In memoriam - Peter Kuhrt

Auroville’s pioneer Peter Kuhrt – also known as Stream – passed away on January 28th in a Munich hospital due to heart failure. He was 76.

Peter came to Auroville with the caravan of 1969, together with Michel Klostermann, Christl, Joachim and Dorothee Hach. The group of Munich friends had read about the inauguration of Auroville in a German magazine and decided then and there to come. They had written to the Sri Aurobindo Society but never received an answer, so they just started off in an old Volkswagen bus, driving overland for six weeks and reaching Pondicherry in November, 1969. In due time the group was assigned some accommodation in Auroville’s Aspiration community.

Originally born in East-Prussia, Peter had grown up and studied in Germany. In Auroville he stayed for a few years in Aspiration, doing garden work, working at the AuroPolyester unit, and growing more passionate about painting. Later on, he lived for some time in the Pump House and in Existence (naming it ‘Edge of Existence’).

Residents who know him from that time remember him as a quiet, interiorised person, very gentle and kind-hearted. They observed that the intensity of his inner life came through in his art, and that he, as an artist, saw himself in a state of transition, without thinking that he had “already arrived”. He considered such thinking as the greatest danger to creativity. That he took on the name ‘Stream’ may be a reflection of this transitory stance.

After some ten years he left, feeling unsupported and insecure, realising that Auroville at that stage was not a place for artists. Friends who knew him in his later years in Germany tell us that he lived his life as an artist to the bone. He had no cell phone or internet, and lived with the utmost simplicity, only being concerned with painting, which was the strong yoga which carried him through everything. He was a true and faithful soul and Aurovilian until his last breath.