George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (c.1867 – 29 October 1949) was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer. Gurdjieff taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep", but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and serve our purpose as human beings. The practice of his teaching has become known as "The Work" (connoting work on oneself) and is additional to the ways of the fakir, monk and yogi, so that his student P. D. Ouspensky referred to it as the "Fourth Way".

Gurdjieff's teaching has inspired the formation of many groups around the world. After his death in 1949, the Gurdjieff Foundation in Paris was established and led by his close pupil Jeanne de Salzmann in cooperation with other direct pupils of Gurdjieff, until her death in 1990; and then by her son Michel de Salzmann, until his death in 2001.

The International Association of the Gurdjieff Foundations  comprises the Institut Gurdjieff in France; The Gurdjieff Foundation in the USA; The Gurdjieff Society in the UK; ; and the Gurdjieff Foundation in Venezuela.

Biography

Early years
Gurdjieff was born in Gyumri (formerly Alexandropol) in Armenia. His father Ivan Ivanovich Gurdjieff was Greek, and a renowned ashugh under the pseudonym of 'Adash', who in the 1870s managed large herds of cattle and sheep. The long-held view is that Gurdjieff's mother was Armenian, although some scholars have recently speculated that she too was Greek.

The name Gurdjieff represents the Anglicized Russian form of the Greek surname . The term  means 'farmer' in Greek, and is the origin of Gurdjieff's Christian name, George; thus,  could stand for "son of George". Furthermore,  in Persian means 'a Georgian', and the Russian-style surname Gurdjieff could also mean 'the man from Georgia'. According to Gurdjieff himself, his father came of a Greek family whose ancestors had emigrated from Byzantium after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with his family initially moving to central Anatolia, and from there eventually to Georgia in the Caucasus.

There are conflicting views regarding Gurdjieff's birth date, ranging from 1866 to 1877. The bulk of extant records weigh heavily toward 1877, but Gurdjieff in reported conversations with students gave the year of his birth as ; this date is also corroborated by the account of his niece Luba Gurdjieff Everitt. George Kiourtzidis, great-grandson of Gurdjieff's paternal uncle Vasilii (through Vasilii's son Alexander), recalled that his grandfather Alexander, born in 1875, said that Gurdjieff was about three years older than he, which would point to a birth date . Although official documents consistently record the day of his birth as 28 December, Gurdjieff himself celebrated his birthday either on the Old Orthodox Julian calendar date of 1 January, or according to the Gregorian calendar date for New Year of 13 January (up to 1899; 14 January after 1900). The year of 1872 is inscribed in a plate on the gravemarker in the cemetery of Avon, Seine-et-Marne, France, where his body was buried.

Gurdjieff spent his childhood in Kars, which, from 1878 to 1918, was the administrative capital of the Russian-ruled Transcaucasus province of Kars Oblast, a border region recently captured from the Ottoman Empire. It contained extensive grassy plateau-steppe and high mountains, and was inhabited by a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional population that had a history of respect for travelling mystics and holy men, and for religious syncretism and conversion. Both the city of Kars and the surrounding territory were home to an extremely diverse population: although part of the Armenian Plateau, Kars Oblast was home to Armenians, Russians, Caucasus Greeks, Georgians, Turks, Kurds and smaller numbers of Christian communities from eastern and central Europe such as Caucasus Germans, Estonians and Russian sectarian communities like the Molokans, Doukhobors, Pryguny, and Subbotniks.

Gurdjieff makes particular mention of the Yazidi community. Growing up in a multi-ethnic society, Gurdjieff became fluent in Armenian, Pontic Greek, Russian and Turkish, speaking the last in a mixture of elegant Osmanlı and some dialect. He later acquired "a working facility with several European languages".

Early influences on him included his father, a carpenter and amateur ashik or bardic poet, and the priest of the town's cathedral, Dean Borsh, a family friend. The young Gurdjieff avidly read literature from many sources and influenced by these writings and witnessing a number of phenomena that he could not explain, he formed the conviction that there existed a hidden truth known to mankind in the past, which could not be ascertained from science or mainstream religion.

Travels
In early adulthood, according to his own account, Gurdjieff's search for such knowledge led him to travel widely to Central Asia, Egypt, Iran, India, Tibet and other places before he returned to Russia for a few years in 1912. He was never forthcoming about the source of his teaching, which he once labelled as esoteric Christianity. The only account of his wanderings appears in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, which is not generally considered to be a reliable or straightforward autobiography. Each chapter is named after a "remarkable man", some of whom were putative members of a society called "The Seekers of Truth".

After Gurdjieff's death, J. G. Bennett researched his potential sources and suggested that the men were symbolic of the three types of people to whom Gurdjieff referred: No. 1 centred in their physical body; No. 2 centred in their emotions and No. 3 centred in their mind. Gurdjieff describes how he encountered dervishes, fakirs and descendants of the Essenes, whose teaching he said had been conserved at a monastery in Sarmoung. The book also has an overarching quest involving a map of "pre-sand Egypt" and culminates in an encounter with the "Sarmoung Brotherhood".

Business career
Gurdjieff wrote that he supported himself during his travels by engaging in various enterprises such as running a travelling repair shop and making paper flowers; and on one occasion while thinking about what he could do, he described catching sparrows in the park and then dyeing them yellow to be sold as canaries;  It is also speculated by commentators that during his travels he was engaged in a certain amount of political activity, as part of The Great Game.

In Russia
From 1913 to 1949, the chronology appears to be based on material that can be confirmed by primary documents, independent witnesses, cross-references and reasonable inference. On New Year's Day in 1912, Gurdjieff arrived in Moscow and attracted his first students, including his cousin, the sculptor Sergey Merkurov, and the eccentric Rachmilievitch. In the same year, he married the Polish Julia Ostrowska in Saint Petersburg. In 1914, Gurdjieff advertised his ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians, and he supervised his pupils' writing of the sketch Glimpses of Truth.

In 1915, Gurdjieff accepted P. D. Ouspensky as a pupil, and in 1916, he accepted the composer Thomas de Hartmann and his wife, Olga, as students. He then had about 30 pupils. Ouspensky already had a reputation as a writer on mystical subjects and had conducted his own, ultimately disappointing, search for wisdom in the East. The Fourth Way "system" taught during this period was complex and metaphysical, partly expressed in scientific terminology.

In the midst of revolutionary upheaval in Russia, Gurdjieff left Petrograd in 1917 to return to his family home in Alexandropol (present-day Gyumri in Armenia). During the October Revolution, he set up a temporary study community in Essentuki in the Caucasus, where he worked intensively with a small group of Russian pupils. Gurdjieff's eldest sister Anna and her family later arrived there as refugees, informing him that Turks had shot his father in Alexandropol on 15 May. As the area became increasingly threatened by civil war, Gurdjieff fabricated a newspaper story announcing his forthcoming "scientific expedition" to "Mount Induc". Posing as a scientist and wearing a red fireman's belt with brass rings Gurdjieff left Essentuki with fourteen companions (excluding Gurdjieff's family and Ouspensky). They travelled by train to Maikop, where hostilities delayed them for three weeks. In spring 1919, Gurdjieff met the artist Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife Jeanne and accepted them as pupils. Assisted by Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff gave the first public demonstration of his Sacred Dances (Movements at the Tbilisi Opera House, 22 June).

In March 1918, Ouspensky separated from Gurdjieff, settling in England and teaching the Fourth Way in his own right. The two men were to have a very ambivalent relationship for decades to come.

In Georgia and Turkey
In 1919, Gurdjieff and his closest pupils moved to Tbilisi, where Gurdjieff's wife Julia Ostrowska, the Stjoernvals, the Hartmanns, and the de Salzmanns continued to assimilate his teaching. Gurdjieff concentrated on his still unstaged ballet, The Struggle of the Magicians. Thomas de Hartmann (who had made his debut years ago, before Czar Nicholas II of Russia), worked on the music for the ballet, and Olga Ivanovna Hinzenberg (who years later wed the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright), practiced the dances. It was here that Gurdjieff opened his first Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

In late May 1920, when political and social conditions in Georgia deteriorated, his party travelled to Batumi on the Black Sea coast and then by ship to Istanbul. Gurdjieff rented an apartment on Kumbaracı Street in Péra and later at 13 Abdullatif Yemeneci Sokak near the Galata Tower. The apartment is near the kha'neqa'h (dervish lodge) of the Mevlevi Order (a Sufi order following the teachings of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi), where Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Thomas de Hartmann witnessed the sema ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes. In Istanbul, Gurdjieff also met his future pupil Capt. John G. Bennett, then head of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence in Constantinople, who describes his impression of Gurdjieff as follows:

It was there that I first met Gurdjieff in the autumn of 1920, and no surroundings could have been more appropriate. In Gurdjieff, East and West do not just meet. Their difference is annihilated in a world outlook which knows no distinctions of race or creed. This was my first, and has remained one of my strongest impressions. A Greek from the Caucasus, he spoke Turkish with an accent of unexpected purity, the accent that one associates with those born and bred in the narrow circle of the Imperial Court. His appearance was striking enough even in Turkey, where one saw many unusual types. His head was shaven, immense black moustache, eyes which at one moment seemed very pale and at another almost black. Below average height, he gave nevertheless an impression of great physical strength.

Prieuré at Avon
In August 1921 and 1922, Gurdjieff travelled around western Europe, lecturing and giving demonstrations of his work in various cities, such as Berlin and London. He attracted the allegiance of Ouspensky's many prominent pupils (notably the editor A. R. Orage). After an unsuccessful attempt to gain British citizenship, Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau. The once-impressive but somewhat crumbling mansion set in extensive grounds housed an entourage of several dozen, including some of Gurdjieff's remaining relatives and some White Russian refugees.

New pupils included C. S. Nott, René Zuber, Margaret Anderson and her ward Fritz Peters. The intellectual and middle-class types who were attracted to Gurdjieff's teaching often found the Prieuré's spartan accommodation and emphasis on hard labour in the grounds disconcerting. Gurdjieff was putting into practice his teaching that people need to develop physically, emotionally and intellectually, and so lectures, music, dance, and manual work was organised. Older pupils noticed how the Prieuré teaching differed from the complex metaphysical "system" that had been taught in Russia. In addition to the physical hardships, his personal behaviour towards pupils could be ferocious:

Gurdjieff was standing by his bed in a state of what seemed to me to be completely uncontrolled fury. He was raging at Orage, who stood impassively and very pale, framed in one of the windows.... Suddenly, in the space of an instant, Gurdjieff's voice stopped, his whole personality changed and he gave me a broad smile - and looking incredibly peaceful and inwardly quiet, motioned me to leave. He then resumed his tirade with undiminished force. This happened so quickly that I do not believe that Mr. Orage even noticed the break in the rhythm.

