"Wholeness" before and after 1945

Notes on the biography and writings of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim (1896-1988)

Abstract

Among psychotherapists and other people of West Germany and neighboring countries, Count Karlfried Dürckheim (1896-1988), founder of a psychological center in the Black Forest and one of the first teachers of Zen Buddhism in Germany, came to certain prominence between the 1960s and 1980s. From 1938 to 1947 he had lived in Japan. Here he had not only engaged in the study of Zen Buddhism and archery, as he told later, but primarily had propagated National Socialism. Later he totally split off this part of his biography. The books he published after 1945, however, show striking similarities to what he wrote between 1933 and 1945, particularly in the use of the concept of „wholeness“ („Ganzheit“).