Born in Hamburg in 1931. My family fled to England in 1934 because of the Nazis, so I grew up in an English-speaking environment, and returned to Hamburg after the war, where I studied physics, started a family, and became a researcher. Later, I spent several years in the United States of America, but always returned to Hamburg, where I became the founding director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in 1975. I retired in 2000, but continued my work in climate science on the side with developing coupled economic-climate models. However, my heart and mind turned to particle physics, which I had followed up before as a hobby.