During this period, Gurdjieff acquired notoriety as "the man who killed Katherine Mansfield" after Katherine Mansfield died there of tuberculosis on 9 January 1923. However, James Moore and Ouspensky argue that Mansfield knew she would soon die and that Gurdjieff made her last days happy and fulfilling.

First car accident, writing and visits to North America

Starting in 1924, Gurdjieff made visits to North America, where he eventually received the pupils taught previously by A.R. Orage. In 1924, while driving alone from Paris to Fontainebleau, he had a near-fatal car accident. Nursed by his wife and mother, he made a slow and painful recovery against all medical expectations. Still convalescent, he formally "disbanded" his institute on 26 August (in fact he dispersed only his "less dedicated" pupils) which he expressed was a personal undertaking: "in the future, under the pretext of different worthy reasons, to remove from my eyesight all those who by this or that make my life too comfortable".

Whilst recovering from his injuries and still too weak to write himself, he began to dictate his magnum opus Beelzebub's Tales, the first part of All and Everything in a mixture of Armenian and Russian. The book is generally found to be convoluted and obscure and forces the reader to "work" to find its meaning. He continued to develop the book over some years, writing in noisy cafes which he found conducive for setting down his thoughts.

Gurdjieff's mother died in 1925 and his wife developed cancer and died in June 1926. Ouspensky attended her funeral. According to Fritz Peters, Gurdjieff was in New York from November 1925 to the spring of 1926, when he succeeded in raising over $100,000. He was to make six or seven trips to the US, but alienated a number of people with his brash and impudent demands for money. Some have interpreted that in terms of his following the Malamatiyya technique of the Sufis, he was deliberately attracting disapproval.

A Chicago-based Gurdjieff group was founded by Jean Toomer in 1927 after he had trained at the Prieuré for a year. Diana Huebert was a regular member of the Chicago group, and documented the several visits Gurdjieff made to the group in 1932 and 1934 in her memoirs on the man.

Despite his fund-raising efforts in America, the Prieuré operation ran into debt and was shut down in 1932. Gurdjieff constituted a new teaching group in Paris. Known as The Rope, it was composed of only women, many of them writers, and several lesbians. Members included Kathryn Hulme, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson and Enrico Caruso's widow, Dorothy. Gurdjieff became acquainted with Gertrude Stein through its members, but she was never a follower.

In 1935, Gurdjieff stopped work on All and Everything. He had completed the first two parts of the planned trilogy but then started on the Third Series. (It was later published under the title Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'.) In 1936, he settled in a flat at 6, Rue des Colonels-Renard in Paris, where he was to stay for the rest of his life. In 1937, his brother Dmitry died, and The Rope disbanded.

World War II
Although the flat at 6 Rue des Colonels-Renard was very small, he continued to teach groups of pupils there throughout the war. Visitors have described his pantry or 'inner sanctum' as being stocked with an extraordinary collection of eastern delicacies and the suppers he held with elaborate toasts with vodka and cognac to "idiots". Having cut a physically impressive figure for many years, he was now paunchy. His teaching was now conveyed more directly through personal interaction with his pupils, who were encouraged to study the ideas he had expressed in Beelzebub's Tales.

His personal business enterprises (he had intermittently been a dealer in oriental rugs and carpets for much of his life, among other activities) enabled him to offer charitable relief to neighbours who had been affected by the difficult circumstances of the war, and it also brought him to the attention of the authorities, leading to a night in the cells.

Final years

After the war, Gurdjieff tried to reconnect with his former pupils. Ouspensky was hesitant, but after his death (October 1947), his widow advised his remaining pupils to see Gurdjieff in Paris. J. G. Bennett also visited from England, their first meeting in 25 years. Ouspensky's pupils in England had all thought that Gurdjieff was dead. They discovered he was alive only after the death of Ouspensky, who had not told them that Gurdjieff, from whom he had learnt of the teaching, was still living. They were overjoyed and many of Ouspensky's pupils including Rina Hands, Basil Tilley and Catherine Murphy visited Gurdjieff in Paris. Hands and Murphy worked on the typing and retyping for the publication of All and Everything.

Gurdjieff suffered a second car accident in 1948 but again made an unexpected recovery.

"I was looking at a dying man. Even this is not enough to express it. It was a dead man, a corpse, that came out of the car; and yet it walked. I was shivering like someone who sees a ghost."

With iron-like tenacity, he managed to get to his room, where he sat down and said: "Now all organs are destroyed. Must make new". Then, he turned to Bennett, smiling: "Tonight you come dinner. I must make body work". As he spoke, a great spasm of pain shook his body and blood gushed from an ear. Bennett thought: "He has a cerebral haemorrhage. He will kill himself if he continues to force his body to move". But then he reflected: "He has to do all this. If he allows his body to stop moving, he will die. He has power over his body".

After recovering, Gurdjieff finalised plans for the official publication of Beelzebub's Tales and made two trips to New York. He also visited the famous prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux, giving his interpretation of their significance to his pupils.

Gurdjieff died of cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on 29 October 1949. His funeral took place at the St. Alexandre Nevsky Russian Orthodox Cathedral at 12 Rue Daru, Paris. He is buried in the cemetery at Avon (near Fontainebleau).

Children
Although no evidence or documents have certified anyone as a child of Gurdjieff, the following six people are believed to be his children:
 Nikolai Stjernvall (1919–2010), whose mother was Elizaveta Grigorievna, wife of Leonid Robertovich de Stjernvall.
 Michel de Salzmann (1923–2001), whose mother was Jeanne Allemand de Salzmann; he later became head of the Gurdjieff Foundation.
 Cynthie Sophia "Dushka" Howarth (1924–2010); her mother was dancer Jessmin Howarth. She went on to found the Gurdjieff Heritage Society.
 Eve Taylor (born 1928), whose mother was one of his followers, American socialite Edith Annesley Taylor.
 Sergei Chaverdian; his mother was Lily Galumnian Chaverdian.
 Andrei, born to a mother known only as Georgii.

Gurdjieff had a niece, Luba Gurdjieff Everitt, who for about 40 years (1950s–1990s) ran a small but rather famous restaurant, Luba's Bistro, in Knightsbridge, London.

Ideas
Gurdjieff taught that people cannot perceive reality in their current condition because they are not conscious of themselves, but rather live in a state of a hypnotic "waking sleep".

"Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies."
As a result, a person perceives the world in a state of dream. He asserted that people in their ordinary waking state function as unconscious automatons, but that a person can "wake up" and become what a human being ought to be.

Some contemporary researchers claim that Gurdjieff's concept of self-remembering is "close to the Buddhist concept of awareness or a popular definition of 'mindfulness'.... The Buddhist term translated into English as 'mindfulness' originates in the Pali term 'sati', which is identical to Sanskrit 'smṛti'. Both terms mean 'to remember'."

Self-development teachings

Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result, humans were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis such as World War I. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could provide only a one-sided development, which did not result in a fully integrated human being.

According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the three dimensions of the person—namely, either the emotions, or the physical body or the mind—tends to develop in such schools and sects, and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers, as Gurdjieff called them. As a result, these paths fail to produce a properly balanced human being. Furthermore, anyone wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three—namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. But Gurdjieff also described a "Fourth Way" which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and America. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff's discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development.

In parallel with other spiritual traditions, Gurdjieff taught that a person must expend considerable effort to effect the transformation that leads to awakening. The effort that is put into practice Gurdjieff referred to as "The Work" or "Work on oneself". According to Gurdjieff, "...Working on oneself is not so difficult as wishing to work, taking the decision."
Though Gurdjieff never put major significance on the term "Fourth Way" and never used the term in his writings, his pupil P. D. Ouspensky from 1924 to 1947 made the term and its use central to his own teaching of Gurdjieff's ideas. After Ouspensky's death, his students published a book titled The Fourth Way based on his lectures.

Gurdjieff's teaching addressed the question of humanity's place in the universe and the importance of developing latent potentialities—regarded as our natural endowment as human beings but rarely brought to fruition. He taught that higher levels of consciousness, higher bodies, inner growth and development are real possibilities that nonetheless require conscious work to achieve.

In his teaching Gurdjieff gave a distinct meaning to various ancient texts such as the Bible and many religious prayers. He believed that such texts possess meanings very different from those commonly attributed to them. "Sleep not"; "Awake, for you know not the hour"; and "The Kingdom of Heaven is Within" are examples of biblical statements which point to teachings whose essence has been forgotten.

Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness. According to his teaching, this inner development of oneself is the beginning of a possible further process of change, the aim of which is to transform people into what Gurdjieff believed they ought to be.

Distrusting "morality", which he describes as varying from culture to culture, often contradictory and hypocritical, Gurdjieff greatly stressed the importance of "conscience".

To provide conditions in which inner attention could be exercised more intensively, Gurdjieff also taught his pupils "sacred dances" or "movements", later known as the Gurdjieff movements, which they performed together as a group. He also left a body of music, inspired by what he heard in visits to remote monasteries and other places, written for piano in collaboration with one of his pupils, Thomas de Hartmann.

Gurdjieff also used various exercises, such as the "Stop" exercise, to prompt self-observation in his students. Other shocks to help awaken his pupils from constant daydreaming were always possible at any moment.

Methods
"The Work" is in essence a training in the development of consciousness. Gurdjieff used a number of methods and materials, including meetings, music, movements (sacred dance), writings, lectures, and innovative forms of group and individual work. Part of the function of these various methods was to undermine and undo the ingrained habit patterns of the mind and bring about moments of insight. Since each individual has different requirements, Gurdjieff did not have a one-size-fits-all approach, and he adapted and innovated as circumstance required. In Russia he was described as keeping his teaching confined to a small circle, whereas in Paris and North America he gave numerous public demonstrations.

Gurdjieff felt that the traditional methods of self-knowledge—those of the fakir, monk, and yogi (acquired, respectively, through pain, devotion, and study)—were inadequate on their own and often led to various forms of stagnation and one-sidedness. His methods were designed to augment the traditional paths with the purpose of hastening the developmental process. He sometimes called these methods The Way of the Sly Man because they constituted a sort of short-cut through a process of development that might otherwise carry on for years without substantive results. The teacher, more adept, sees the individual requirements of the disciple and sets tasks that he knows will result in a transformation of consciousness in that individual. Instructive historical parallels can be found in the annals of Zen Buddhism, where teachers employed a variety of methods (sometimes highly unorthodox) to bring about the arising of insight in the student.

