ABSTRACT
I was born shortly before the end of World War II as the first child of a couple from the South-West of Germany, close to the region of the Black Forest that till today I deem my spiritual home. My father, a research and development specialist in engineering was the co-inventor of a new technology in metallurgy that enabled a faster and more cost-effective production of gear wheels and other complicated devices. After the end of the war, this new process (“powder metallurgy,” Silbereisen et al., 1992), which was a typical dual-use technology relevant for car manufacturing and other machinery, led him to leading positions in industry and to extensive international
collaboration. His expectations for his son, therefore, were quite clear-I should also study an engineering discipline! To that end, I attended a high school specializing in mathematics and natural sciences, but, to his dismay, in the end I decided to become a psychologist. However, when in 1987 I happened to call him from Beijing, China, thereby demonstrating it was not only the top brass of German industry that could make it to this emerging hotspot of modernization, but also someone in psychology, which was a discipline he had difficulties seeing as a real science, he accepted-albeit reluctantly-this waste of what he saw as my technological talents. This event happened when I was attending a satellite workshop in China that was held in parallel to the biennial congress of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD) in Tokyo, Japan. As such, this meeting was a first in breaking new ground for the openingup of Chinese science to the world and to collaboration with Western institutions (Harold Stevenson’s early activities in China were very important in this regard).
