Falk Huettig was born in 1971 in Räckelwitz in the now defunct communist German Democratic Republic. He left school at 16 to become a mechanic and welder. After finishing his apprenticeship, he worked shifts in a communist Kombinat (factory) to assemble combine harvesters for the Eastern Bloc. The only peaceful revolution in German history and the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the course of his life when he was 18 and communist dictators and their henchmen were replaced by West German capitalists (and their henchmen). A (what looked like a) promising working-class career came to an abrupt end when the factory was closed down by its West German rival and the workforce got fired.
In 1993 he refused to join the Federal German Army and became a conscientious objector doing community service for 18 months in youth centers for disadvantaged kids in Ennis, Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland. In 1995, Huettig decided that he was not ready to return to Germany and went to Scotland instead. He enrolled for a higher education access course at Telford College in Edinburgh while financing himself by being a night porter at Bruntsfield Youth Hostel.
Taking advantage of the lofty ideals of free movement and free labor within the European Union, and the idea of free university education for all in the times before New Labour, he entered Edinburgh University in 1996 to study Biology. Being fascinated by the course Psychology 1, he switched to Psychology, and after obtaining Bachelor and Master degrees, he went to York University in England to get a PhD in Psychology. In 2004, Huettig left the UK to be a post-doc at Ghent University, Belgium.
Since 2007 he’s been doing full-time research in Psychology of Language and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He is also a Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany, and at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.