Georg Zundel (May 17, 1931 – March 11, 2007) was a German physicist, entrepreneur, and peace politics committed philanthropist.
Georg Zundel was born in 1931 as the only son of Georg Friedrich Zundel and Paula Zundel. He became a physicist and gained an international reputation especially in hydrogen bonding research. He founded companies and was always committed to agriculture and forestry. Peace politics, Georg Zundel was particularly involved through the establishment of the Berghof Foundation, Foundation for Conflict Research, for which he was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003. Zundel was married and had three children. He lived with his family in Salzburg until his death in 2007. His grave is located in Haisterkirch near Bad Waldsee.
Childhood and youth
Georg Zundel spent his childhood and youth on his parents' estate, the "Berghof" near Tübingen, and on the family farm in Haisterkirch, Bad Waldsee. His appreciation of agriculture stemmed from this experience in times of food shortages. At the same time, Zundel was confronted at a young age by an environment marked by political and economic tensions through his parental home. His mother Paula Zundel was the daughter of the entrepreneur Robert Bosch. His father Georg Friedrich Zundel was married in his first marriage to the women's rights activist Clara Zetkin. As a painter of large-scale workers' portraits, he had caused a sensation at the turn of the 20th century. Due to the war, Georg Zundel was not able to graduate from high school until 1952, whereupon he began studies in physics at Universität München. Before and during his studies, he traveled through Italy and Greece by motorcycle in 1951 and 1952. In 1955, he and a friend conducted a nine-month journey in a converted Unimog from Stuttgart via Afghanistan to India and back.
