After he went to Germany from Estonia in 1941 he began his studies of chemistry in 1949 at the University of Tübingen until 1951. He became Dr. rer. nat. in 1954 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He did his habilitation 1960 at the same university. After a short but very successful career in industry at Bayer from 1962 until 1968 when he joined the University of Southern California at Los Angeles.
From 1971 he worked at the Technical University of Munich, and was an emeritus from 1999 until his death in 2005.