It’s an interesting year. As you know, we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany.
It is particularly poignant for me because I was there. Not for the tearing down the wall for the cameras bit. No. I was
a 13 year old who lived 15 kilometers away in the East whose life was transformed in November 1989.
I left my own school within months and ‘crossed over’. It felt weird. I entered a school „in the West“ and felt
like a stranger in a strange land. A few others joined me and we stuck out like sore thumbs. We looked a bit
different, sounded different and, well, we were different. But in good ways too: as East Germans we were so much
smarter in math and science!
Berlin in the 1990s was not an ideal environment for a budding entreprenEUR. Artificially bolstered by the
German government housing the Bundestag after the war in 1949 then after reunification in 1999 with the snazzy new
Reichstag building, Berlin until recent years was the epitome of a ‘company town’ with everyone employed by that one employer. In Berlin’s case, both pre and post reunification, that ‘company’ was the government.