Music
Gurdjieff's music divides into three distinct periods. The "first period" is the early music, including music from the ballet Struggle of the Magicians and music for early movements dating to the years around 1918.

The "second period" music, for which Gurdjieff arguably became best known, written in collaboration with Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann, is described as the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music. Dating to the mid-1920s, it offers a rich repertoire with roots in Caucasian and Central Asian folk and religious music, Russian Orthodox liturgical music, and other sources. This music was often first heard in the salon at the Prieuré, where much was composed. Since the publication of four volumes of this piano repertoire by Schott, recently completed, there has been a wealth of new recordings, including orchestral versions of music prepared by Gurdjieff and de Hartmann for the Movements demonstrations of 1923–24. Solo piano versions of these works have been recorded by Cecil Lytle, Keith Jarrett, Frederic Chiu.

The "last musical period" is the improvised harmonium music which often followed the dinners Gurdjieff held at his Paris apartment during the Occupation and immediate post-war years to his death in 1949. In all, Gurdjieff in collaboration with de Hartmann composed some 200 pieces. In May 2010, 38 minutes of unreleased solo piano music on acetate was purchased by Neil Kempfer Stocker from the estate of his late step-daughter, Dushka Howarth. In 2009, pianist Elan Sicroff released Laudamus: The Music of Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, consisting of a selection of Gurdjieff/de Hartmann collaborations (as well as three early romantic works composed by de Hartmann in his teens). In 1998 Alessandra Celletti released "Hidden Sources" (Kha Records) with 18 tracks by Gurdjieff/de Hartmann.

The English concert pianist and composer Helen Perkin (married name Helen Adie) came to Gurdjieff through Ouspensky and first visited Gurdjieff in Paris after the war. She and her husband George Adie emigrated to Australia in 1965 and established the Gurdjieff Society of Newport. Recordings of her performing music by Thomas de Hartmann were issued on CD. But she was also a Movements teacher and composed music for the Movements as well. Some of this music has been published and privately circulated.

Movements

Movements, or sacred dances, constitute an integral part of the Gurdjieff Work. Gurdjieff sometimes referred to himself as a "teacher of dancing" and gained initial public notice for his attempts to put on a ballet in Moscow called Struggle of the Magicians.

In Views from the Real World Gurdjieff wrote, "You ask about the aim of the movements. To each position of the body corresponds a certain inner state and, on the other hand, to each inner state corresponds a certain posture. A man, in his life, has a certain number of habitual postures and he passes from one to another without stopping at those between. Taking new, unaccustomed postures enables you to observe yourself inside differently from the way you usually do in ordinary conditions."

Films of movements demonstrations are occasionally shown for private viewing by the Gurdjieff Foundations, and some examples are shown in a scene in the Peter Brook movie Meetings with Remarkable Men.

Writings
Gurdjieff wrote a unique trilogy with the Series title All and Everything. The first volume, finalized by Gurdjieff shortly before his death and first published in 1950, is the First Series and titled An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man or Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. At 1238 pages it is a lengthy allegorical work that recounts the explanations of Beelzebub to his grandson concerning the beings of the planet Earth and laws which govern the universe. It provides a vast platform for Gurdjieff's deeply considered philosophy. A controversial redaction of Beelzebub's Tales was published by some of Gurdjieff's followers as an alternative "edition", in 1992. [See Paul Beekman Taylor's' Gurdjieff's Worlds of Words (2014) for an informed account.]

On his page of Friendly Advice facing the first Contents page of Beelzebub's Tales Gurdjieff lays out his own program of three obligatory initial readings of each of the three series in sequence and concludes, "Only then will you be able to count upon forming your own impartial judgement, proper to yourself alone, on my writings. And only then can my hope be actualized that according to your understanding you will obtain the specific benefit for your self which I anticipate."

The posthumous second series, edited by Jeanne de Salzmann, is titled Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) and is written in a seemingly accessible manner as a memoir of his early years, but also contains some 'Arabian Nights' embellishments and allegorical statements. His posthumous Third Series, (Life Is Real Only Then, When 'I Am'), written as if unfinished and also edited by Jeanne de Salzmann, contains an intimate account of Gurdjieff's inner struggles during his later years, as well as transcripts of some of his lectures. An enormous and growing amount has been written about Gurdjieff's ideas and methods, but his own challenging writings remain the primary sources.

Reception and influence
Opinions on Gurdjieff's writings and activities are divided. Sympathizers regard him as a charismatic master who brought new knowledge into Western culture, a psychology and cosmology that enable insights beyond those provided by established science. Osho described Gurdjieff as one of the most significant spiritual masters of this age. At the other end of the spectrum, some critics assert he was a charlatan with a large ego and a constant need for self-glorification.

Gurdjieff had significant influence on some artists, writers, and thinkers, including Walter Inglis Anderson, Peter Brook, Kate Bush, Darby Crash, Muriel Draper, Robert Fripp, Keith Jarrett, Timothy Leary, Katherine Mansfield, Dennis Lewis, James Moore, A. R. Orage, P. D. Ouspensky, Maurice Nicoll, Louis Pauwels, Robert S de Ropp, René Barjavel, Rene Daumal, George Russell, David Sylvian, Jean Toomer, Jeremy Lane, Therion, P. L. Travers, Alan Watts, Minor White, Colin Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Zorn, and Franco Battiato.

Gurdjieff's notable personal students include P. D. Ouspensky, Olga de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, Jane Heap, Jeanne de Salzmann, Willem Nyland, Lord Pentland (Henry John Sinclair), John G. Bennett, Alfred Richard Orage, Maurice Nicoll, and Rene Daumal.

Gurdjieff gave new life and practical form to ancient teachings of both East and West. For example, the Socratic and Platonic emphasis on know thyself recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the practice of self-observation. His teachings about self-discipline and restraint reflect Stoic teachings. The Hindu and Buddhist notion of attachment recurs in Gurdjieff's teaching as the concept of identification. His descriptions of the "three being-foods" matches that of Ayurveda, and his statement that "time is breath" echoes jyotish, the Vedic system of astrology. Similarly, his cosmology can be "read" against ancient and esoteric sources, respectively Neoplatonic and in such sources as Robert Fludd's treatment of macrocosmic musical structures.

An aspect of Gurdjieff's teachings which has come into prominence in recent decades is the enneagram geometric figure. For many students of the Gurdjieff tradition, the enneagram remains a koan, challenging and never fully explained. There have been many attempts to trace the origins of this version of the enneagram; some similarities to other figures have been found, but it seems that Gurdjieff was the first person to make the enneagram figure publicly known and that only he knew its true source. Others have used the enneagram figure in connection with personality analysis, principally with the Enneagram of Personality as developed by Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo and others. Most aspects of this application are not directly connected to Gurdjieff's teaching or to his explanations of the enneagram.

Gurdjieff inspired the formation of many groups around the world after his death, all of which still function today and follow his ideas. The Gurdjieff Foundation, the largest organization influenced by the ideas of Gurdjieff, was organized by Jeanne de Salzmann during the early 1950s, and led by her in cooperation with other pupils of his. Other pupils of Gurdjieff formed independent groups. Willem Nyland, one of Gurdjieff's closest students and an original founder and trustee of The Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, left to form his own groups in the early 1960s. Jane Heap was sent to London by Gurdjieff, where she led groups until her death in 1964. Louise Goepfert March, who became a pupil of Gurdjieff's in 1929, started her own groups in 1957. Independent thriving groups were also formed and initially led by John G. Bennett and A. L. Staveley near Portland, Oregon.

Pupils

Gurdjieff's notable pupils include:

Peter D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) was a Russian journalist, author and philosopher. He met Gurdjieff in 1915 and spent the next five years studying with him, then formed his own independent groups at London in 1921. Ouspensky became the first "career" Gurdjieffian and led independent Fourth Way groups in London and New York for his remaining years. He wrote In Search of the Miraculous about his encounters with Gurdjieff and it remains the best known and most widely read account of Gurdjieff's early experiments with groups.

Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) was a Russian composer with Ukrainian origins. He and his wife Olga first met Gurdjieff in 1916 at Saint Petersburg. They remained Gurdjieff's close students until 1929. During that time they lived at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Paris. Between July 1925 and May 1927 Thomas de Hartmann transcribed and co-wrote some of the music that Gurdjieff collected and used for his Movements exercises. They collaborated on hundreds of pieces of concert music arranged for the piano.

This concert music was first recorded and published privately from the 1950s to 1980s. It was first issued publicly as the Music of Gurdjieff / de Hartmann, Thomas de Hartmann, piano by Triangle Records, with 49 tracks on 4 vinyl disks in 1998, then reissued as a 3-CD set containing 56 tracks in 1989. A more extensive compilation was later issued as the Gurdjieff / de Hartmann Music for the Piano in 4 printed volumes by Schott, between 1996 and 2005, and as audio CDs under the same title in four volumes, with nine discs recorded with three concert pianists, by Schott/Wergo between 1997 and 2001.

Olga de Hartmann (née Arkadievna, 1885–1987) was Gurdjieff's personal secretary during their Prieuré years and took most of the original dictations of his writings during that period. She also authenticated Gurdjieff's early talks in the book Views from the Real World (1973). The de Hartmanns' memoir, Our Life with Mr Gurdjieff (1st ed, 1964, 2nd ed, 1983, 3rd ed 1992), records their Gurdjieff years in great detail. Their Montreal Gurdjieff group, literary and musical estate is represented by retired Canadian National Film Board producer Tom Daly.

Jeanne de Salzmann (1889–1990). Alexander and Jeanne de Salzmann met Gurdjieff in Tiflis in 1919. She was originally a dancer, a Dalcroze Eurythmics teacher. She was, along with Jessmin Howarth and Rose Mary Nott, responsible for transmitting Gurdjieff's choreographed movement exercises and institutionalizing Gurdjieff's teachings through the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, the Gurdjieff Institute of Paris, London's Gurdjieff Society Inc., and other groups she established in 1953. She also established Triangle Editions in the US, which imprint claims copyright on all Gurdjieff's posthumous writings.

