Hello, my name is Heinrich and I´m living in Düsseldorf/Germany

 

 

 

 

 

 

A short biography


I was born in 1957 in Essen-Werden, a small town in the middle of Germany. The marriage of my young parents, 20 and 21 years old, quickly got into difficult waters and after 3 years it was divorced.  My mother moved with me to her parents in Lintorf, near Düsseldorf. Here I spent the next four years.
     It was four good years, full of warmth and joy of life! In retrospect they seem to me like a single beautiful, cheerful day!

 

Of course, in those happy years, I didn't think anything would ever change. But then my mother remarried and we moved to a neighboring town called Heiligenhaus. And in a way, it was the beginning of the seriousness of life for me. Because the relationship with my stepfather turned out to be quite difficult.
    He obviously put it into his head to make me a model pupil. On the one hand he supported me and was also quite generous, but on the other hand he was very strict and did not tolerate any contradiction. I feared him and so I became a good and obedient boy.
    But I have to admit that I liked bringing home good grades. I received a lot of praise and recognition from my parents, teachers and classmates.

 

When I was about twelve years old, I was best in class and class president, but I felt lonely at the bottom of my heart. Then something happened that would change everything. On a cold winter's day a neighbor boy and I built us a small ski jump where we could fly a few meters. During a jump I fell and broke my right ankle. At that time it was called six weeks plaster and lying at home.
    The physical fracture was completely healed after about half a year, but the psychological consequences proved to be more serious. My ambition at school was broken and my grades began to deteriorate. In the end I had a complete failure. I did not pass the Abitur!
    How was such a thing possible, from model pupil to Abitur failure? A really reasonable explanation cannot be found. Many factors played a role here. From today's point of view I would say that I was in a deep crisis of meaning. Apart from my hobbies (table tennis and chess) everything seemed so pointless to me. School, education, profession, the bourgeois work ethic, to which my stepfather in particular attached, did not interest me at all. Wherever I looked, there was nobody who seemed to be really happy and content with his life.
    This may now sound rather unworldly and arrogant, but that's how I felt at the time. In the bourgeois world I saw nothing that seemed desirable to me. No role models that I could have emulated. Intuitively I felt that something could not be right. If there was such a thing as a happy life, it had to be found somewhere else. At least that's how I thought at that time.

 

Then followed 1977/78 the Bundeswehr time and with it a real low point in my life. First stationed in Hamburg and later in Bad Segeberg, I experienced a heavy "command and obedience" were simply not my world. After about nine months one had finally an understanding, and I was released prematurely due to a psychiatric appraisal.
    Whatever the exact statement in that report might have been, for me the discharge was a miracle. Completely unexpected!
    I moved back into my parental home, now a home of my own in Ratingen-Hösel, and soon began studying social pedagogy in Düsseldorf.

That now sounds almost as if life had come in a reasonably orderly fashion after all. On the surface this was true, but on the inside I was still completely disoriented. The studies financed by my stepfather I never understood as a vocational training, but more as time given for self-discovery.
    In fact, I was quite successful in tournament chess at that time, so I briefly considered whether I should perhaps make this my profession. But I decided against it, because the effort would have been too big and the realistic chances of success would have been too low.
   Nevertheless, this was partly a nice time in my life.

At the age of about 25 - under pressure from my stepfather - I started studying a little more seriously. Meanwhile I lived in my own apartment in Düsseldorf and could have been quite satisfied.
   But it still wasn't me. Something quite decisive seemed to be missing. Even a very intensive love relationship had not been able to help. What is actually going on with me? was a question I asked myself from time to time. But without finding a satisfying answer.
   Then, at the beginning of 1985, at the age of 27, I took a four-week break.

 

I can't say that this time-out has helped me much. But one thing had become clear to me, I would not give up the search for happiness or perhaps the meaning of life. Everything else was of secondary importance. The only problem was that I didn't know where to look. But somehow I hoped that chance or fate would come to my aid.
   And in fact a little later on the bus I met a fleeting acquaintance who lived very close to me.  He was an esoteric and aroused my interest in astrology and tarot. I was fascinated by the thought that our life might be predestined in the stars, and that one could possibly get concrete help by means of a map survey.

    But in the middle of this trial and experiment phase, something happened that would completely change my view of the world. Through a friend I got to know table writing, a spiritual contact with the world beyond by means of a table that moved and put texts on paper with a pencil attached to it. A completely supernatural process, beyond a physical explanation.
    Fascinated by the functioning of this process and believing myself to be in contact with the beloved, meanwhile deceased, relatives from my happy childhood, I fully engaged myself in the matter.
    The bad awakening came then however on 5 June 1985. The death of a friend was announced!

 

What happened then, I can only interpret as an intervention of God in this situation. In the next 24 hours dramatic things and a fateful chain of command happened, at the end of which I converted to Christian faith in a Pentecostal church in Düsseldorf. Something that I would have completely excluded for myself, but had now suddenly happened under the pressure of the events. The whole dramatic story can be read here, by the way:

Von Geistern getäuscht und von Gott errettet, wäre eine treffende Kurzbeschreibung der damaligen Ereignisse. Aber es ging eigentlich um weit mehr! Denn nun plötzlich verstand ich, was all die Jahre gefehlt hatte: Der Friede und die Verbindung mit Gott!

   Deshalb war ich so ruhelos gewesen, hatte mich nichts wirklich zufrieden stellen können. Jetzt war ich dort angekommen, wonach ich all die Jahre unbewusst gesucht hatte.