Gerhard Von Harscher

Vocation

German musician, composer and astrologer who published astrology magazines in the 1950s. Harscher is the son of a Berlin silent film musician. He taught himself to play the piano and an operetta he composed earned him a place at the Hamburg Musikhochschule; to this day he composes in various genres. He is a trained sewing machine mechanic and worked in shipping for a long time to earn a living. At the age of eighty he turned his musical passion into his profession and became a coffee house pianist. He is considered to be the oldest of his subject and is a piano teacher. After four marriages, he is now married to Helga Rosenau, who is also his manager. In the 1950s Harscher seems to have run the scientific-astrological working Apollon Institute in Hamburg. He published the Fachblatt für astrologische Grundlagenforschung (1951-53, from 1957 under the title "Aspekte"). Together with the philosopher and astrologer Hellmut Wolff, he had initiated the journal Astrologie in October 1952, which he continued alone in 1953. Both journals were published by the Hamburg-based Apollon Institute, an astrological research and educational institution. He wrote many of the articles himself, but other astrologers also had their say. Since the 1980s he has published in the linguistic field, for example the open letter " Rechtschreibreform - so nicht!" (Spelling reform - not so!) was published as a book in 2002, and he also wrote articles on the cultivation of the Low German language. He lived in Meckelfeld, Lower Saxony, and died on 20 February 2018.