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) was a British intelligence officer, polyglot (fluent in English, French, German, Turkish, Greek, Italian), technologist, industrial research director, author, and teacher, best known for his many books on psychology and spirituality, particularly the teachings of Gurdjieff. Bennett met both Ouspensky and then Gurdjieff at Istanbul in 1920, spent August 1923 at Gurdjieff's Institute, became Ouspensky's pupil between 1922 and 1941 and, after learning that Gurdjieff was still alive, was one of Gurdjieff's frequent visitors in Paris during 1949. See Witness: the Autobiography of John Bennett (1974), Gurdjieff: Making a New World(1974), Idiots in Paris: diaries of J. G. Bennett and Elizabeth Bennett, 1949 (1991).

Alfred Richard Orage (1873–1934) was an influential British editor best known for the magazine New Age. He began attending Ouspensky's London talks in 1921 then met Gurdjieff when the latter first visited London early in 1922. Shortly thereafter, Orage sold New Age and relocated to Gurdjieff's institute at the Prieré, and in 1924 was appointed by Gurdjieff to lead the institute's branch in New York. After Gurdjieff's nearly fatal automobile accident in July 1924 and because of his prolonged recuperation during 1924 and intense writing period for several years, Orage continued in New York until 1931. During this period, Orage was responsible for editing the English typescript of Beelzebub's Tales (1931) and Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963) as Gurdjieff's assistant. This period is described in some detail by Paul Beekman Taylor in his Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (2001).

Maurice Nicoll (1884–1953) was a Harley Street psychiatrist and Carl Jung's delegate in London. Along with Orage he attended Ouspensky's 1921 London talks where he met Gurdjieff. With his wife Catherine and their daughter, he spent almost a year at Gurdjieff's Prieuré institute. A year later, when they returned to London, Nicoll rejoined Ouspensky's group. In 1931, on Ouspensky's advice he started his own Fourth Way groups in England. He is best known for the encyclopedic six-volume series of articles in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Boston: Shambhala, 1996, and Samuel Weiser Inc., 1996).

Willem Nyland (1890–1975) was a Dutch-American chemist who first met Gurdjieff early in 1924 during the latter's first visit to the US. He was a charter member of the NY branch of Gurdjieff's Institute, participated in Orage's meetings between 1924 and 1931, and was a charter member of the Gurdjieff Foundation from 1953 and through its formative years. In the early 1960s he established an independent group in Warwick NY, where he began making reel-to-reel audio recordings of his meetings, which became archived in a private library of some 2600 90-minute audio tapes. Many of these tapes have also been transcribed and indexed, but remain unpublished. Gurdjieff Group Work with Wilhem (sic-Willem) Nyland (1983) by Irmis B. Popoff, sketches Nyland's group work.

Jane Heap (1883–1964) was an American writer, editor, artist, and publisher. She met Gurdjieff during his 1924 visit to New York, and set up a Gurdjieff study group at her apartment in Greenwich Village. In 1925, she moved to Paris to study at Gurdjieff's Institute, and re-established her group in Paris until 1935 when Gurdjieff sent her to London to lead the group C. S. Nott had established and which she continued to lead until her death. Jane Heap's Paris group became Gurdjieff's 'Rope' group after her departure, and contained several notable writers, including Margaret Anderson, Solita Solano, Kathryn Hulme, and others who proved helpful to Gurdjieff while he was editing his first two books.

Kenneth Macfarlane Walker (1882–1966) was a prominent British surgeon and prolific author. He was a member of Ouspensky's London group for decades, and after the latter's death in 1947 visited Gurdjieff in Paris many times. As well as many accessible medical books for lay readers, he wrote some of the earliest informed accounts of Gurdjieff's ideas, Venture with Ideas (1951) and A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching (1957).

Henry John Sinclair, 2nd Baron Pentland (1907–1984) was a pupil of Ouspensky's during the 1930s and 1940s. He visited Gurdjieff regularly in Paris in 1949, then was appointed as President of the Gurdjieff Foundation of America by Jeanne de Salzmann when she founded that institution at New York in 1953. He established the Gurdjieff Foundation of California in the mid-1950s and remained President of the US Foundation branches until his death. Pentland also became President of Triangle Editions when it was established in 1974.

Critics
Louis Pauwels, among others, criticizes Gurdjieff for his insistence on considering people as "asleep" in a state closely resembling "hypnotic sleep". Gurdjieff said, even specifically at times, that a pious, good, and moral person was no more "spiritually developed" than any other person; they are all equally "asleep".

Henry Miller approved of Gurdjieff not considering himself holy but, after writing a brief introduction to Fritz Peters' book Boyhood with Gurdjieff, Miller wrote that people are not meant to lead a "harmonious life" as Gurdjieff believed in naming his institute.

Critics note that Gurdjieff gives no value to most of the elements that compose the life of an average person. According to Gurdjieff, everything an average person possesses, accomplishes, does, and feels is completely accidental and without any initiative. A common everyday ordinary person is born a machine and dies a machine without any chance of being anything else. This belief seems to run counter to the Judeo-Christian tradition that man is a living soul. Gurdjieff believed that the possession of a soul (a state of psychological unity which he equated with being "awake") was a "luxury" that a disciple could attain only by the most painstaking work over a long period of time. The majority—in whom the true meaning of the gospel failed to take root—went the "broad way" that "led to destruction."

In Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (see bibliography), Gurdjieff expresses his reverence for the founders of the mainstream religions of East and West and his contempt (by and large) for what successive generations of believers have made of those religious teachings. His discussions of "orthodoxhydooraki" and "heterodoxhydooraki"—orthodox fools and heterodox fools, from the Russian word durak (fool)—position him as a critic of religious distortion and, in turn, as a target for criticism from some within those traditions. Gurdjieff has been interpreted by some, Ouspensky among others, to have had a total disregard for the value of mainstream religion, philanthropic work and the value of doing right or wrong in general.

Gurdjieff's former students who have criticized him argue that, despite his seeming total lack of pretension to any kind of "guru holiness", in many anecdotes his behavior displays the unsavory and impure character of a man who was a cynical manipulator of his followers. Gurdjieff's own pupils wrestled to understand him. For example, in a written exchange between Luc Dietrich and Henri Tracol dating to 1943: "L.D.: How do you know that Gurdjieff wishes you well? H.T.: I feel sometimes how little I interest him—and how strongly he takes an interest in me. By that I measure the strength of an intentional feeling."

Louis Pauwels wrote Monsieur Gurdjieff (first edition published in Paris in 1954 by Editions du Seuil). In an interview, Pauwels said of the Gurdjieff work: "... After two years of exercises which both enlightened and burned me, I found myself in a hospital bed with a thrombosed central vein in my left eye and weighing ninety-nine pounds... Horrible anguish and abysses opened up for me. But it was my fault."

Pauwels believed that Karl Haushofer, the father of geopolitics whose protégée was Deputy Reich Führer Rudolf Hess, was one of the real "seekers after truth" described by Gurdjieff. According to Rom Landau, a journalist in the 1930s, Achmed Abdullah told him at the beginning of the 20th century that Gurdjieff was a Russian secret agent in Tibet who went by the name of "Hambro Akuan Dorzhieff" (i.e. Agvan Dorjiev), a tutor to the Dalai Lama. However, the actual Dorzhieff went to live in the Buddhist temple erected in St. Petersburg and after the revolution was imprisoned by Stalin. James Webb conjectured that Gurdjieff might have been Dorzhieff's assistant Ushe Narzunoff (i.e. Ovshe Norzunov).

Colin Wilson writes about "...Gurdjieff's reputation for seducing his female students. (In Providence, Rhode Island, in 1960, a man was pointed out to me as one of Gurdjieff's illegitimate children. The professor who told me this also assured me that Gurdjieff had left many children around America.)"

In The Oragean Version, C. Daly King surmised that the problem that Gurdjieff had with Orage's teachings was that the "Oragean Version", Orage himself, was not emotional enough in Gurdjieff's estimation and had not enough "incredulity" and faith. King wrote that Gurdjieff did not state it as clearly and specifically as this, but was quick to add that, to him, nothing Gurdjieff said was specific or clear.

According to Osho, the Gurdjieff system is incomplete, drawing from Dervish sources inimical to Kundalini. Some Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandi, draw from and are amenable to Kundalini.

The Teachers of Gurdjieff, a book by "Rafael Lefort" was published in 1966. It suggested that Gurdjieff's teachings were actually derived from those of Naqshbandi Sufis. The book has since been attributed to the Sufi school of the brothers Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah, its authenticity questioned, and even described by Gurdjieff biographer James Moore as a "distasteful fabrication". Gurdjieffian student and writer John G. Bennett also claimed that "more than anything else", Gurdjieff was a Sufi. Though this view has been questioned "by more orthodox followers of Gurdjieff", it is claimed by other researchers such as William James Thompson and Anna Challenger that textual analysis of Gurdjieff's works shows references to Islamic and Sufi figures, including the Naqshbandi and the wise fool of Sufic folklore, Mulla Nasrudin.

Bibliography
Three books by Gurdjieff were published in the English language in the United States after his death: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson published in 1950 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., Meetings with Remarkable Men, published in 1963 by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., and Life is Real Only Then, When 'I Am', printed privately by E. P. Dutton & Co. and published in 1978 by Triangle Editions Inc. for private distribution only. This trilogy is Gurdjieff's legominism, known collectively as All and Everything. A legominism is, according to Gurdjieff, "one of the means of transmitting information about certain events of long-past ages through initiates". A book of his early talks was also collected by his student and personal secretary, Olga de Hartmann, and published in 1973 as Views from the Real World: Early Talks in Moscow, Essentuki, Tiflis, Berlin, London, Paris, New York, and Chicago, as recollected by his pupils.

Gurdjieff's views were initially promoted through the writings of his pupils. The best known and widely read of these is P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching, which is widely regarded as a crucial introduction to the teaching. Others refer to Gurdjieff's own books as the primary texts. Numerous anecdotal accounts of time spent with Gurdjieff were published by Charles Stanley Nott, Thomas and Olga de Hartmann, Fritz Peters, René Daumal, John G. Bennett, Maurice Nicoll, Margaret Anderson and Louis Pauwels, among others.

The feature film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), loosely based on Gurdjieff's book by the same name, ends with performances of Gurdjieff's dances known simply as the "exercises" but later promoted as movements. Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook wrote the film, Brook directed, and Dragan Maksimovic and Terence Stamp star, as does South African playwright and actor Athol Fugard.

In Fiction
Leonora Carrington's experience of the Fourth Way led her to model the character Dr Gambit on Gurdjieff in her novel The Hearing Trumpet (completed 1950, published 1976).

