Background Information for Album

In October of 2001, a group of us had the good fortune to spend five days with Dr. Peters at his home in Bremen, Germany. As the leading distributor of the Peters Map in the United States, I had a cordial phone and fax relationship with Dr. Peters for some years and always wanted the chance to meet him in person.

Fate and circumstance converged quite nicely, and I decided it was high time someone made a documentary film about his quite remarkable life. It felt important to record some of his stories for posterity.

Accompanied by an eager video documentary filmmaker (my mother, Ruth Abrams) and supported by the official Peters Map cartographer (Terry Hardaker of Oxford Cartographers), as well as Ward Kaiser (who was the first to publish the Peters map in North America in 1983), and Andreas Kaiser (who is Arno Peters' closest collaborator), we spent time poring over his personal archives for days. To call this experience "fascinating" would be an understatement.

We have over 20 hours of fabulous video footage from our meetings, including details that Dr. Peters had never shared with anyone before about his experiences during and after W.W.II. I learned about Dr. Peters' commitment to basic human rights principles, which include: 40 years of passionate support for reparations to the former East Germany, his Synchronoptic World History (unavailable in English, but published in German and French), and his unique system of musical notation that has devout fans but yet to find a commercial publisher. His recent passions involved creating a whole new view of the field of economics, which he worked on daily.

We expect to have three or four videotapes of under 30-minutes produced soon. Until then, we have assembled the following photo biography from his personal archives. I began the visit with a huge amount of respect for the man. By the end of my time in Bremen, I was stunned with breadth and depth of his knowledge, the passion of his convictions, and the ambitious way in which he has always seen the world from a unique perspective.

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