Dieter Hagenbach

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Dieter Alfred Hagenbach (born July 24, 1943 in Basel ; † August 17, 2016 there ) was a Swiss bookseller, publisher, literary agent and author. Hagenbach was the founder of Sphinx Verlag and the non-profit Gaia Media Foundation .

Life and work

After graduating from high school , Dieter Hagenbach did an apprenticeship as an interior designer, followed in 1969 by studying art and architecture at the Düsseldorf Art Academy . At the academy he formed the multimedia art team “Cosmic Correspondence” with the German Jürgen Rahn. This was followed by consciousness experiments typical of the time with LSD , mushrooms , hashish and amphetamine as well as trips to California and India . When Timothy Leary sought asylum in Switzerland in 1971 while fleeing the CIA , he lived for a while with Hagenbach, who advocated Leary in a letter to the then Swiss President Kurt Furgler .

In the fall of 1975, Hagenbach opened the Sphinx bookstore on Spalenberg in Basel with the Sphinx publishing house belonging to it . The focus of the publishing program was on the topics of psychology, philosophy, consciousness research , indigenous peoples, spirituality and esotericism . In 15 years of publishing history he has published works by Alan Watts , Marilyn Ferguson , Joseph Campbell , Fritjof Capra , John C. Lilly , Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley , for example . In 1977 he published the Necronomicon of the later Oscar winner HR Giger , with whom he had a long friendship. From 1977 to 1986 Hagenbach was editor of the Sphinx magazine .

In 1990 the Sphinx publishing house was sold to the Random House publishing group . From then on, Dieter Hagenbach worked as a literary agent and founded the non-profit Gaia Media Foundation in Basel on June 23, 1993 , which wanted to counteract the daily horror news with a “Goodnewsletter” set up by Hagenbach, among other things. The Goodnewsletter appeared in print until 2006.

For the 100th birthday of the LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann, the Gaia Media Foundation organized a ceremony in the Natural History Museum in Basel, as well as the subsequent symposium “ LSD - Problem Child and Wonder Drug”. In response to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos , Hagenbach hosted the World Psychedelic Forum (WPF) in the Congress Center Basel from March 21 to 24, 2008 , with around 2000 visitors from 37 countries. The speakers included the psychotherapists Peter Gasser , Stanislav Grof and Ralph Metzner , the artist Alex Gray , MAPS founder Rick Doblin and Albert Hofmann.

Publications

Web links

Individual notes

  1. ↑ Obituaries of Dieter Hagenbach , todesverbindungenportal.ch, accessed on September 1, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b c Lucius Werthmüller: Obituary for Sphinx publisher Dieter Hagenbach. In: Grenzwissenschaft-aktuell. August 30, 2016, accessed September 1, 2016.
  3. ↑ Daniel Meier: In Search of the Self , obituary in: NZZ am Sonntag of August 28, 2016.
  4. ↑ www.psychedelik.info: speakers .
personal data
SURNAME Hagenbach, Dieter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hagenbach, Dieter Alfred (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss publisher, author and founder
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH 17th August 2016
Place of death Basel