Two stories in C. Daly King's 1935 collection The Curious Mr. Tarrant ("The Episode of the Man with Three Eyes" and "The Episode of the Final Bargain") have a character named Monsieur Hor who is based on Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff appears as a character in Andrew Crumey's novel Beethoven's Assassins (2023), together with A.R. Orage, Thomas de Hartmann and Katherine Mansfield. The novel also discusses the theories of P. D. Ouspensky

Books

All and Everything trilogy:

Notes

Footnotes

References

Further reading
 Jean Vaysse, Toward Awakening, An Approach to the Teaching Left by Gurdjieff. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, .

External links

 International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations
 Gurdjieff Reading Guide compiled by J. Walter Driscoll. Fifty-two articles which provide an independent survey of the literature by or about George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and offer a wide range of informed opinion (admiring, critical, and contradictory) about him, his activities, writings, philosophy, and influence.
 Writings on Gurdjieff's teachings in the Elizabeth Jenks Clark Collection of Margaret Anderson Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
 Howarth Gurdjieff Archive at The New York Public Library
 George Gurdjieff: "Seeker of Truth" A video documentary on Gurdjieff's life and teaching.
 Gurdjieff.am

19th-century births
1949 deaths
People from Gyumri
People from Erivan Governorate
Fourth Way
20th-century Russian philosophers
Russian spiritual writers
20th-century mystics
Spiritual teachers
New Age predecessors
Russian hypnotists
Burials in Île-de-France
People from the Russian Empire of Greek descent

George Gurdjieff


Ernesto Igel (27 November 1893 – 24 January 1966) was an Austrian entrepreneur and founder of the company Empresa Brasileira de Gáz a Domilicio Ltda, the first Brazilian gas distribution network of fuel for cooking equipment (LPG).

In 1938, the company changed its name to Ultragaz S.A.

Through Ultragaz's growth and the creation of new companies, Ernesto Igel founded Ultra, also known as Ultrapar.

Early life

Born to a family of merchants in Vienna, Austria, Igel was the eldest of five children. At 15, he got his first job at an import-export company. At 21, he was drafted to the Austrian army to fight in World War I. He was sent to Romania, where he served as a management assistant.

Career
After the war, Igel moved to Brazil in 1920, when he was 26 years old. He then established the company Ernesto Igel & Cia., an importer of tableware, sanitary metals, stoves and heaters for use with pipeline gas. During his trips to Europe, Igel got to work with the then-new gas bottling technology for domestic use.

On 30 August 1937, Igel founded Empresa Brasileira de Gáz a Domicílio Ltda. The following year, in September 1938, the company's IPO set the start of Ultragaz S.A. After that, the company extended its operations and began to conduct business throughout Brazil.

Personal life
Igel married Margaret Hartman, also Austrian, with whom he had two children, Pery and Daisy Igel. The businessman headed the administration of their companies until 1959, when he named his son, Pery Igel, as the new head of Ultragaz.

References

1893 births
1966 deaths
Businesspeople from Vienna
20th-century Brazilian businesspeople
Austrian expatriates in Brazil
Igel family

Ernesto Igel


Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science is the second volume of the autobiographical memoir by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. It was published in English in September 2015.

Description
The first volume, titled An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, tells the first thirty-five years of his life, until the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976. In Brief Candle in the Dark, Richard Dawkins continues his autobiography until an academic party for and "... on my seventieth birthday,....". He explains his inspirations, ideas, encounters and history. He mentions some of his 'heroes' such as Charles Darwin, Peter Medawar, Niko Tinbergen, Bill Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Douglas Adams, Carl Sagan and David Attenborough.

He develops subjects such as his scientific work, travels and conferences, his Royal Institution Christmas Lecture (Growing Up in the Universe, in 1991), his work as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in Oxford, his documentaries (such as The Root of All Evil?) as well as his personal life and his books.

The title of the book is a reference to Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow…" and reminds us of the two sides of Dawkins – the educator who staunchly defends rationalism – and the man who sees poetry in life, existence, and scientific explanations

Reviews
Kirkus Reviews found the book "an impressive overview". Dwight Garner wrote that the book "presents a public life more than a private one." Steven Shapin wrote that the book is "a loose and multiply digressive collection of reminiscences, anecdotes, addenda, quotes from admirers, and extended quotes from himself."

See also
 The Demon-Haunted World (book by Carl Sagan whose subtitle "Science as a Candle in the Dark" probably inspired Dawkins' "candle in the dark" title

References

External links

2015 non-fiction books
Science autobiographies
Books by Richard Dawkins
British memoirs
English-language books
English non-fiction books
Bantam Press books

Brief Candle in the Dark


The Republic of Lakotah is a proposed nation inside the United States. It was created by a Native American group called the Lakotah Freedom Delegation. The group believes that the Republic of Lakotah should be treated as a separate country. At the moment, no other country agrees that it is. The area includes parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana.

Background
When European settlers first came to North America, the Lakotah people had been living there for thousands of years. The Lakotah are a Native American tribe that lives in the north central part of the United States.  The Lakotah first signed treaties with the United States in the 1800s. Since that time, the Lakotah have been citizens of the United States.

On December 17, 2007, the Lakotah Freedom Delegation said that Lakotah tribe should no longer be a part of the United States. They wanted to return to the way things were before they signed the treaties.

They drew up borders for the Republic. The area included parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana.  No other country has supported them. Most people feel these are to still belong to the United States.

Reasons for wanting independence
In December 2007, the group went to Washington, D.C. to speak to the government. They said that the Lakotah were ending from the treaties they had with the United States. They said the US had not been following the treaties and this had been causing problems on Lakotah land.

For example, the US and the Lakotah made an agreement called the Treaty of Fort Laramie. It said that the Lakotah could keep the Black Hills. The Black Hills is a very sacredplace for the Lakotah. The US broke the agreement and invaded the Black Hills when gold was found there. Today, the Black Hills is home to the National monument of Mount Rushmore.

The group does not think that the Republic of Lakotah is a new countr. They feel that it is an old counry that has been revived. Not all members of the Lakotah tribe support the groups actiona. Many of the leaders of the Lakotah tribe were not asked beforehand. Traditionally, a vote  is needed to change a treaty. Seventy-five percent of the Lakotah males need to vote to approve the change. There was no vote on the plans to create the Republic of Lakotah.

The group argues that it is legal  for the Lakotah to be its own country. They use the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Article Six of the United States Constitution and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to support  their plans.

The Lakotah Freedom Delegation say they may follow the example of the Philippines or the Marshall Islands. These counrties used to belong to the United States but have become independant.

Government
Anyone can become a citizen of the Republic of Lakotah. The only thing they must do is give up their citizenship of the United States. The group plans to make its own passports and driving licenses. They say that the government will be run in the traditional Lakotah way. The leaders of the counry would be seleted by the tribe elders. They say the nation will use solar energy and wind power to make electricity. They would chose to use these methods because they do not hurt the environment.

At the moment, supporters of the Lakotah Freedom Delegation are arguing over the name of the country. Some people like the name Republic of Lakotah. Otthers prefer Lakotah Oyate. Oyate is the Lakotah word meaning "nation".

Support
A nation does not exist as a country until other countries recognise the boarders or government of that country. Other countries must also treat it as a separate country. The Lakotah Freedom Delegation has contacted the embassies of Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and South Africa. They have asked each of these countries to accept them as an independent country. The group has also mentioned talking to Russia, Finland and Iceland, They say that Ireland and East Timor are interested in the plans. currrently, no other country in the world is treating Lakotah as a separate country.

The US government is not likely to support the Republic of Lakotah. It would mean that the United States would lose some land. The government has said that the plans of the group do not mean anything.

United States
Native Americans
Nationalism

Republic of Lakotah


Manfred Fuhrmann (23 June 1925 – 12 January 2005) was a professor for classical Latin philology and one of the most eminent German philologists.

Life
Fuhrmann was born on 23 June 1925 in Hiddesen (near Detmold). He started his studies in Leiden. While Fuhrmann wanted to study music, he gave up this plan in favour of classical philology and jurisprudence, whereby the classical philology was decisive for him. 1953 he obtained his doctorate in classical philology in Freiburg, followed by his habilitation ibidem. 1962 Fuhrmann accepted a chair at the University of Kiel, 1966 one at the University of Konstanz. Also, he was a member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (academy of sciences of Heidelberg) and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1990. Furthermore, the University of Freiburg gave Fuhrmann an honorary doctorate in jurisprudence. He died on 12 January 2005.

Achievements
Fuhrmann is generally considered to be one of the most eminent German philologists. During his lifetime he has undoubtedly achieved a lot: Above all he has worked as a translator — having translated a huge amount of classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts into German: His probably most outstanding achievement was to translate all of Cicero's speeches. For this translation Fuhrmann received the Johann Heinrich Voß Prize in Translation from the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung 1990. Besides he has translated texts from other classical authors like Horace, Aristotle and Plato.

In addition to his translations, Fuhrmann became well known for his criticism of education. In his book Bildung. Europas kulturelle Identität (Education. The cultural identity of Europe) he criticised that natural sciences are much too important in the most current educational systems, whereas classical philology, history and music do not receive enough recognition.

Literature
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Der europäische Bildungskanon des bürgerlichen Zeitalters. Insel. 2004.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Rom in der Spätantike: Porträt einer Epoche. Artemis & Winkler. 1998.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Cicero: Und die römische Republik. Patmos. 2005.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Bildung: Europas kulturelle Identität. Reclam. 2002.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Die antike Rhetorik. Eine Einführung. Artemis & Winkler. 2003.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Latein und Europa. Die fremd gewordenen Fundamente unserer Bildung. Dumont Buchverlag. 2005.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Die antike Rhetorik. Patmos. 2007.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Geschichte der römischen Literatur. Reclam. 2005.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Cicero: Die catilinarischen Reden. Artemis & Winkler. 1998.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Aristoteles: Poetik. Reclam. 1994.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Platon: Apologie des Sokrates. Reclam. 1986.
Fuhrmann, Manfred: Cicero: Die Reden gegen Verres / In C. Verrem: Erste Verhandlung. Zweite Verhandlung, viertes Buch / Actio prima. Actio secunda, liber quartus''.  Artemis & Winkler. 1999.

References

Sources
Rösler, Wolfgang. Poiss, Thomas: Zum Tod von Manfred Fuhrmann. 2005.
Der Spiegel: Klüger werden mit: Manfred Fuhrmann: Der 77-jährige emeritierte Latinist über Bildung. 2002.

