Born in the year 1955, I live in Hamburg since my earliest childhood. Here I visited school and studied Sociology and Social and Economic History. I've got my Ph.D. in early 1989 at the Institut für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte at Hamburg University for a thesis on the German labor leader Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). The intense research led to several scientific publications. 1988 together with Lothar Knatz I've organized and led an international conference on Wilhelm Weitling at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

I have a special interest for the presentation of history in diverse media, especially film. At Hamburg University I've offered courses on that topic and presented film programs at the Public Cinema Metropolis, for instance "Zeitmaschine Kino" (1989/90), which resulted in a book with the same title, and "Vietnamkino" (1994).

I'm interested in film even without explicit historical content. Since the early nineties I publish reviews, interviews und stories. I worked at the editorial offices of several German tv magazines (TV Movie, TV Neu, TV Spielfilm, development of new concepts) and from 1992 through 1994 I was responsible for the tv program in "Der Spiegel". Digital Media like Multimedia oder Virtual Reality, which I regard as a logical extension of film and television, are also among my favourite subjects.

A large conference of astronomers, that gathered in Hamburg in 1994, revived my interest in space, which roots in my childhood time. Since then, the focus of my activities has shifted more and more to the sciences. Besides Astronomy and space travel this is mainly research on artificial intelligence and robotics. I reported several times live from RoboCup (from Stockholm, Amsterdam,  Melbourne, and Paderborn), the international soccer competition for autonomous robots. Since the moon landings of the sixties there was probably no comparable opportunity to report live on science and technology with a similar excitement.

Despite all unavoidable specialization and focusing the driving force of all my activities remains curiosity and the wish to better understand the world around me. Among the works that still are most important to me are those which transcend the boundaries between disciplines: for instance the encounter with a dying man, unable to move, who writes poems with the help of a computer system; a series of articles about cultural dimensions of a manned mission to Mars; or research of the amazing intelligence of honey-bees.