Horst-Eberhard Richter

The author of numerous books was also regarded by many as the große alte Mann of the Federal German Peace movement.

His father was a successful engineer, head of a Siemens plant and author of a standard reference book on precision mechanics.

After returning home to Germany, he learned that his parents had been murdered by Soviet soldiers months after the end of the war.

[3] He wrote his dissertation on the subject of Die philosophische Dimension des Schmerzes in the flat of a bombed-out tenement building in Berlin-Halensee, with which he was awarded a Dr. phil.

[9] As a gravestone serves a boulder with a quotation by Max Scheler, which was already to be read in simplified form in the family's funeral announcement: "Man, before he is a thinking and a willing being, is a loving being."

Complementing Freud's analysis of the parent-child relationship [de], he conversely investigated the pathogenic effect of disturbed parents on their children.

In the vacillation between fear of impotence and delusion of omnipotence, the scientific-technical revolution threatens to lose ethical control.

What Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker called the "mental illness of peacelessness" in the West has been the main topic of Richter's cultural psychology analyses in speeches and writings since 2007.

In his opening speech at the founding congress of the German organisation in 2001 in Berlin, he strongly pleaded for a closer connection of social, economic and ecological reform initiatives with the peace movement.

Stephan Scholz reported on Richter's tribute in the Gießener Anzeiger [de] and called him a "thinker who dominated the bestseller lists for years and whose humanity is still praised in the highest terms today.

"[14] Richter refused three times the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on the grounds that "too many Altnazi [de]s" had received it.