Leipzig is for Lovers

OK, I'm a sucker for the Germans. Maybe it's the flash of Nena's armpit hair on her 99 Luftballoon video or their heavily accented English, but something to me says, 'Ja' whenever I meet a German. Or a German beer.

I spent a summer in the northern German town of Braunschweig while in high school; Braunschweig translates to Brunswick and it's near Hanover. For those of you living in and around Wilmington, that's kind of cool, huh? This was part of an exchange program and it turns out the highlight of which was a friggin 'B' in my English class. I was able to visit West Berlin and go to East Berlin. I speak some German and their experience as a divided country still resonates with me.

So, during my senior year in college, I was glued to the information available about the revolution in the Eastern Bloc countries. To date me, this was really before fulltime cable news coverage and I just had the newspapers. My choice was the Wall Street Journal and I followed the whole event faithfully; I literally could not believe what was happening. I tried to keep up with everything but nothing prepared me for the access to information we had while in Leipzig. Turns out, the whole thing started here.

A 4 paragraph primer: The Deutsche Demokratische Republik --The German Democratic Republic or East Germany-- just couldn't keep up economically with the West. West Germany had created for itself a very nice export economy and was renowned for it's engineering standards and quality work. The East was renowned for it's spying and secret police and so something had to break at some point. College students --kids that are my age now-- started to push back and churches were given permission to have students gather for 'prayer meetings'.

The prayer meetings were every Monday and gained momentum. They started at St. Nicholas' Lutheran Church in downtown Leipzig. Three of the activists of that time spoke with us and brought us into their world a bit. Let me try and paint the picture of state-sponsored fear and intimidation prevalent at that time. The Stasi, or state secret police, existed in reality, but never in conversation and the Stasi HQ in Leipzig was an old insurance office building called the Round Corner that we visited (see pictures). And in this building, the Stasi kept tabs on it's networks of informants, the spying they did on citizens, the information collected by the 'journalists' that worked for the newspapers, and even managed to work over the teachers to find perfect little communists that would start spying on their classmates. The process was detailed and thorough and focused on instilling terror in the citizenry.

In that climate of distrust, if you had a good feeling about someone's intentions, you ran with it. This feeling eventually bubbled up into protests in the streets of up to 70,000 families, students and everyday people that wanted change. The goal was to protest the current state of the State, to work within the allowed system. Eventually it was clear that Gorbachev was unable to support East Germany financially; East Germany just had an election that showed 99% support for the Communist party that everyone knew was bogus; East Germans were watching West German news. So they protested with candles and prayers. It became a perfect storm for revolution.

There were a total of 27 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. On October 9, 1989, the most important happened, the demonstration that the East German government ordered stopped. There were police in riot gear with orders to shoot, tank battalions were activated, and there were snipers on roofs. But too many of these policemen/soldiers/apparatchiks knew too many of their own families were participating in the protests. Besides there was no shouting, just protesters that chanted "We are the people". The response to the governments claims that they were there for the people. The protestors froze the government by demending free movement, free opinion, free elections, free business and abolition of the 'anti-free' laws. Also localized, specfic demands; they had SO MANY demands that it paralyzed a dictitorial system. Ultimately, the wall opened on November 9th. And free elections happened in January.

Fast forward to today. Germany is still separate areas: one that has high wages with highly educated and experienced individuals. The other that has lower wages, brand new infrastructure and folks that feel that their 'west' German brethren resent them a little too much. That being said, I'd bet that the differences between the east and west do not amount to near the differences in the US between the north and South. So don't let me paint a picture that is out of proportion.

Leipzig is getting lots of western infrastructure. Porsche and BMW have plant here and Amazon.com is putting a distribution center there. Just like everywhere else I visited, Leipzig considers itself the "crossroads of Europe", so multi-nationals like to have a presence here. Manufacturing is all the rage in eastern Germany (low wages) and Leipzig's blend of highly competitive universities and talented IT folks make it a good fit.

Germany is now the economic powerhouse of Europe. Angela Merkel (the German PM) is the most powerful woman in the world, so much so that George W thought she was a bit sexy and tried to give her a G20 backrub. She is reaching out to Russia. Germany's export economy is taking a hit, but Deutsche Bank just made $2.3B last quarter. Beyond the backrub thing, do you get a sense that paying attention to Germany makes sense?

How does Leipzig attract companies? As part of the EU, I'm told that all cities have the same incentives they can provide for companies that are looking to move there. So each city has to rely on their own infrastructure and ability to market itself to attract businesses. Leipzig seems to be better at it than most. I met with 2 individuals from the Leipzig Economic Development Agency and was fascinated at their approach. Believe me, Wilmington has nothing on these guys, their marketing collateral is first rate and even though they may struggle getting their point across in English, it's obvious that businesses will want to move here.

Since I'm writing this during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, it has some meaning, a lot to me, hopefully a lot to you, too. Leipzig was the epicenter 20 years ago and has Opportunity today. And it's not just because I like Germans.