Dieter Duhm - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born in Berlin, Germany in 1942, Duhm lived through the bombing of Berlin as a very young child, as well as the poverty and hunger in the postwar period, and those experiences would shape his thinking and actions throughout his life.

In 1969 Duhm completed his B.A. in psychology and in 1973 he earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Freiburg.

But it was the Vietnam War that catapulted him into a leadership role in the Marxist Left of the German Student Movement and made him a staunch critic of western capitalism. He wrote an essay called, The structure of material goods and destroyed inter-personality, which was published as a book in Cologne, Germany in 1975, and Fear in Capitalism: A second attempt at a social substantiation of inter-personal fear in material capitalist society, which became a best-seller three times: in 1973, the 14th edition in 1977, and the 17th edition in 1984.

The anti-imperialist struggle and the attempts within this to develop new forms of community and real socialism failed because of human conflicts. Without building a human basis that can support this, the continuation of such political work no longer seems useful.

Despite offers of a professorship, Duhm decided to leave academic life and his political activism in 1975, explaining his reasons in The Human Being is Different: Reflection on much ridiculed, but necessary contents of a holistic theory of liberation; critique of Marxism.

In this book I concentrate on the question of whether the human being is changeable and what possibilities emerge after a change has taken place. I do not deny the necessity to change the society. But both parts – the change of society and the change of the individual – have to come together in order to create a revolution, through which a society is created that really fulfills the needs of its people.

He retreated to an isolated farmhouse in southern Germany and spent the next three years in research, developing the basis of a theory to create a future without war for the Earth, using many different sources of thinking and wisdom.