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I have been interested in history since childhood, and in family history since my teens. On the side of my mother's family, the Holtermann-s, my great grandfather had published a tree in 1902. On the side of my father's family, different Middelmann relatives had done research in the 1920s, resulting in a family tree published in the early 1930s. In 1957 Raoul went to America, assisted by a Fulbright grant. In 1959 he obtained a B.A. cum laude, majoring in economics and history, at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA. In 1962, at the J.W. von Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt/M, Germany, he obtained a Diplom-Volkswirt. In 1963 Raoul went to the University of Melbourne, Australia, to teach economic history. On the side he worked his Ph.D. which he obtained in 1971. My thesis topic was "Victoria's Credit Foncier and Rural Lending on Long-term Mortgage." You might say that it got me the Ph.D., but that was about all. To this day in Australia whenever interest rates go up, it hits everybody in debt, instead of only those who want to get into debt despite higher interest. The Australian Treasury indicated to me years ago that it wanted to use in effect the sledge hammer in economics, and Australian economists are still only interested in maximising GNP in the short run for, as Keynes said, "in the long-run we are all dead." In December 1973 the arrival of the Whitlam Government brought for Raoul the offer of a senior position as federal public servant (government official) in the Australian Treasury in Canberra. He took up this position early in 1974 and the whole family moved from Melbourne to Canberra. In this new position Raoul dealt with international financial issues such as foreign exchange management, exchange rates, interest rate variations, International Monetary Fund, and Bank of International Settlements (Basel). He observed economic planning and policy making at close hand. In the Australian institutional setting economic structural matters are considered at best during economic crises, such as the one Australia faced at the water front. In other words as long as peace prevails and the economy is humming along - specially while a Liberal/National coalition is in power - little will happen on the structural front. On many economic structural issues Australia still benefits from the thorough thinking done during 1898-1906. In Europe the two world wars and the subsequent attempts to overcome their effects, the East/West Conflict, the American (or Japanese) challenge, the various steps towards the unification of Europe (of which the EURO is the last), have helped many countries to restructure and modernise their economies rather more continuously. In August 1975 Raoul moved to the Dept. of Agriculture. He became Section Head of the International Negotiations Section. In 1981, in the same Department, he took over the Multilateral Relations Section of Australian Fisheries. In that position he organised three FAO conferences in Australia, in Sydney, Kooralbyn, QLD, and in Darwin. In 1988 and 1989, as a member of the Australian Delegation he attended annual meetings in Hobart, Tasmania, of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the only international commission domiciled in Australia. Along with his busy professional life, Raoul maintained his strong interest in family history. My father told numerous stories about our forebears and put some of them to paper in 1974, and in the early 1980s. I went to Obercastrop, today part of the city of Castrop-Rauxel, in 1961 and prepared a report on my findings. At various times my father had put together dates for the Proffen and Sieben families (mother's side) and the Hoffmann and Steinhaeuser families (father's side). Then there was always the Russian great-grandfather Nicholas Orloff. Following downsizing in Australian government departments, restructuring and turning the Fisheries Division of the Department into an independent statutory authority, in December 1993 Raoul was sent into early retirement. He took this opportunity to devote more of his time to some of the important themes in his life. It was early in 1990 that I became concerned with losing the oversight of the many stories that had come into my hand. I also wondered, how best to pass them on to my children. I also began to become concerned about the declining interest in Western societies in history in general as economic pressures sought to turn us all into mere consumers and, even worse, of products with ever shorter life spans. I am certain that understanding how the world has impacted on a person's forebears will lead to a better understanding of the present and assist in making decisions regarding the future. As I thought about the issues I became aware of the fact that with every generation young men in particular spent periods of their life further and further from their places of birth and, accordingly, found their wives from geographically further and further afield, beyond the confines of specific nation-states. I also found how ever more artificial nation- states have become. I observed how technology increasingly has restricted the power of nation-states and how, when looking back into the history of any family, eventually we note that forebears sat on both sides of the fence on any issue at the time. Thus we may find that the forebears included Catholics and Protestants, Christian and Jews, Franks and Saxons, English and Scots, jailers and jailed, etc. Raoul's detailed research was just beginning. His comments on how he went about this enormous task give some insights into the way his book developed. To read more, go to:
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