Hans Martin Sutermeister

Early years

Hans Martin was born to Friedrich Sutermeister (1873-1934) and Maria Hunziker (1875-1947). His brothers include the writer Peter and composer Heinrich. His grandfather was the folklorist Otto Sutermeister. A minister's son, Hans Martin studied theology in Germany, changing to medicine at University of Basel just before completing his degree. After his promotion with his uncle Hans Hunziker in 1941, Sutermeister published, under the pseudonym “Hans Moehrlen” (following the surname of his great-grandfather Christophe Moehrlen), an autobiographical novella about his life as a bachelor. The novella describes his philosophical change of direction towards a monist view of love and happiness, inspired by natural science; remarkably is its heartedness in times of war. In the following years, Sutermeister published a series on neopositivist medical thought. He was especially interested in psychosomatic medicine and music psychology. For example, according to him, “swing music is restful” because the brain becomes fatigued when it is worked too hard, as in acquiring knowledge of new facts. Both students and business men can benefit by such music … the best way to rest the brain after such fatigue is to “regress” to more basic or primitive forms of thought and feeling.

During World War II, he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as a physician at the Swiss border. After the war he wrote for medical journals and was an instructor in psychophysiology at the Volkshochschule (Folk high school) in Bern. In 1945, he opened his first a family medical practice in Bern.

In order to get a venia legendi in History of Medicine and Medical Psychology (Psychosomatics), Sutermeister successively deposited, at the beginning of the 1950s, three post-doctoral theses at the Medical Faculty of the University of Berne:

About the changes in the perception of the disease;

Psychosomatics of laughter and crying (a philosophical-psychological and physiological work on the Freud's theory of humor);

Schiller as physician: a contribution to psychosomatic medicine.

Sutermeister was in contact with the medical historian Erich Hintzsche particularly because of his work Schiller as physician, and he participated in a seminar on medical history 1953 in Lugano. In a letter to Hintzsche, Henry E. Sigerist described Sutermeister's review, published in 1955 as Volume 13 of the Berne contributions to the history of medicine and natural sciences, as “a very nice work … that is interesting even to literary historians.” The assessor Jakob Klaesi recommended to the Dean of the Faculty Bernhard Walthard to allow Sutermeister's habilitation allow for the government to issue Sutermeister's habilitation as a lecturer in Medicine history and Psychosomatic medicine. Hintzsche, however, who decided jointly, rejected his habilitation.

Hans Martin married Ingeborg Marie Schulzke, with whom he had three daughters.

He joined the Ring of Independents political party and began his political career in the legislature of the Canton of Bern. From 1967 to 1971 he served as a member of the municipal executive, as well as director of the city's schools. As school director, he promoted comprehensive schools. Although he had a reputation as a progressive within his party, he also stirred some concern both inside and outside the party by fiercely criticizing The Little Red Schoolbook, an educational manifesto deriving from the 1968 student protest movement that urged students to reject societal norms. Der Spiegel quoted his warning to all educators: We will not permit our youth, who are today still healthy, and our freedom-based Western culture, to be undermined by such softening-up tactics, which are clearly controlled from the East, and made 'Ready for conquest' by Communism.

and added that some schools banned the book; Radio Bern canceled a broadcast on it; and bookstores canceled orders; the city authorities determined that the book was not seditious, but with police assurance that they had the power to do so, banned it as posing a danger to minors. His actions revealed latent attitudinal and generational divisions within the party, and he was not re-elected in 1971.

In 1972, he opened his new family medical practice in Basel.