Peter Petschauer
New Releases!
Welcome!
My books range from European History of the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century. They include two poetry books, a novel, monographs including about my immigrant experience in New York City, farm and urban women during two wars and German women's elementary education from Martin Luther to the 1980s. Some works are autobiographical.
The photograph on the right shows the farm on which I grew up and on which I learned to walk and speak the local Middle-High German dialect. It is in the Dolomite mountains of Italy. I was not born there, but, like so many children who are born into a war, my parents were able to place my brother and me on this farm; we were safer there than in any city in Germany or even Italy. It makes me empathise with children in Ukraine and Gaza. The women on the farm and farm life centered me and became the focal point in life.
Photo depicting the farm in the top-left.
Overlays of history! The author's recent photograph stems from the bishop's palace in Salzburg, Austria.
The lower photograph is of Bass Lake near Blowing Rock, NC, where my wife and I lived and where we walked daily for more than a decade on the carefully maintained gravel paths; several previous poems originated in that beautiful area.
A rigorous education in gymnasiums became my home away from home before I emigrated....Latin, Greek, history, etc. When you read my texts, I hope you will do that, especially the poetry, you will detect my background ... the beauty of nature, the love of animals, the drive to work hard, the determination to understand the past (and thus teaching of and writing about history), the disdain for pompacity and overbearing, and falsehood, the lure of beauty (as in art and music).
​
These points are well represented in the Festschrift in my name in the journal Clio's Psyche." (vol. 30, #2, Winter, 2024). There my colleagues talk about me as a historian, psychohistorian really; that is the reason for my photograph on the left of a small section of the bishop's castle in Salzburg, Austria. Psychohistorians dig with the psychologist's tools below the surface stories of the past to discover what is underneath and then and bring it forward to our listeners and readers.
