Happy German Unity Day – still a long way to go

I still remember the day when the German wall came down. Probably every single person in Germany who was old enough will never forget it. We were sitting in our living room in our apartment in West-Germany in a small village near Brunswick and we were watching television. My Mom was very excited and also we kids realized that something important was going on. I was 9 years old and used to occasionally visiting some relatives in East-Germany. However, crossing the German-German border has never been usual.

There were these strange situations at the inner German border which I experienced and which still come into my mind automatically when I think about the German wall: when my Mom suddenly became afraid about so many tiny things; when my sister asked her innocently why they were putting a long stick in the fuel tank of our car and she tried to silence her without getting the attention of the guard who was patroling; or the moment when my Mom discovered that she had west-music on board and panically tried to hide the tapes in our children’s toys.

All these actions confused us kids very much. We were used to the feeling of right and justice and we were not able to grasp the dimension of what was going on. That we were literally entering a country where you could get into real trouble because of listening to the wrong type of music. Or where people would be so desperate to leave that they would even try it to hide themselves in the fuel tank of a car.

The day when the wall finally came down, my mother impulsively put us into her car and drove us the 60 km to the next border crossing. I will never forget what happened there. Everyone was so exhilarated. I had the impression that all the adults have been awake for too long and eaten too much sweets. My mother embraced every single person she met and we just did the same without thinking too much. Men and women were crying out loudly and this very special moment in my life, I had the feeling that everything WAS possible.

On this historic evening, we became friends with another family from East-Germany which invited us to a spontaneous sleep-over. The place they were living at was quite dark outside. They didn’t possess much. If you wanted to make a phone call you had to go to the next phone box some corners far away. However, when we had breakfast together, they shared everything they had and the mood was so positive and exciting, we all felt very comfortable indeed.

I sometimes wonder what these kids must have thought in these moments of pure happiness. How confident and full of hope in the future they must have been – and how much disappointed afterwards.

We lost contact many years ago but I am still wondering when the moment was that they realized that their provenance will last as a negative stigma on them for decades, maybe for the rest of their lives; that >20 years after the wall came down, there haven’t been a single person from East-Germany who has ever been appointed to a board of the German DAX-30 stock market and that there doesn't seem to be any real perspective for a structural progress; that you can jump off an ICE (fastest train) on some very small cities in West-Germany – but that the capital of the East-German federal state of Saxony-Anhalt still isn’t connected to any; that most of the professorships as well as most of the leading public administration positions in East-Germany are still in the hand of people from West-Germany (spoiler alarm: it’s not the other way around in West-Germany).

How much disappointed they must be – from all of us.

The German Day of Unity should help us to reflect and remember why we wanted this unity and that we owe it to those people who trusted in us and in our system to bring about a change for the better. To whom we promised that they will have equal opportunities in a unified country! There is still a long way to go and we need to go it – in order to prevent that our society falls apart.

Call for action for German business leaders:

1. Stop discriminating people bc of their dialect. Get used to it that not everyone speaks the dialect from lower saxony (which is in West-Germany and the region where I grew up; this dialect is regarded as the standard). Acknowledge diversity – most people from East Germany will probably beat you in every single science task if you’ll give them the chance!
2. Don’t care so much about the connections someone has but more on the potential to develop. Only a small number of people had the good luck that they grew up in one of the wealthy West-German families. For all the others it’s much harder to build up a reliable network to business or political leaders (this is in particular true if you are from East-Germany).
3. Stop weighting provenance more than capabilities. I understand that it’s easier to trust people who have a similar background. But again: the probability is higher to get better results in a diverse team!

#GermanUnityDay #GUD #BusinessLeaders #CallForAction