Where it all began – remembering Helmut Beloch
by Gerda Mävers
We received the sad news that the co-founder of our association, our founding member and long-time vice chairman Helmut Beloch, passed away on October 17, 2024. Our thoughts are with his wife Sonja, his daughters, his family.
This must satisfy the formality, otherwise Helmut would take it very badly. Helmut had a deep aversion to formalities and conventions. That makes me smile when I wrote it, because it was his tenacity, meticulousness and willingness to face the formalities of German association law that made the establishment of our association possible in the first place. It was he who was in charge of the formal implementation of the foundation and registration – I would say gave the
fire a stable framework. A framework that has not been thought away from the psychodrama landscape in Europe since 1989, because it was the first formal association of European psychodramatists from East and West – and this under the flag of non-profit status. Three idealists – one of them with a great willingness to carry out the necessary formalism – were required for this.
The common goal of overcoming inner and outer borders and walls through the founding of a European Psychodrama Institute united and inspired 3 people for whom the date 1989 was overdue. It was not only the founding of this association with founding members from East and West 3 months before the actual fall of the Wall that was revolutionary. Revolutionary in the psychodrama landscape of that time was also the conscious decision for a non-profit form of organization. This non-profit association now looks back on 35 years of psychodramatic work in
Europe – still essentially on the basis of the statutes that Helmut Beloch put on paper in 1989 – and says:
Thank you, Helmut! Thank you for pouring our club and its structure so persistently, precisely and conscientiously into a form that still carries today. This remains unforgotten. “And so we – Sonja, Ildikó and I – were sitting around the kitchen table at the Beloch´s place in Munich one evening and birthed the idea of founding a European Psychodrama institute. The idea survived the night …”
(Helmut Beloch, Everyone talks about Europe – we´re shaping it! in Psychodrama Association for Europe e.V., 30th Anniversary Book, 2019)
