Author Description

Product Description English summary: The author of these memoirs lived an early life of flight: Berlin, Switzerland, Italy, the Soviet Union (1935-38), a decade in exile in Sweden, with a return in 1948. A strange life, his father wrote, lived in rescue, hope, and dream countries, which shaped the author as much as the civil education and honesty of his predecessor generations. During his studies he was moved to complete historical cultural research on the early modern period. Here, he describes in a rather unusual approach the contemporary historical tensions between hope and doubt, autobiographically as dense as it is openheartedly documented: people and opportunities in the sometimes harsh scientific life of the GDR; being evicted from the Greifswald Institute of History; early return as head of the East German cultural center in Stockholm; and a tolerant atmosphere at the Research Institute at the Academy Kuczynski. After 1990 Jan Peters found himself in an exceptional situation, where he was offered the opportunity to lead a MPG working group at the Potsdam University. His strange life was determined by his openness to alternative systems and by empathy on all sides. German text. German description: Der Autor dieser Erinnerungen erfuhr fruehzeitig ein bewegtes Fluchtleben: Berlin, Schweiz, Italien, Sowjetunion (1935-38), ein Jahrzehnt im Exilland Schweden, Rueckkehr 1948. äEin sonderbares Leben, wie sein Vater schrieb, gelebt in Rettungs-, Hoffnungs- und Traumländern, die den Autor ebenso formten wie die buergerliche Bildung und Redlichkeit seiner Vorgängergenerationen. Im Studium zog es ihn zur historischen Kulturforschung in der Fruehneuzeit. Hier schildert er im ungewohnten Ansatz eher die zeithistorischen Spannungsverhältnisse zwischen Hoffnung und Zweifel, autobiographisch ebenso dicht wie offenherzig dokumentiert und erzählt: Menschen und Möglichkeiten im mitunter rauen Wissenschaftsleben der DDR, Rauswurf aus dem Greifswalder