German classical philologists
1925 births
2005 deaths
Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Manfred Fuhrmann


In aerodynamics, Betz's law indicates the maximum power that can be extracted from the wind, independent of the design of a wind turbine in open flow. It was published in 1919 by the German physicist Albert Betz. The law is derived from the principles of conservation of mass and momentum of the air stream flowing through an idealized "actuator disk" that extracts energy from the wind stream. According to Betz's law, no windmill of any mechanism can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind. The factor 16/27 (0.593) is known as Betz's coefficient. Practical utility-scale wind turbines achieve at peak 75–80% of the Betz limit.

The Betz limit is based on an open-disk actuator. If a diffuser is used to collect additional wind flow and direct it through the turbine, more energy can be extracted, but the limit still applies to the cross-section of the entire structure.

Concepts

Betz's law applies to all Newtonian fluids, including wind. If all of the energy coming from wind movement through a turbine were extracted as useful energy, the wind speed afterward would drop to zero. If the wind stopped moving at the exit of the turbine, then no more fresh wind could get in; it would be blocked. In order to keep the wind moving through the turbine, there has to be some wind movement, however small, on the other side with some wind speed greater than zero. Betz's law shows that as air flows through a certain area, and as wind speed slows from losing energy to extraction from a turbine, the airflow must distribute to a wider area. As a result, geometry limits any turbine efficiency to a maximum of 59.3%.

Independent discoveries

British scientist Frederick W. Lanchester derived the same maximum in 1915. The leader of the Russian aerodynamic school, Nikolay Zhukowsky, also published the same result for an ideal wind turbine in 1920, the same year as Betz. It is thus an example of Stigler's law, which posits that no scientific discovery is named after its actual discoverer.

Proof

The Betz Limit is the maximum possible energy that may be derived by means of an infinitely thin rotor from a fluid flowing at a certain speed.

In order to calculate the maximum theoretical efficiency of a thin rotor (of, for example, a windmill) one imagines it to be replaced by a disc that withdraws energy from the fluid passing through it. At a certain distance behind this disc the fluid that has passed through flows with a reduced velocity.

Assumptions

 The disk does not possess a hub and is ideal (so if it were conceptualized as a rotor it might have an infinite number of blades, which have no drag). Any non-idealities are assumed to only lower this idealized value making it an upper bound.
 As an effectively 1-D model, the flow into and out of the disk is axial, and all velocities are transversely uniform. This is a control-volume analysis, and to construct a solution, the control volume must contain all flow going in and out, failure to account for that flow would violate the conservation equations.
 The flow is non-compressible. Density remains constant, and there is no heat transfer.
 Uniform pressure is applied to the disk (again a 1-D model, so no radial dependence on pressure)

Application of conservation of mass (continuity equation)

Applying conservation of mass to this control volume, the mass flow rate (the mass of fluid flowing per unit time) is given by

where v1 is the speed in the front of the rotor, v2 is the speed downstream of the rotor, v is the speed at the fluid power device, ρ is the fluid density, the area of the turbine is given by , and  and  are the areas of the fluid before and after reaching the turbine.

So the density times the area and speed should be equal in each of the three regions: before, while going through the turbine and afterward.

The force exerted on the wind by the rotor is the mass of air multiplied by its acceleration. In terms of the density, surface area and velocities, this can be written as

Power and work

The work done by the force may be written incrementally as

and the power (rate of work done) of the wind is

Now substituting the force F computed above into the power equation will yield the power extracted from the wind:

However, power can be computed another way, by using the kinetic energy. Applying the conservation of energy equation to the control volume yields

Looking back at the continuity equation, a substitution for the mass flow rate yields

Both of these expressions for power are completely valid, one was derived by examining the incremental work done, and the other by the conservation of energy. Equating these two expressions yields

For all v and S the density cannot be 0. Examining the two equated expressions yields an interesting result, namely

or

Therefore, the constant wind velocity across the rotor may be taken as the average of the upstream and downstream velocities. This is arguably the most counter-intuitive stage of the derivation of Betz's law. This strong result is directly  a consequence of the "axial flow" assumption which disallows any massflow radial to axial flow in the actuator disk region.  Without mass escape and a constant diameter to the actuator region the air Speed cannot change in the interaction region and thus no energy can be extracted other than at the front and back of the interaction region, fixing the airspeed of the actuator disk to be the average. (Removing that restriction may allow higher performance than Betz law allows but other radial effects should also be considered. This constant velocity effect is distinct from the radial kinetic energy loss that is also ignored.)

Betz's law and coefficient of performance

Returning to the previous expression for power based on kinetic energy:

By differentiating  with respect to  for a given fluid speed  and a given area , one finds the maximum or minimum value for . The result is that  reaches maximum value when .

Substituting this value results in

The power obtainable from a cylinder of fluid with cross-sectional area  and velocity  is

The reference power for the Betz efficiency calculation is the power in a moving fluid in a cylinder with cross-sectional area  and velocity :

The power coefficient  (= ) is the dimensionless ratio of the extractable power  to the kinetic power  available in the undistributed stream.  It has a maximum value  (or 59.3%; however, coefficients of performance are usually expressed as a decimal, not a percentage).

Modern large wind turbines achieve peak values for  in the range of 0.45 to 0.50, about 75–85% of the theoretically possible maximum. In high wind speed, where the turbine is operating at its rated power, the turbine rotates (pitches) its blades to lower  to protect itself from damage. The power in the wind increases by a factor of 8 from 12.5 to 25 m/s, so  must fall accordingly, getting as low as 0.06 for winds of 25 m/s.

Understanding the Betz results

The speed ratio  between outgoing and incoming wind implies that the outgoing air has only  the kinetic energy of the incoming air, and that  of the energy of the incoming air was extracted. This is a correct calculation, but it only considers the incoming air which eventually travels through the rotor.

The last step in calculating the Betz efficiency  is to divide the calculated power extracted from the flow by a reference power. As its reference power, the Betz analysis uses the power of air upstream moving at  through the cross-sectional area  of the rotor. Since  at the Betz limit, the rotor extracts  of , or  of the incoming kinetic energy.

Because the cross-sectional area of wind flowing through the rotor changes, there must be some flow of air in the directions perpendicular to the axis of the rotor. Any kinetic energy associated with this radial flow has no effect on the calculation because the calculation considers only the initial and final states of the air in the system.

Upper Bounds on windmills
Although it is often touted (e.g. ) as the definitive upper bound on energy extraction by any possible windmill it is not.  Despite the misleading title of his article, Betz (nor Lanchester) never made such an unconditional claim. Notably, a windmill operating at the Betz maximum efficiency has a non-zero wind velocity wake.  Any actuator disk placed downstream of the first will extract added power and so the combined dual actuator complex exceeds Betz limit. The second actuator disk could be but need not be in the far field wind zone (parallel streamline) for this consideration to hold.

The reason for this surprising exception to a law based solely on energy and flux conservation laws lurks in the seemingly modest assumption of transverse uniformity of the axial wind profile within the stream lines.  For example, the aforementioned dual actuator windmill has,downstream, a transverse wind profile that has two distinct velocities and thus is not bound by the limits of the single actuator disk.

Mathematically,  the derivation for an single actuator disk implicitly embeds the assumption that the wind does not change velocity as it transits the "infinitely thin" actuator; in contrast, in the dual actuator hybrid, the wind does change velocity as it transits, invalidating the derivation's key step requiring constant velocity.  A single infinitely thin actuator cannot change the velocity because it would otherwise not conserve flux, but in the hybrid pair, flux can be shed (outside the crossection) between the actuators allowing a different final outlet velocity than the inlet velocity.

Physical multi-coaxial-rotor windmills have been analyzed.  Although these do not exceeded Betz limit in practice, this may be attributable to the fact that rotors not only have losses but must also obey angular momentum and the Blade element momentum theory which limits their efficiency below Betz limit.

Economic relevance

Most real windmills are aerodynamically "thin" making them approximate the assumptions of Betz law.  To the extent that a typical windmill approximates the assumptions in Betz law, then Betz limit places an approximate upper bound on the annual energy that can be extracted at a site. Even if a hypothetical wind blew consistently for a full year, any windmill well approximated by the actuator disk model can extract no more than the Betz limit of the energy contained in that year's wind could be extracted.

Essentially increasing system economic efficiency results from increased production per unit, measured per square meter of vane exposure. An increase in system efficiency is required to bring down the cost of electrical power production. Efficiency increases may be the result of engineering of the wind capture devices, such as the configuration and dynamics of wind turbines, that may increase the power generation from these systems within the Betz limit. System efficiency increases in power application, transmission or storage may also contribute to a lower cost of power per unit.

Points of interest

The assumptions of the Betz derivation impose some physical restrictions on the nature of windmills it applies to (identical inlet/outlet velocity for example).  But beyond those assumptions, the Betz limit has no dependence on the internal mechanics of the wind extraction system, therefore  may take any form provided that the flow travels from the entrance to the control volume to the exit, and the control volume has uniform entry and exit velocities. Any extraneous effects can only decrease the performance of the system (usually a turbine) since this analysis was idealized to disregard friction. Any non-ideal effects would detract from the energy available in the incoming fluid, lowering the overall efficiency.

Some manufacturers and inventors have made claims of exceeding the limit by using nozzles and other wind diversion devices, usually by misrepresenting the Betz limit and calculating only the rotor area and not the total input of air contributing to the wind energy extracted from the system.

The Betz limit has no relevance when calculating turbine efficiency in a mobile application such as a wind-powered vehicle, as here the efficiency could theoretically approach 100% minus blade losses if the fluid flow through the turbine disc (or equivalent) were only retarded imperceptibly. As this would require an infinitely large structure, practical devices rarely achieve 90% or over. The amount of power extracted from the fluid flow at high turbine efficiencies is less than the Betz limit, which is not the same type of efficiency.

Modern development

In 1934 H. Glauert derived the expression for turbine efficiency, when the angular component of velocity is taken into account, by applying an energy balance across the rotor plane. Due to the Glauert model, efficiency is below the Betz limit, and asymptotically approaches this limit when the tip speed ratio goes to infinity.

