Life
Joachim Hoffmann was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1930. In the latter stages of World War II Hoffmann's family fled to western Germany to avoid the advancing Red Army. There the family settled in Berlin.
From 1951 Hoffmann studied modern history, eastern European history and comparative ethnology at the Free University of Berlin and University of Hamburg. In 1959 he received his PhD in history for his study Die Berliner Mission des Grafen Prokesch-Osten 1849-1852. From 1960 until 1995 Hoffmann was working in the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office, where his field of expertise was the “Armed Forces of the Soviet Union”. In his later years he held the post of scientific director. In these years he was also awarded prizes for his work, such as the “Dr. Walter-Eckhardt” Award (1991) and the “General Andrej Andrejewitsch Wlassow” Cultural Prize (1992). After Hoffmann had retired in 1995, he continued to work as an independent author.
He died in February 2002.
Read more about this topic: Joachim Hoffmann
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
—Martin Amis (b. 1949)
“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own—even more, one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)