[1] He and his family, Baltic German industrialists, were relocated from Estonia to occupied Poland at the beginning of World War II because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

[1] After graduating in 1950 from high school (Gymnasium) with the Abitur in Bielefeld, Germany,[2] he studied Slavistics, Eastern European history and sociology at the University of Göttingen.

He spent one year of his studies at the University of Zagreb, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia, and wrote his dissertation, which focused on the Croatian theatre of the 19th century.

He held a key position at a time of rapprochement between the German government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during the Perestroika period.

His first wife was of Hungarian nobility;[6] they are the grandparents of the German singer Lena Meyer-Landrut, who won the 2010 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo.