Dear Horst

Dear Horst,

Belated Congratulations and best wishes for your 90^th birthday! It is not only a major milestone but also an achievement, anybody (especially a male) who reaches their 90^th birthday has had a good long life already. In fact, many aim to reach this age as a goal.

Horst and I go back many decades, which will probably make this text much longer than you might expect. In fact, while I met him in person for the first time in the mid-80s, when he visited Ann Arbor and our Dept of NA&ME, where he was a faculty member from 1964-74, I knew of his work (as well as that of the late profs. Ogilvie and Benford) much earlier, in the mid-70s, when I was an NA&ME student at the NTU of Athens. After completing my graduate studies at MIT, I also was elected a faculty member of that NA&ME Dept at Michigan, in fact to replace the retiring (in 1982) Harry Benford.

When Horst was in Michigan, and when he went back to TU Berlin, he was instrumental in the creation of an agreement between the two U’s that allowed students and professors from one U’s to visit the other. In my case, after considerable correspondence with Horst, I was invited to be a Gastprofessor at the ISM at TUB, working with Horst and his co-workers and colleagues, for the first time in June-Aug 1988, my first visit to Germany. My work was to evaluate the economic feasibility of a SWATH passenger-ferry which would travel from Piraeus to the island of my birth, Crete, in 6 hours, a project jointly researched with our colleagues at NTUA.

It was a great time to live in Berlin that summer, since it was the Cultural Capital of Europe, and there were, besides the many museums in both then East and West Berlin, there were many concerts in great locations and other cultural activities.  In addition, there was the mild springtime weather, and the long days of summer (sunlight at 10 PM). Horst’s late wife, Elfi, had looked around and found an excellent studio apartment for me on Breitestrasse (42, I believe) in Schmargendorf, a pleasant suburb of Berlin, in a new multistory building, with lots of amenities. I could then tell about my “Life on Broadway” when I came back to the US.

Later, both my late parents visited me, and I rented a Golf for a three-day weekend, Fri July 22-Sun July 24. I remember, because Saturday the 23^rd was my 35^th birthday, which we observed in the middle of the Black Forest, with a cake and a ton of cool water from a spring called Jakobsbrunnen (if I remember correctly). I must have drunk more than two liters of the delicious water, which felt heavy with minerals, but when I returned in Berlin I was told it might have been contaminated. I had no ill effects. I did all the driving, 1000 km a day each day, that Golf had a top speed of no more than 160 kph and almost all of the driving was done with my foot on the floor. The itinerary was Berlin to Koeln and Koblenz the first day, Marburg (why? I had a colleague there who (and his family) was a friend) to Black Forest and Munich the second, and Munich to Nuremberg and finally Berlin late on Sunday. We only had a ‘Stau’ for about 15 mins near Stuttgart, where they frequently have them.

I rented a Golf again with Dr. Kaklis, who was doing a post-doc with Prof. Nowacki at the time, this time on a Thu-Sat three day, also 3,000 km tour, that also involved visiting Denmark for a day, before we returned at night under heavy rain, and the next day we went down Rheinstrasse, and even managed to visit Prof. Beier’s late mother in the scenic village of Montabaur for lunch, before returning to Berlin. We did not do it Fri-Sun, because we were invited at Horst’s home that Sunday, along with the late Prof. Yagle and his wife from UM. Again, I did all the driving, and I even managed to get lost in East Germany near Berlin. I stopped to ask an East German policeman, I asked Dr. Kaklis to give me the map, which was in the back seat, he had to take his seat belt off to reach it, and the policeman promptly gave him a ticket for not wearing it. When I protested, he informed me in detail which sections of their traffic code were violated. Fortunately, the ticket was an utterly insignificant (compared to today’s $140+ tickets here) 10 DM, as was the one I managed to get for speeding (not on the Autobahn, but going 90 km when the limit was 80, in a Landstrasse).

During my travels, I took many photos and esp. slides, and wanted to (but did not get to do it) give a slide show back in my department, as Harry Benford and his wife would often offer to us from their travels. If I did it, I would show them how clean most German cities and towns look, and tell them the reason is, they have no rats. The way they achieve this is by hiring a musician, who goes out on the streets playing a flute, which attracts all the rats behind him. He then walks them to the Rathaus (every town has one) and locks them there. The most promising of these rats may make it to the BundesRat.

After this excellent experience, I was planning to do my sabbatical next Fall 1989 also at the ISM at TUB with Horst, but I later had to change my plans and go to my alma mater, NTU of Athens instead. I thus missed all the action with the fall of the Wall etc. But I came back in 1992 for a week, sent by our College of Engineering to look for research cooperation opportunities, and again for six weeks in 1999, working with Prof. Horst Linde and also with Horst Nowacki, on a transportation proposal to alleviate the East-west highways by shifting cargo to rivers, a multinational project that involved Germany, Poland, Ukraine and even Russia (East Prussia region). We visited Gdansk for two days of meetings with our partners then. 1999 was also my last stay in Germany, if you exclude frequent visits to airports when I change flights. However, Horst visited our U again after that, and we kept in touch all the time with regular emails and holiday cards and annual reviews of our activities.

After Horst became an Emeritus professor at 65, he stayed very active for a very long time, working at the Max Planck Institute, and doing a lot of very interesting historical work, focusing on Archimedes. We kept in touch and exchanged our news all the time. I remember when the late Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, Horst emailed me with some choice titles some tabloids used for the occasion, such as “Papa Razzi”, and “The German Shepherd”.  Speaking of him, a fellow high school classmate of mine, but 18 years my senior, Nikos Dimou, a well-known author (best known for “the Misfortune of being Greek”), after finishing high school, studied Philosophy at the U in Munich, and in his thesis defense, there was a professor of Theology who asked him lots of questions. That was the above later Pope, and Nikos was not awarded his PhD, so his CV now lists him as a high school graduate.

I cannot believe he has already been retired for 25 years. Time does fly really fast these days. I hope we will all be around 10 years from now to wish him for his 100^th birthday. It is not as hard as you may think. Harry Benford almost made it at 99 and a few months! And I see I have already written two pages, so I will stop here!

Anastassios Perakis