In 2001, Gorban, Gorlov and Silantyev introduced an exactly solvable model (GGS), that considers non-uniform pressure distribution and curvilinear flow across the turbine plane (issues not included in the Betz approach). They utilized and modified the Kirchhoff model, which describes the turbulent wake behind the actuator as the "degenerated" flow and uses the Euler equation outside the degenerate area. The GGS model predicts that peak efficiency is achieved when the flow through the turbine is approximately 61% of the total flow which is very similar to the Betz result of  for a flow resulting in peak efficiency, but the GGS predicted that the peak efficiency itself is much smaller: 30.1%.

In 2008, viscous computations based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were applied to wind turbine modeling and demonstrated satisfactory agreement with experiment. Computed optimal efficiency is, typically, between the Betz limit and the GGS solution.

References

External links

 Pierre Lecanu, Joel Breard, Dominique Mouazé. Betz limit applied to vertical axis wind turbine theory

Wind power
1919 in science
1919 in Germany

Betz's law


Bernd Dost (May 16, 1939 – February 14, 2015) was a German journalist, filmmaker, writer and publisher. He produced documentaries for ARD, Germany's leading Public TV Station, and wrote articles for the magazine Stern and the newspapers Münchner Merkur and Münchner Abendzeitung. His documentary works are socio-critical and deal with major topics such as environmental protection, human rights and psychology. As a documentary film maker, Bernd Dost has worked with various people like Jane Goodall, the Anti-psychiatry pioneer Ronald David Laing or the writer Carl Amery. His novels include elements of surrealism, transgressional fiction and postmodernism and deal with mass media, religion and psychology. He was the brother of theater and film actress Roswitha Dost.

Biography and work

Youth
Dost was born in Dortmund. His father, Josef Dost, was a foreman, and his mother, Elisabeth "Elli" Dost, a writer. During the Second World War Bernd Dost experienced the bombing of Dortmund, was subsequently evacuated and grew up in Hemer in the Sauerland. From a very early age he was interested in a career as a writer and journalist.

He graduated from secondary school in 1957 in Iserlohn, then studied both German and English languages and literature as well as psychology in Marburg and Munich. He worked his way through university, performing a wide assortment of jobs. For example, as a trainee, he worked for the Westfälische Rundschau in Iserlohn and in his Munich days was involved in the student magazine Profil. He was also hired intermittently by the Insel Film company as an Assistant Script Editor.

Journalism
Bernd Dost elected to be self-employed early in his career but soon experienced financial difficulties associated with the Werbefilm-Studio, a company he co-founded with Canadian Richard Archer. The Studio did not last long, but through Archer, Dost met the Editor-in-Chief and founder of the Münchner Abendzeitung (AZ), Werner Friedmann. Dost then wrote local stories and captions for the legendary photos of attractive local young women by glamour photographer and friend Kurt Huhle. This early "cheesecake" photography was published in the well-read AZ gossip column by Hannes "Hunter" Obermaier.

It was at this time that the Münchner Merkur became aware of Bernd Dost and hired him to write substantive reports. His successful affiliation with the newspaper ceased at the end of 1966 because of artistic and political differences with the main editorial office.

The professional breakup resulted from an article Bernd Dost had written portraying the fate of impoverished Josefine Countess Wrbna-Kaunitz, a trustee of the estate of and confidante of the Wittelsbacher family, who had been snubbed by members of Bavaria's royalty. In this affair, known as the "BAURA scandal" he championed the people who felt they had been duped by the legal staff of the President of the Bavarian Parliament, Rudolf Hanauer, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) party. Under the presidential banner, plots of land were apparently sold illegally. Dost's defense of those claiming "foul" was too politically sensitive for the Münchner Merkur, particularly with its close ties to the CSU and he was soon looking for another job.

He then went to Hamburg to write for Stern magazine with a very ambitious, if not ambiguous personal recommendation: "We can confirm that he is a very quick-witted journalist with an extremely clear opinion of his own." Together with Heiko Gebhardt he soon became one of the young journalists featured at the magazine by chief editor Henri Nannen. Dost's work was also held in high esteem by editors Peter Neuhauser and Manfred Bissinger.

Film making
In May 1968, Dost was sent to Paris to report on the student revolts as backup correspondent. After a period in Paris, he began his career as a documentary filmmaker in Munich. But, while working in the business program of the Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavaria's public Radio and TV complex), he seldom saw eye to eye with the editor-in-chief (and later TV director) Wolf Feller, an intimate friend of the Bavarian Prime Minister, Franz Josef Strauss, about the political content of their work. Nevertheless, he learned much in the fields of visual and drama arts that led to his writing, editing and directing TV documentaries. Dost established good friendships with cartoonist Dieter Hanitzsch and editor Brigitte Schroedter and good relationships with colleagues Wolfgang Kahle, Thilo Schneider, Dietmar Ebert, Karl Neumann, Henric L. Wuermeling, Jürgen Martin Moeller, Meggy Steffens, Christel Hinrichsen, and with Rudolf Mühlfenzl, the somewhat baroque, liberal editor-in-chief.

In 1978, Bernd Dost married Caroline von Harder, a businesswoman, who headed the PR department of the Beck clothing store in Munich and who set up a mail order business of her own selling decorative household accessories. Their daughter Franziska Dost studied TV journalism and later, European Ethnology in Berlin.

Fiction
In 1998, Bernd Dost founded the Vedra Verlag in which he first published his own novels under the pseudonym of R.B. van Mattruer and later other books under his own name plus an extensive collection of short stories by Elisabeth Dost (Elli Dost). In the same year he wrote the book "Schiffe Versenken", a vivid novel set in the world of harbours, smugglers and thieves, using the language of the dockers and seamen and elements of  Low German ("Platt") which you still can hear in Hamburg today (example: "Ich werd euch nun, min Deern un' min Jung, verklaren, wie's mit mir und Ronja weiterging.").

His next book "Tote leben länger" describes the media hype created around a man in coma who was found in a corn field covered with wounds and suffering from a brain injury, while the TV talk show host Buck Blohm tries to present him as the returned and incarnated Jesus Christ. The book is outlined as a crime thriller though the actual story deals in a sarcastic way with conspiracy theories, tasteless politicians, bizarre journalists and other ominous characters all suddenly interested in the body of the unknown more-dead-than-alive man.

With "die zornigen" (the enraged) Bernd Dost wrote his most transgressive/transgressional novel, telling the story of a small group of common people who "just can't take it anymore" and who turn to actions of terrorism against the mass media system.

"The book "die zornigen" is an infectious story of people who want to change our world. It throws a bridge of ideas stemming from the French Revolution over the dropouts of ´68 across to the raging opponents to the merciless globalization of today. The story revolves around three people: Roger, the hesitating journalist, Cat, the aggressive nurse and Sol, the charismatic social worker. They among others, comprise "the enraged" - more enraged than ever, in view of the menacing annihilation of our pride, our freedom, our culture after 9/11." (press text)

In 2004 Dost wrote the surreal and tragicomic book "Mensch Frankenstein". The fantastic, mystical novel is the story of an honest, belligerent human creature born in a subway in the San Francisco, who is arrested and made to fit in with the rules of the predominant form of society; he receives a character mask and then a sculpted plastic body armour and rises to become a successful monster in the world of politics and industry. Self-revelation, the love of a courageous woman and the encounter with a mystic in Zurich save "Frankenstein the Man" and allow the natural true being to re-emerge. The US Administration sentences the creature, whom it regards as a danger to the state, and disposes of it in a branch of Guantánamo.

Bernd Dost's last novel was called "Der Zug ohne Wiederkehr" (The train of no return). The novel clearly continues the humanistic and humanitarian ideas of "the enraged" and "Mensch Frankenstein". It was published in 2008.

Filmography / Bibliography

Documentary Films

1972:
 "Diseases of Society: Stress: a disease of civilization" (30')
 "Brains Inc. - A psychological show about manipulation (60')
 "About Ourselves: Protracted Old Age" (32')
 "Review of a Year: a Psychogram of the Events of 1972" (66')

1973:
 "Slow Motion: Eros and Politics" (47´)
 "Human Games: An Experiment in Group Dynamics" (80´)
 "Slow Motion: When You're on Your Way: Understanding the Other" (45´)
 "Slow Motion: The Star is Dead - is the Star Dead?" (45´)
 "A Year in Retrospect: Psychogram of the Events of 1973" (58´)

1974:
 "Slow Motion: A Number for Everyone - Registered, Programmed, Controlled" (45´)
 "Slow Motion: Worker and Model" (43')
 "A Year in Retrospect: Psychogram of the Events of 1974" (45´)

1975:
 "Death of a Sea: The Mediterranean Sewage Pit" (45´)
 "Slow Motion: The Rumor" (45´)
 "The Big Prize" (43´)
 "What They Call Normal or: Life is Child's Play" (44´)

1976:
 "Cypriot Family Life" (42´)
 "Apprenticeship in Feeling: Esalen, Big Sur" (45´)

1977:
 "Hope of Healing: Lourdes and Faith Healers" (45´)
 "Miracles Happen All the Time; About People that Have Survived Against the Odds" (45´)
 "People, Drinks and Politics: Portrait of a Standup Bar" (45´)
 "Olé HSV! - Football - A Circus for Millions" (58´)
 "Workplace Situation: Nobody Don't Know Nothing!" (45´)
 "Family Vacation. One German, One Swedish and One Italian Family in Lignano" (45')

1978:
 "Shady New Flags: Exploitation on Ships Under New Flags" (45´)
 "Green Time: Environmental Protection in the Form of a Party" (45´)
 "I Represent Young People" (45´)
 "The Emigrants: Off to Australia" (45´)
 "The Flying Doctor: On the Way to Lonely Farms in Australia" (45´)
 "About Driving, Franzen and Tuning - Rally Drivers" (43´)

1979:
 "A Fragmented Image: What People Think of Politicians" (45´)

1980:
 "Mary and Jesus: Between Oath and Business Profit in Oberammergau" (45´)
 "Of Heroes, Buccaneers and Crash Pilots: Private Flyers" (43´)
 "Extreme Travel: Survival Training in Canada" (43´)
 "Recreation Areas for Everyone: The dilemma on Lake Shores" (45´)

1981:
"Exotic Profits: International Trade With Protected Animals" (45´)
 "Constant Trouble With the Program: Scandals in the Theater" (45')
 "The Friendly Sharks: The Profitable Business of Rescue Shipping" (45')

1982:
 "Contemporary History on Television: The Reichstag Fire" (90´)
 "Last Farewells: Of Young Runaways and Desperate Parents" (60´)
 "The Emigrants and What Became of Them" (45´)
 "The Anguish Telephone:  Children Calling For Help" (45´)
 "Inheriting Evils: Sick Environment, Sick Children" (45´)

