Peter Behrens

Peter Behrens (14 April 1868 – 27 February 1940) was a German architect and designer. He was important for the modernist movement, and several of the movement's leading names (including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius) in earlier stages of their careers.

Biography

Behrens attended the Christianeum Hamburg from September 1877 until Easter 1882. He studied painting in his native Hamburg, as well as in Düsseldorf and Karlsruhe, from 1886 to 1889. In 1890, he married Lilly Kramer and moved to Munich. At first, he worked as a painter, illustrator and book-binder in a sort of artisanal way. He frequented the bohemian circles and was interested in subjects related to the reform of life-styles. In 1899 Behrens accepted the invitation of the Grand-duke Ernst-Ludwig of Hesse to be the second member of his recently inaugurated Darmstadt Artists' Colony, where Behrens built his own house and fully conceived everything inside the house (furniture, towels, paintings, pottery, etc.) The building of this house is considered to be the turning point in his life, when he left the artistic circles of Munich and moved away from the Jugendstil towards a sober and austere style of design.

Peter Behrens (musician)

Peter Behrens (born 4 September 1947 in Sande, Lower Saxony) is a German drummer, actor, musician and clown.

Life

Peter Behrens is the illegitimate son of an American GI, and was put up for adoption by his biological mother. He was adopted by the Behrens family, where he grew up in northern Germany. After graduating from high school in Jaderberg, he studied at a college nearby, but quit a short while later.

Subsequently, he toured as a drummer in several bands, playing throughout northern Germany, and for half a year throughout Africa. In 1971 he played in the Krautrock band Silberbart, who released an album of psychedelic hard rock, now very popular among collectors. Nearing the end of the 1970s, he attended the Milan circus school, and worked briefly as a clown and pantomime artist.

Together with Stephan Remmler and Gert "Kralle" Krawinkel, Behrens was a member of the German band Trio in the early 1980s, where he played the drums. The band became known particularly through the minimalist title Da Da Da, a succession to the New German Wave. The other two members met Behrens through a newspaper advertisement. Behrens was especially known for his somewhat formal dress attire: white T-shirt, white pants, red suspenders and red shoes. Behrens' hair-do showed an upward coil similar to that of Moritz of Max and Moritz. Behrens owned this outfit before clown school and Trio. Also he used to play the drums standing upright in a stoic manner, which added to the visual appearance of the band.

Peter Behrens (writer)

Peter Behrens (born 1954) is a Canadian novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. His debut novel, The Law of Dreams, won the 2006 Governor General's Award for English fiction.

Behrens was born and raised in Montreal, where he studied at Concordia University and McGill University. He was a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. His earliest short fiction can be found in Best Canadian Stories 1978 and Best Canadian Stories 1979, and in his debut short story collection, Night Driving (1987). He subsequently worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter; though he continued to publish short stories and essays in Canadian and American magazines, he did not publish another book until The Law of Dreams, his novel of a young man driven into exile during Ireland's Great Famine. The NYT called the book "Absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written...a masterly novel." The NYT called his second novel, The O'Briens, published in 2012 "a major accomplishment". "The O'Briens" was published in French by Editions Philippe Rey (Paris) in 2014. Behrens' third novel Carry Me, an unusual love story set in Berlin, Frankfurt, and West Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, will be published February 2016 by Pantheon in the US and House of Anansi in Canada.