From 'Customer is King' to Serving the King: The 'Waffenschmied's Silent Power Shift
In 1979, caterer Rolf Anschütz experienced the highlight of his career: the Emperor of Japan received him and honoured his ‘Waffenschmied’ as the best Japanese restaurant outside of Japan (Timm 2012).
Seven years later, the Suhl restaurant was a pile of rubble: the Japanese restaurant's warehouse was infested with fungus and had to be closed for hygiene reasons, as did the in-house laundry. Walls collapsed. The employees now called their workplace ‘the ruin’ and offered their voluntary help to the responsible trade organisation ?Handelsorganisation“ (HO) to renovate the building.
Despite this, no funds were made available for this (Erices 2016). Instead, the HO demanded increases in turnover from the ‘Waffenschmied’ (Bollwahn 2012). Yet despite all the difficulties, the restaurant had made a respectable profit of one million marks in the previous year (Erices 2016).
Rolf Anschütz then resigned and his brother, who was a loyal party soldier and secret Stasi informer, was appointed restaurant manager (Erices 2016). Then the restaurant was temporarily closed and the necessary repairs were made (Erices 2016).
Which stratagem did the HO use?
Number 4: ?Await the exhausted enemy at your ease“. In doing so, someone remains in the waiting position and prepares until the other person loses their balance and can be (almost) effortlessly tipped off (Senger 1993: 59-66).
The Japanese section of the ‘Waffenschmied’ was the HO's local branch's cash cow: since its imperial honour, the restaurant attracted tens of thousands of guests from the West every year - including national celebrities and international show stars (Seifert 2023; Bollwahn 2012). The restaurant was also a meeting point for the Staatssicherheit; it was extensively monitored by internal informants and external surveillance technology (Erices 2016). Rolf Anschütz was a nuisance, however, because he prioritised his service to the guests over his homeland (Unknown author 2012).
Anschütz was an artist and a fanatic, a perfectionist for whom his obsession with Japan was everything. He was good at improvising, but poor at compromising, so it was decided to get rid of him (Bollwahn 2012).
However, this wasn't that easy, because as a member of the presidium of the East German-Japanese Friendship Society, he was closely connected to the Japanese (Uske 2012: 1), with whom the GDR did didn't want to jeopardise its foreign policy relations. Instead, they stopped the maintenance of the 103-year-old building that housed the restaurant and also demanded higher sales, until the star chef's collar burst and he made way for his partisan-loyal brother with the same surname.
This preserved the connection between the name and the ‘Waffenschmied’, while the paradigm shift from customer is king to serving the king took place behind the scenes (largely) unnoticed by outsiders.
After his departure, Rolf Anschütz went to Berlin and helped the Stasi a little bit back home (Erices 2016). However, his hopes of being assigned a Japanese restaurant in East Germany's capital remained unfulfilled (Bollwahn 2012).
Meanwhile, the restaurant was reopened after the refurbishment and continued to operate successfully until after German reunification (Bollwahn 2012).
Note
The result of this analysis is based on the incomplete information available to me. The result could be correct, but it could also be that Rolf Anschütz didn't have planning permission for the unconventional furo bath he built within the restaurant (see Uske 2012: 2) and that the responsible authorities therefore stubbornly refused to repair the resulting water damage. Anschütz Suhl's (contemporary) comrades should therefore know this better than I do.
Sources
#36stratagems