With Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen [de; fr], Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, Beuys created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research (FIU).

By his own account, when the Nazi Party staged their book-burning in Kleve on 19 May 1933 in his school courtyard, he salvaged the book Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus "... from that large, flaming pile".

Although he finally opted for a career in medicine,[7] in 1941, Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe,[8] and began training as an aircraft radio operator under the tutelage of Heinz Sielmann in Posen, Poland (now Poznań).

[10] Drawing from this incident, Beuys fashioned the myth that he was rescued from the crash by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health: "Had it not been for the Tartars I would not be alive today.

After returning to Kleve, Beuys met local sculptor Walter Brüx and painter Hanns Lamers, who encouraged him to take up art as a full-time career.

His students were artists Anatol Herzfeld, Katharina Sieverding, Jörg Immendorff, Blinky Palermo, Peter Angermann, Walter Dahn, Johannes Stüttgen [de; fr], Sigmar Polke and Friederike Weske.

[18] Beuys entered wider public consciousness in 1964, when he participated in a festival at the Technical College Aachen which coincided with the 20th anniversary of an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.

The document was a self-consciously fictionalised account of the artist's life, in which historical events mingle with metaphorical and mythical speech (he refers to his birth as the 'Exhibition of a wound;' he claims his Ulysses Extension to have been carried out 'at James Joyce's request' – impossible, given that the writer was long dead by 1961).

[21] During an Artforum interview with Willoughby Sharp in 1969, Beuys added to his famous statement – "teaching is my greatest work of art" – that "the rest is the waste product, a demonstration.

Some of his ideas espoused in class discussion and in his art-making included free art education for all, the discovery of creativity in everyday life, and the belief that "everyone [was] an artist.

[24] While some of Beuys's students enjoyed the open discourse of the Ringgesprache, others, including Palermo and Immendorf, disapproved of the classroom disorder and anarchic characteristics, eventually rejecting his methods and philosophies altogether.

According to Cornelia Lauf (1992),[full citation needed] "in order to implement his idea, as well as a host of supporting notions encompassing cultural and political concepts, Beuys crafted a charismatic artistic persona that infused his work with mystical overtones and led him to be called "shaman" and "messianic" in the popular press."

In his first lecture tour in America he espoused that humanity was in an evolving state and that as "spiritual" beings we ought to draw on both our emotions and our thinking as they represent the total energy and creativity for every individual.

Beuys described how we must seek out and energize our spirituality and link it to our thinking powers so that "our vision of the world must be extended to encompass all the invisible energies with which we have lost contact.

Gold and honey indicate a transformation of the head, and therefore, naturally and logically, the brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare: the warm stool insulated with felt ... and the iron sole with the magnet.

On one level this must be because everyone consciously or unconsciously recognizes the problem of explaining things, particularly where art and creative work are concerned, or anything that involves a certain mystery or question.

"[34][failed verification]Beuys produced many such spectacular, ritualistic performances, and he developed a compelling persona whereby he took on a liminal, shamanistic role, as if to enable passage between different physical and spiritual states.

Inside the blanket Beuys held a microphone into which he breathed, coughed, groaned, grumbled, whispered and whistled at irregular intervals, with the results amplified by a PA system as viewers observed from the doorway.

[35] In her book on Beuys, Caroline Tisdall wrote that The Chief "is the first performance in which the rich vocabulary of the next fifteen years is already suggested,"[35] and that its theme is "the exploration of levels of communication beyond human semantics, by appealing to atavistic and instinctual powers.

"It takes a lot of discipline to avoid panicking in such a condition, floating empty and devoid of emotion and without specific feelings of claustrophobia or pain, for nine hours in the same position ... such an action ... changes me radically.

At the same time, however, he also undermines this assertion through the lamentably powerless form by which this voice is produced: in emitting half-smothered inarticulate sounds that would have remained inaudible without electronic amplification.

Beuys deliberately distanced the viewers by physically positioning them in a separate gallery room — only able to hear, but not see what is occurring — and by performing the action for a grueling nine hours.

"[40] He also said, "The relationship to the human position is marked by the two red crosses signifying emergency: the danger that threatens if we stay silent and fail to make the next evolutionary step...Such an object is intended as a stimulus for discussion, and in no way is to be taken as an aesthetic product.

[41][43] Caroline Tisdall noted how, in this work, "sound and silence, exterior and interior, are ... brought together in objects and actions as representatives of the physical and spiritual worlds.

With it and his Eurasian staff he is a transmitter and, despite long periods of imperturbable stillness interspersed by Christiansen's 'sound sculptures', he also creates dialogue evoking artists' thoughts and in discussion with spectators.

[50] Indebted to Romantic writers like Novalis and Schiller, Beuys was motivated by a belief in the power of universal human creativity and was confident about the potential for art to bring about revolutionary change.

[55] Some discourse about Beuys by those who consider his body of artwork sacrosanct has avoided "Sonne statt Reagan", regarding the video as an outlier, even to be ridiculed.

Beuys became a pacifist and a vocal opponent of nuclear weapons; he campaigned for environmental causes (in fact he was elected as a Green Party candidate for the European Parliament).

[59] First, Buchloh notes Beuys' fictionalisation of his own biography,[60] which he sees as symptomatic of a dangerous cultural tendency to disavow past trauma and retreat into the realms of myth and esoteric symbolism.

Relatively few accounts have addressed works themselves, with the exception of scholarship from art historians like Gene Ray,[64] Claudia Mesch,[65][66][67] Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes,[68] Briony Fer,[69] Alex Potts,[70] and others.