1983:
 "The Programmed Catastrophe: Safety at Sea" (45´)
 "Situation: Us and the Children: Overshadowed by Dachau" (45´)
 "Under the Hammer. Fortunes Around an Auction House" (45´)

1984:
 "The Revenge of the Victims: Taking the Law into One's Own Hands" (45´)
 "Helpless in the Flow. Powerless Against the Power of the Power Suppliers" (45´)
 "Searching for Heirs" (59´)

1985:
 "Rescue the Mediterranean: The 10-Year Battle for the Mare Nostrum" (45´)
 "Everyone Has His Nest in Mind: Iserlohn Revisited" (69´)
 "Dangerous Freight: The Risk of Transporting a Hazardous Load" (45´)
 "Night Studio: The Little Nobel Prize" (60´)

1986:
 "Marco Polo's Heirs: Traveling with Businessmen" (45´)
 "Einstein's Child Prodigies: Of the Happiness and Misery of the Highly Gifted" (60´)
 "Sinking Ships: Criminal Practices in Shipping" (30´)

1987:
 "My Home is the Big Top: Chicky Altenburger, Clown" (45´)
 "My Home is the Sea: Immo von Schnurbein and the Gorch Fock" (45´)
 "My Home is the Stars: Gustav A. Tammann, Astronomer" (59´)
 "My Home is the Jungle: Jane Goodall and the Chimpanzees of Gombe" (45´)

1988:
 "Luxury, Smiles, Loneliness: A Ship's Doctor on a Cruise Liner" (45´)
 "Computers Are Not for Kissing: Mankind in the Age of Data Processing" (45´)
 "Art as Hot Goods: Art Fakers, Art Robbers, Art Searchers (45´)

1989:
 "Hunting Down Ancestors: On the Adventure of Discovering Your Family" (45´)
 "People Under the Hammer: Compulsory Auctions" (45´)
 "The Toothless Tigers: The Youth Organizations of the Political Parties" (45´)
 "In the Future: Open-Minded Thinkers Needed" (45´)
 "War Brides: Katharina Militello" (30´)
 "War Brides: Lisa Slaughter" (30´)
 "Highly-Gifted Children: Observations Over a Period of Three Years" (60´)

1990:
 "Yesterday's Enemy, Today's Comrade? The Federal German Armed Forces and the National People's Army"  (45´)
 "A Wound That Won't Heal: Deforestation in Papua New Guinea" (45´)
 "Yesterday and Today: Rioting in Schwabing" (30´)
 "Legally Incapacitated: On the Drama of No Longer Being a Person" (59´)

1991:
 "30 Years of Amnesty International: The Fight for Human Rights" (45´)
 "People Who Change Their Lives: From Officer to Missionary" (30´)
 "People Who Change Their Lives: A Surgeon in Search of the Soul" (30´)
 "People Who Change Their Lives: From Engineer to Priest" (30´)

1992:
 "Hope of Healing (I): The Chances of Gentle Medicine" (45´)
 "Hope of Healing (II): On the Way to Energy-Based Medicine" (45´)
 "Blue Helmets: With a UN Unit in Yugoslavia" (45´)
 "All Kinds of People: Angelo Conti Rossini" (30´)
 "Plunge Into a Void: On the Fate of People with Cranio-Cerebral Injuries" (45´)

1993:
 "The Long Waltz: Dancing, My Life. Walter Deutsch" (58´)
 "Nature Hits Back: Climatic Catastrophes" (45´)
 "Reportage on Monday: Contaminated Home" (45´)
 "Lifeline: The Conductor Eduard Macku" (45´)
 "An Eagle with Broken Wings: Dancing, My Life. Ilias Pilalis" (60´)

1994:
 "Report on Monday: What Make Children Sick Today" (45´)

1995:
 "Lifeline: The Cook, the Clown and His Love of Anarchy: Angelo Conti Rossini" (45´)
 "Spiritual Crises. Sense in Insanity" (45´) (not broadcast)
 "Geniuses of Tomorrow: Intermediate Report on a Long-Term Observation" (45´)
 "Dachau Concentration Camp" (90´)
 "Lifeline: Anna. Florist. Anna Lindner" (45´)
 "Three Women in Papua New Guinea: Between a Hut and a High-Rise Block" (58´)

1996:
 "Did Kohl Kiss Madonna? How Pictures Can Be Manipulated" (45´)
 "Lifeline: The Napoleon Among Landlords. Richard Süßmeier" (45´)
 "The Kind Uncle: The Life and Death of Felix Haserick" (45´)
 "Highlights of the 41st German Historians' Congress" (45´)
 "Save Our Children: Violence on TV and Its Consequences" (45´)

1997:
 "Lifeline: Death Embraces Us In the Middle of Life. Claudia Marschner, Undertaker" (45´)
 "The Firm - Siemens: A German Family History" (45´)
 "Lifeline: Always on Course. Pilot Hein Mehrkens" (45´)
 "Suddenly Gone:  The Fates of Missing Youngsters" (80´)
 "Lifeline: A Gentleman from Bohemia and His Love of Beauty. Rainer Kreissl'' (45')

1998:
 "Simply to Live: Young people and Their Right to a Future" (45´)
 "Lifeline: A Piece of Chocolate, Miss? Kathy and Dany Militello" (45´)

1999:
 "20 Days in the 20th Century: Chernobyl - The Atomic Scare" (44´)
 "20 Days in the 20th Century: Hiroshima - The Nuclear Threat" (44´)
 "Walt Disney's Secret: Tracing a Legend" (68')
 "Lifeline: You'll Never Be Down with Frieda. - Frieda Hiesgen, Canteen landlady" (44´)

2000:
 "Lifeline: I'll paint a Rembrandt Today. Günter Hopfinger" (44´)
 "World Courier: Family Life in Kazakhstan" (26´)
 "World Courier: Family Life in Siberia" (26´)
 "World Courier: Family Life in Tansania" (26´)
 "World Courier: Family Life in Eritrea" (26´)
 "World Courier: Family Life in Egypt" (26´)
 "Four Bright Minds: Long-Term Observation of Highly-Gifted Children" (88´)
 "The Amazons of Oberammergau: the Passion of the Strong Women" (79´)

2001:
 "Lifeline: Digging Charley of Seebruck. Karl Ostermayer" (45´)
 "Scene of Crime - a Child: Violence That Came Out of the Cold" (45´)

2002:
 "Man as a Victim" (45´)
 "The Clones Are Coming: Genetic Engineering, Dream or Nightmare?" (45´)
 "In the Waiting Room of Death: The Fates of Forced Labourers" (74´)
 "Lifeline: Catching the Right Moment. Inge Feltrinelli, Publisher"  (45´)
 "Escape to the Paradises in the World of Advertising" (45´)
 "Scandals in the Federal Republic of Germany: The Witch Trials of Memmingen" (45´)

2003:
 "Lifeline: A Gentleman from Bohemia and His Love of Beauty (II)
 "Rainer Kreissl" (45´)

2004:
 "Lifeline: The Oktoberfest Landlord from Nockherberg. Peter Pongratz"  (45´)
 "To Europe Together: German-Czech Reconciliation" (45´)

Books

Non-fiction
"The Evil Heritage; Sick Children, Sick Environment", Koesel Verlag, 1985
"A Country Suffocating", Koesel Verlag, 1986
"Projects of Hope: The Alternative Nobel Prize", with Jakob von Uexküll, Raben Verlag, 1986
"Healing With Holistic Medicine", Koesel Verlag, 1995 and Goldmann Taschenbuch, 1996
Afterword for the German release of "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough " by Peter C. Whybrow, Vedra Verlag, 2007

Fiction
"Schiffe Versenken" ("Killing Ship", under the pseudonym of  R.B.van Matturer), Vedra Verlag, 1998
"Tote leben länger" ("The Dead Live Longer", under the pseudonym of R.B.van Matturer), Vedra Verlag, 1999
"die zornigen" ("The Enraged"), 2002, Vedra Verlag
"Mensch Frankenstein" ("Frankenstein the Man"), 2004, Vedra Verlag
"Der Zug ohne Wiederkehr" ("The train of no return"), 2008, Vedra Verlag

("Schiffe Versenken" and "die zornigen" are illustrated by Russian painter and manga artist Aljoscha Klimov.)

Poetry
"The Sleep with the Beautiful Hands", Vedra Verlag, 2003

References

External links
 An article of the Süddeutsche Zeitung
 Vedra Verlag
 DostFilme.de

1939 births
2015 deaths
Writers from Dortmund
People from the Province of Westphalia
German male journalists
German journalists
German documentary filmmakers
Film people from North Rhine-Westphalia
Postmodernists
German male novelists
20th-century German novelists
20th-century German male writers

Bernd Dost


Mehu was an Ancient Egyptian vizier who lived in the  Sixth Dynasty, around 2300 BC. The office of the vizier was the most important one at the royal court. Mehu is mainly known from his monumental mastaba at Saqqara, not far away from the Pyramid of Unas.

The exact dating of Mehu is disputed in Egyptology. Hartwig Altenmüller published the relief decoration of the mastaba and dates him under king Teti. He argues that the one of the brothers of Mehu with the name Iynefret is identical to another vizier also named Iynefret, who might date to the early Sixth Dynasty. Furthermore, Mehu carried the title of an overseer of priest at Djed-sut-Teti, that is the pyramid complex of king Teti. Other argue that he dates slightly later under king Pepy I.

Mehu's family, in particular his parents, remain unknown but he was very likely from Mendes.
Mehu had two wives, one called Nebet, the other one Neferkaus.

Mehu was bearing a high number of important titles. These include the titles of the vizier, but he was also Overseer of the treasuries, overseer of the double granary, overseer of Upper Egypt and overseer of all royal works. Several sons are mentioned in the tomb. One son was perhaps called Mery, but his name was several times deleted. Another son was Hetepka. Within the mastaba of Mehu there are parts reserved for a vizier called Hetepka. It is possible that he was the son of Mehu, albeit final evidence for this identification is missing. The vizier Hetepka might have been just a member of Mehu's family. Two other known children of Mehu are a daughter called Merut and a further son called Khuy.

References

External links
Virtual tour of his mastaba

Viziers of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt
Overseer of the treasury
Overseers of Upper Egypt
Ancient Egyptian overseers of royal works
Ancient Egyptian overseers of the granaries

Mehu