Ulrike lives with her husband in the French-speaking part of Switzerland but was born in Germany and is the fourth of five children. During her childhood, her parents relocated six times for financial reasons, and then her father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 40 when she was ten. Her father was a soldier during the Second World War at the age of 16. Europe's history fascinates her, and this difficult historical legacy has repeatedly prompted her not only to examine the past, but also to recognise how important reconciliation is for a stable future.
She lived at the IofC centre in Caux for about 30 years, where her three children were born and grew up. Living there gave her a much broader and more global view of the world and a deeper understanding of how people live on our planet.
Creating trust and security in the family is fundamental for her. She felt that the best legacy she could leave them was to break the chain of decisions shaped by trauma and unresolved suffering. “Because what is not processed within yourself will be certainly transferred to others, children are the best breeding ground for this”.
She trained as a life coach at the PRH School (Personalité Relation Humaine), with the motto: ‘You can only help others as much as you yourself have been helped.’ During this training, she worked on personal healing from trauma, restoring true identity, dealing with family secrets and taboos, as well as intergenerational illnesses and communicating dysfunction in families.
For years, she has been organising seminars with others as part of IofC, either in Germany, Poland or Switzerland, always seeking to bring together Eastern and Western Europeans.
Ulrike is an artist always searching for the meaning of life, for the origins that have shaped the present, and for the challenge of reorientation that can take on a new form in the hope and faith of tomorrow.
She tried to show this in her picture exhibition in November 2024 with the guiding theme: ‘Life transcends us’ and ending with the challenge: ‘Make us an instrument of your peace’. The exhibition addresses current issues: social questions such as conflict, war and peace, freedom and responsibility, as well as the past and the future. It was filmed and enhanced with text and music.
Her oil paintings always have something of this: life in our society today, with the underlying questions: “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why was I created?” These questions gave rise to her book, which was printed in 2023.
