Meet Our Authors
Dieter Duhm was born in 1942 in Berlin, Germany. He has a PhD in sociology, is an art historian, author and psychoanalyst. He is the initiator of the “Healing Biotopes Plan” – a global peace plan.
Beginning in 1967 he engaged in the Marxist left and became one of the leading characters in the students’ movement. He made a connection between the thoughts behind the political revolution and the thoughts related to the liberation of the individual and became known through his book “Angst im Kapitalismus” [Fear in Capitalism] (1972). Around 1975 he began publically distancing himself from the leftist dogmatism and shifted to a more thorough human alternative.
In 1978 he established the “Bauhütte” project and led a three-year social experiment with 40 participants in the Black Forest in Germany. The theme of the experiment was to “found a community in our times” and it embraced all the questions of the origin, meaning and aim of human existence on planet Earth. The outlines of a new possibility for existence arose with the concepts of ‘free love,’ ‘spiritual ecology’ and ‘resonance technology.’
In 1995 he founded the peace research center Tamera in Portugal together with the theologian Sabine Lichtenfels and others. Today Tamera has approximately 200 co-workers.
Dieter Duhm has dedicated his life to create an effective forum for a global peace initiative that can be a match for the destructive forces of the capitalistic globalization.
Sabine Lichtenfels, was born into a family of artists in 1954. From a very early age she was concerned with questions of love and was connected to Jesus as a revolutionary role model. Already at 16 years old she envisioned “a village in which all lovers live together and no one has to abandon each other.” She studied theology, married and gave birth to her first daughter. In 1978 she met Dieter Duhm and along with their common friend, Charly Rainer Ehrenpreis, she supported in founding the Healing Biotopes Project.
In 1981 she left the church and became the co-initiator of a three-year social experiment – a research and community project in the Black Forest in Germany, where the foundations for peaceful co-habitation were discovered through real life experiences. By the consequent exploration and presentation of her own deep soul processes in love, she began her research for the reconciliation and truth between the genders as the basis for a peace culture. In this way, she shed light in an exemplary manner on the structures of the worldwide war between the genders, especially through the example of her long-term partnership with Dieter Duhm. At the points where fight would arise she ever more persistently replaced it with the big power of trust. By this she became an orientation for many young people and continuously supports them in their questions around love, sexuality and community building.She dedicated her work to peace in crisis- and conflict areas. She goes to places that most people avoid – the Colombian rainforest and civil war areas, Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli settlements and military bases – and negotiates between the frontiers.Through her skills as a medium she is connected to prehistoric matriarchies and early temple cultures in Malta, Crete and Nubia, and also with indigenous cultures and early Christianity. She translates their sources of knowledge into our time in her books, seminars and speeches. By connecting erotic, spiritual and social knowledge in a societal perspective, the media often seeks her out, but this also occasionally spurs controversies and resistances.
From 1988-1992 she led “desert camps” – a spiritual education in various places in nature. These camps include dream research, trance, the power of prayer, as well as communication with nature. From 1992-1995 she led the Erotic Academy in Lanzarote. These projects led to the founding of Tamera in 1995 with Dieter Duhm and Charly Rainer Ehrenpreis. She was attracted to the land of Tamera by way of her psychic research in the stone circle in Evora.
In 2004, alongside Marko Pogacnik, she began creating a geomantic community art piece in Tamera – a lithopuncture circle as an acupuncture point for peace. Shocked and shaken in 2005 by the impending war in Iran, she went alone on a peace pilgrimage for several months without any money. Her walk led to the first Grace Pilgrimage through Israel and the West Bank in Palestine, and along with it came the founding of the first Global Grace Day on November 9th, which since this time has served as an annual day of commemoration for overcoming all walls. Almost every year since 2005 a Grace Pilgrimage takes place, mostly in crisis areas such as Colombia or the Middle East. Also in 2005 she was nominated by a Swiss initiative for the Nobel Prize as one of the worldwide “1000 Women for Peace.” In Tamera she leads the Global Love School and “Terra Deva,” the department for spiritual research.
Sabine Lichtenfels is the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of three grandchildren.
Leila Dregger, born 1959, freelance journalist and author, former publisher of the journal “Weibliche Stimme – für eine Politik des Herzens” (The Female Voice – for a Politics of the Heart. She lives mainly in Tamera.
Martin Winiecki, born 1990 in Dresden, Germany. From the age of 14 years, he was a political activist in his home town Dresden. From 2006 to 2009 he became a student of the peace education in Tamera, Portugal and works in Tamera since then. He is the coordinator of the Terra Nova School, an online education platform. He is a dedicated networker and despite his young age a brilliant analyzer of global political events and social movements.
Madjana Geusen, born in Bonn in 1959, she’s an artist and co-worker of Tamera peace research center in Portugal.
She writes, “In 1979, when I was 20, during my search for meaning and purpose in life I found the Bauhütte in Leuterstal, the first station of the project Dieter Duhm founded in 1978. ‘The revolutionary of our times is the one who discovers life’, was one of the theses of the Bauhütte. It felt as a an amazing dream to finally end up in that place.
In 1982 I fully joined the “Experiment for a Humane Earth”, which in 1995 led to the establishment of Tamera Healing Biotope 1 in Portugal, where I’ve been working since 1999 as a permanent co-worker. Art is my Tao, my path with power – although I am not primarily a painter, but a performing artist. I feel connected to the idea of art as being creation of a world that is not subject to identification. There is a secret there: an entirely new way of seeing life. We can, for example, through the medium of art, begin to open up new channels and areas in life that otherwise remain unconscious and that come up from behind to bite our souls. This can be done with ease and with a joy of life if we at the same time work artistically at developing new life perspectives. This is what our workshops and art courses are for.”
Beate Möller, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1957, she’s an architect and artist. Since 1985 is a fellow worker at the Healing Biotope project.