In his own words
Like most children, I was fascinated by beautiful stones even as a small boy. The real impetus to collect minerals, however, came from my tennis friend Wolfram Schäfer, who kept telling me and other friends enthusiastically about the emerald occurrences in the Habachtal. As my interest had been aroused, but I also had my doubts about whether such noble stones could really occur in our Alps, one early summer I accepted Wolfram’s invitation to accompany him on a collecting trip to the Habachtal. And lo and behold: we really did find very beautiful emeralds. From then on I was infected with the virus of mineral collecting.
Because I was very active as a mountaineer at the time anyway, the new hobby suited me very well. However, I soon found out that storming summits and collecting stones are very hard to combine. If you want to reach a summit, you have to leave the stones lying. As I found that harder and harder, it inevitably came about that my summit successes became ever scarcer while my collection of stones grew ever larger.
Only around 1980 did I add a further fascination to my hobby, micromounting, after I had met Peter Köhlen, then the leader of the micromounter group of the Münchener Mineralienfreunde, and other micromounter friends on an excursion to Val Malenco. Very quickly the wonderful world and variety of micromounts under the stereo microscope captivated me.
The main aim of my collecting soon became to bring together as far as possible all the minerals of particular localities or deposits. Systematic collecting appealed to me only marginally, and then mainly from the point of view of aesthetics. I pursued this way of collecting very intensively from 1984 to 2000 during my roughly 20 trips to the western United States – all the more so as I had already retired in 1987.
The reason I take part in the Lithothek of our working group is, first and foremost, to preserve a large part of my collection for interested posterity. It is particularly important to me – unless my heirs show a special interest – to take part in this undertaking with specimens from my collection.