Prof. Dr. em. Klaus E. Müller was born in Dortmund in 1935. After coming into contact with Anthropology through Hermann Baumann, Müller decided to take up his studies at the Institute for Ethnology and African Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich in 1959. He finished his habilitation thesis in 1970 and eventually took up a professorship at the Institute for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Frankfurt University in 1971.