing in Berlin, on the refugee trail, of poverty and hunger in the postwar period form his entire life. The question how war and violence can be overcome on a global scale becomes his life task.
The Vietnam War was the catalyst for his political commitment within the Marxist Left of the German student movement. His first larger publication was entitled: “The structure of material goods and destroyed inter-personality” (1972, various editions). This was followed by “Fear in Capitalism” (1972) with the subtitle: “A second attempt at a social substantiation of inter-personal fear in material capitalist society”. This book was one of the most successful titles of its time (1973, in 1977 the 14th edition and in 1984 the 17th edition).
As is already indicated through the titles of the books, Duhm has never been a purely Marxist economist but has, in all his examinations of social transformation, always been interested in the individual, psychological issue. Theoretical and practical work on various forms of living together followed, whereby socialist thinking was expanded and deepened by the vision of free love. He has always used the term "free love" for a "love free of fear". He thus attempted to “overtake the communist idea on the left” by expanding it to the erotic area and became one of the main figures in the so-called “emancipation debate” concerning the connection between political work and personal liberation.
It is for this, that for some time he was intensively interested in the theories of the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. His contention with and renunciation of Reich led to an opening towards the theories of Asiatic traditions which he wanted to make available to serve practical social change. In spite of several offers to become a professor, Duhm leaves the university and his political work, explaining this decision in his book “The Human Being is Different. Reflection on much ridiculed, but necessary contents of a holistic theory of liberation; critique of Marxism” (1975).
When the student movement broke down Dieter Duhm did not re-integrate himself into bourgeois society. In the face of ongoing global violence he decided to retreat to a lonely farm house and there to reflect on it all. His country retreat turned into an intellectual and spiritual workshop for a humane future. He developed a basic theory for a future without war using many different sources of thinking and wisdom: Nietzsche, Hegel and van Gogh, Rudolf Steiner, Jesus, Laozi, Wilhelm Reich, Prentice Mulford, Teilhard de Chardin and connected the individual fragments of knowledge to an overall picture, a preliminary stage for his later holographic view.
In 1978 he began to put this theory into practise. He created the project "Bauhuette", a social community experiment with 50 participants that was to research the possibilities of dissolving internal group conflicts in terms of power, money, sexuality and love. The experiment was successful, the group remained together for six years. It provided sound basic knowledge of how to develop and build up sustainable human communities. Now with the human base developed, Dieter Duhm wanted to implement the essential idea: to realise the vision of a thoroughly peaceful society and create a model, so-to-speak a prototype of a post-capitalistic, peaceful civilisation. This should include the peaceful cohabitation and cooperation with all creatures of nature (also including bugs or vermin) and provide alternative types of energy supplies (using inexhaustible energy sources rather than exploiting the earth), alternative types of architecture, of nourishment and of medicine, right up to a new understanding of the human world as imbedded in a cosmic order.
But in 1984 a slanderous campaign was launched against Dieter Duhm and his projects both in Germany and Switzerland. This increasingly impeded the research work and finally disrupted it totally. The group’s attempt to have the information about them corrected remained unsuccessful. The community had to disband. A period of decentralisation followed, spanning several years.
1989 Dieter Duhm moved to Lanzarote, together with his life partner, Sabine Lichtenfels (Theologian), and several friends. There, for some years, he consecrated his time to painting and writing and found the peace and quiet to prepare next steps.
In 1995, he finally founded the Tamera Peace Research Center in Portugal together with Sabine Lichtenfels and others. In 2007, about 150 people are working there engaged in the development of a community model without lies, without violence and without degradation. As a case model they research and bring about the social, ecological and technological aspects that can be the basis of a future world society. Dieter Duhm initiated the “Peace School Mirja” and the “Political Ashram” as places of further education for the formation of future “peaceworkers” as well as a training centre for spiritual life practice. With the support of the German solar technologist and physicist, Jürgen Kleinwächter, the development and research began on the Tamera “Solarvillage”, a self-sustained model of housing with the capacity to produce electricity, clean water and nourishment for 50 people. Also in 2007 an intense cooperation started with Sepp Holzer, ecologist and permaculture specialist from Austria.
An international network was established with contacts to peace villages in Colombia (San José de Apartadó), to peace initiatives in Israel and Palestine (Holy Land Trust, Bethlehem), to projects in India (Barefoot College, Tilonia), to futurologists and to representatives of indigenous peoples.
Today, after almost 30 years of work, the project has entered a phase of realisation corresponding to the original dream.
[edit] Political Theory
With the help of various terms from natural science, such as holography, chaos theory, systems theory and morphogenetic fields, Dieter Duhm substantiated his “Political Theory” which is the basis for a global peace concept, the “Plan of the Healing Biotopes”.
It is based on the idea that the building component of mater is not the atom, instead it is energy, frequency, information. Earth with its atmosphere and magnetic field, with its waters and landscapes, its creatures, biotopes and human societies is an integral, oscillating and living body that can be healed, just as a human body can be healed if the appropriate medicine, i.e. the appropriate information is administered.
The healing information is wanted most at the points where new wars are created daily: in the cohabitation of human beings. In this area far reaching change is necessary. The peace information needed will emerge from social structures whose ethical basic values of compassion, trust, mutual support and solidarity are no longer being destroyed, but rather, they are being generated and maintained.
Places are needed where the conditions for peaceful co-habitation are researched and put into practice.
Dieter Duhm calls them “Healing Biotopes” or "Peace Research Villages". These act rather like acupuncture points to foster a new future in the body of Earth. His theory explains why worldwide only a few such centres will be sufficient to tip over the “information field” of violence. It is not the first time this possibility is seen. David Bohm, a quantum physicist, had too mentioned it, so did spiritual masters, such as Sri Aurobindo, Satprem, or Dhyani Iwahoo (Leader of the Tsalagi, USA), or Teilhard de Chardin. Together these few centres will create the microscopically small change which may and will have a large effect on the “Whole”.
Dieter Duhm: “Decisive for the success of such peace projects is not how big and strong they are in comparison to the existing apparatuses but how comprehensive and complex they are, how many elements of life they are able to combine and to unite in a positive way. In the field buildings of evolution it is not the law of the strongest, but the success of the more comprehensive that counts. No new developments would otherwise have been able to assert themselves had they not all begun small and inconspicuous.” (Dieter Duhm: Future without War, 2007).
[edit] Publications
The Sacred Matrix. From the Matrix of Violence to the Matrix of Life. Foundations of a New Civilisation. ISBN 978-3-927266-16-2, 464 pages., 2005
Man's Holy Grail is Woman. Paintings, drawings and texts by Dieter Duhm. ISBN 978-3-927266-21-6, 237 pages, April 2006
Future without War. Theory of Global Healing, ISBN 978-3-927266-24-7, 120 pages, 2007
[edit] External links
official website: [1]
