I was born and grew up in Munich, Bavaria. When it comes to minerals, Munich is not very prolific. All is underlain by many meters of Molasse sediments. However, we have some very decent mineralogical museums, two very good universities with geology and mineralogy departments and quite a few interesting mineral localities in neighbouring Austria and other parts of Bavaria.

For several years I collected exclusively zeolites. My fascination for zeolites started a day in 1975 when I saw for the first time a mesolite spray on apophyllite from India. I did quite a few successful zeolite collecting trips to Northern Ireland, Scotland, Austria and various parts of Germany. Through trading with other worldwide collectors my zeolite collection soon became rather big.

In 1991 I finished my studies in economic geology at the Technical University of Munich and went immediately afterwards into mineral exploration in West Africa where I stayed for almost 10 years. Since then I have worked in many African countries (Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, DR Congo, South Africa and Chad) but also in North and South America (Canada, Brazil), Northern Europe (Finland) and East Asia (North Korea). Due to my job I had to move so many times (18 times in 23 years) that I actually gave up collecting minerals.

Instead, I started collecting data and information. Thanks to my job I have access to a lot of mineralogical and geological data from government and company reports. I am happy to share this information here on Mindat, information that otherwise would perhaps get lost in some dusty archives.

Few, if any, of the mineral exploration projects I am working on will ever become important producers of mineral specimens for collectors. However, every now and then I come across some interesting looking minerals. When I am not 100% sure what they are I get them analyzed by XRD or EDS or microprobe or thin and polished sections or IR or Raman.

Now in 2014, at the age of 50, I moved back to my hometown and started collecting typical ore samples from the projects I am working on. Since early 2014 I am working mainly in Zimbabwe, a country which is tremendously rich in minerals.

Since a couple of years I am using an Olympus camera with built-in GPS for my locality photographs. With the help of a freeware program called “Geosetter” I can place my photos directly into Google Earth, a feature I am finding most useful.