Paul Moor
CURRICULUM VITAE
1924 Born in El Paso, third of three children of Mississippian parents. Attended elementary and high school. Musical prodigy. 1933 First formal musical instruction, violin and piano. Violin discontinued after about two years. 1940 Graduation from Austin High School (El Paso). Entered Juilliard School of Music in New York. 1941 Transferred to University of Texas (Austin) as a music major. 1942 Summer semester at the Universidad Nacional de México. Simultaneously private study with Carlos Chávez, learning his new Piano Concerto. 1943 By taking advanced-standing examinations in a variety of subjects, I managed to get my degree (Bachelor of Music) from the University of Texas at the age of nineteen. That summer I returned to New York, intending to pursue a career as a concert pianist but already feeling the urge to become a writer. 1944 Hired as script writer by RKO-Pathé, Inc., in New York, which produced documentary films, two weekly newsreels, etc. 1947 I turned to working as a free-lance writer and journalist, which I have remained ever since. 1948 Harper's Magazine published the first three articles I wrote. That summer Yaddo (the foundation outside Saratoga Springs NY) invited me to spend two months there writing. Magazines which have published my work since then include The New Yorker, Holiday, Theatre Arts, The Saturday Review, The Saturday Evening Post, etc., etc. 1949 Move to Europe, settling nominally in Paris but making frequent trips from there. I began carrying out regular assignments for the Arts Section of The New York Times. 1951 Move from Paris to Munich. There I undertook an intensive study of modern German history, concentrating on the Third Reich, a study which continued until I left Germany thirty years later. 1953 The first extensive photo-reportage I attempted (Pablo Casals and his music festival in the French Pyrenees) attracted the attention of Robert Capa, who added my name to the affiliate roster of Magnum Photos, the international agency which he and Henri Cartier-Bresson had founded in Paris and New York. For about the next four years I worked mainly as a photojournalist, carrying out assignments for leading publications in the USA and Europe. 1954 Final appearances (tour of West Germany) as a concert pianist, performing the Khachaturian concerto and the third Bartók concerto. 1956 Move from Munich to Berlin. Photo assignments for the Life bureau in Bonn led to assignments to write for the Music section of Time. Regular coverage after 1956 of Berlin's cultural life for The Financial Times (London) and then for The Times, also for the International Herald Tribune (Paris) and Musical America. 1958 Time sent me to Moscow (the first of my six extensive trips through the USSR) to cover the first International Tchaikovsky Competition; after Van Cliburn became the unexpected first-prize winner for piano, I filed a sixty-page cover-story for Time and photographed the lead story that week for Life. That fall I taught a course on contemporary American music at what has subsequently become the Kennedy Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. After fulfilling my commitment there I had to discontinue it due to the necessity to travel for Time-Life International, which had made me its general Berlin correspondent, accredited to the Department of Defence in Washington. For about the next ten years I worked full-time for Time-Life but declined to join the staff. During that period I began broadcasting the news from my area for CBS and for Canada's CBC. I also did a number of lengthy broadcasts, usually on musical subjects, in German for the Sender Freies Berlin, and contributed to leading German publications (Die Zeit, Der Monat, Der Spiegel). Time-Life assignments during those years, together with summer vacations, resulted in a great deal of travelling: to every country of Europe except Albania and Finland, and to the Middle East (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iran). In the summer of 1966 I attended a Russian-language course for foreigners at Lomonosov University in Moscow. 1967 As the result of a Saturday Evening Post article of mine about the issue of voluntary euthanasia, the Bloomingdale Foundation gave me a grant to write a book on the subject. 1969 I discontinued work for Time-Life International to concentrate on radio broadcasting for CBS News, which accredited me as its Berlin representative. 1971 Publication of my first book, *Das Selbstporträt des Jürgen Bartsch*, a psychoanalytically oriented study of a young man who committed his first sadistic infanticide at the age of fifteen and committed three more before his arrest at the age of eighteen. (I treasure a letter from the prominent American psychoanalyst Muriel Gardiner [*The Wolf-Man*, *Code Name "Mary"*, etc.], which led to our meeting and becoming friends, in which she called this "a really great book". The Zurich psychoanalyst Dr. Alice Miller devotes 44 pages [232 - 276] of her book *Am Anfang war Erziehung* [Suhrkamp, 1980] to a discussion of it; in the American edition, *For Your Own Good* [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983; pp. 198 - 246].) 1972 Publication of my euthanasia book, *Die Freiheit zum Tode: Euthanasie und Ethik* (Rowohlt, Hamburg); lecture tour, radio and television appearances, etc. At the annual Berlin Film Festival, I served as American representative on the jury. 1974 I applied for admission in Berlin to the Institute for Psychotherapy and to the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute for "informatory" training, i. e., access to their theoretical seminars. The former accepted me at once, the latter some months later. Psychoanalysis, applied to various fields, had gradually eclipsed music as my primary interest; I continued that training at the BPI until I left Berlin in September, 1981. 1975 Leonard Marcus, Editor of High Fidelity and Musical America, seeking foreign-language rights to deaf Beethoven's "conversation notebooks", chose me to prepare them, with annotations, for publication in English, a project involving twelve volumes of four to five hundred pages each. (Complications entailed in obtaining the rights from East Germany prevented the signing of all contracts until 1978.) I completed the first volume in 1980. 1976 Lectures about the Beethoven notebooks at the University of Southern California and at the University of California at Santa Barbara (also, in 1980, at Emory University in Atlanta). 1979 A Ford Foundation grant to abet the Beethoven project. 1980 I made my first documentary film (on assignment from West German television, Hamburg), about an almost unknown doctor (still practising in southern Germany) who spent eighteen months assigned to the SS Institute of Hygiene at Auschwitz but managed not only to remain an admirable human being (the Poles acquitted him, amidst cheers, after the war) but also to save a number of inmates' lives. 1981 Move back to the USA, concluding thirty-two years in Europe. First winter spent on a fellowship at the Hand Hollow Foundation, East Chatham NY. 1982 Move to San Francisco, where I succeeded Alfred Frankenstein as regional correspondent for Musical America and became a Contributing Editor of High Fidelity. 1991 Publication of my second, definitive book on *Jürgen Bartsch: Opfer und Täter* (Rowohlt Verlag; 473 pages). 1992 Opening of *Bartsch, Kindermörder* (Bartsch the Child- Killer), a monodrama by Oliver Reese composed of extracts from my 1991 book; world premiere in Ulm, productions since then in Cologne, Hannover, Dortmund, Halle, Berlin, Essen, Salzburg, Vienna, Hamburg, etc. 1994 Two (paid) invitations from Europe to lecture about the Jürgen Bartsch case: from Prof. Dr. med. Gerd Biermann's Medizinische Akademie für Psychotherapie von Jugendlichen und Kindern in Brixen, in the South Tyrolean section of northern Italy, and from the German Psychoanalytic Society (with lectures in Berlin [2], Hamburg, Zürich, Düsseldorf, Göttingen, and Munich). 1995 Move back to Berlin to continue writing activities as before - presently especially for. 2001 Rehearsals for a new play based on my 1991 book about Jürgen Bartsch began on August 27th in Bautzen, to open there on October 6th. (To date, 30+ productions of the earlier monodrama by Oliver Reese in theaters all over German-speaking Europe.) 2003 Reissue (by the Rowohlt Verlag) of my 1991 Bartsch book in paperback format; new productions of Oliver Reese's play in Hannover and Nuremberg. January 16, 2004 Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) awarded by Johannes Rau, President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
(Use your browser "Back" button to return to the Biographies)