Yet it is also possible that the phrase “hell on earth” comes to mind. Both the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government often used the term in relation to Tibet. Yet they both meant something completely different. For the Dalai Lama, the new Chinese Tibet that he left behind in 1959 is “hell” and a “large prison,” particularly because he believes that the Chinese oppress Tibetan Buddhism that he considers the core of Tibetan identity. However, from a Chinese perspective, it is the escaped god-king himself and the former Tibetan elite that stand for a “hell on earth”, namely for the old, traditional Tibet that was a deeply inhumane, dreadful, tyrannical, and corrupt feudal society.
Albert Ettinger
was born in 1952 in Differdange, a small industrial town of the Luxembourg steel area, as the first son of a miner. Initially, he studied History, then pursued German and Romance Languages Studies in Trier (Germany), which he completed by a Ph.D. with the rating summa cum laude.
For more than thirty years, he worked as a high school and college teacher in Luxembourg and Trier.
He is married and father of two children.
In recent years, Albert Ettinger wrote two books and many articles about Tibet and the Tibet conflict.
