The authors, as active participants, give for the first time from their personal experience an insight into the first two decades of the history of synergetics. Hermann Haken introduces the terminology of synergetics and illustrates the difficulties of establishing a new way of thinking in science. Peter Plath takes an exemplary look at the prehistory of synergetics and uses a case study from chemistry to show how the idea of synergetics became the leitmotif of a research group. Werner Ebeling and Yuri Romanovsky describe the intensive cooperation of scientists from East and West in the development of new ideas on synergetics.