East-West memories

Just before the celebrations last week to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was running an intercultural training course for a group of German trainees. Most of them were in their mid 20s (i.e. born around 1984). I was surprised when, during one exercise which required two groups from different cultures, they immediately came up with the idea of dividing up according to whether they were "Ossis" or "Wessies". It made me wonder about how quickly, or rather slowly, the differences established during 40 years of living in different political and economic systems actually disappear.

My first experience of the East-West divide was in my gap year between school and university when I lived and worked in West Berlin. My job in the pensions department of a large electrical company soon confronted me with the reality: I wondered for a moment why so many of the pensioners had stopped working on 13 August 1961. Then I realized that they had been travelling to work from East to West Berlin and that was the day when the wall was put up. My guest family was puzzled by the fact that I regularly took the trouble to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie to visit friends that I had made in the East.

Shortly after the Wall fell, I was asked to run some teacher training courses in the East. It was a fascinating experience to see the society in flux. People had to come to terms with many changes. Even the little things caused stress; I remember being asked by a lady in Dresden to show her how to use the ATM as she handed me her PIN number. When I asked the West German colleague I was with how he felt, he said, "It could be Russia as far as I am concerned."

While in the East everything seemed to change, I can’t think of anything that changed for me living in Munich, apart from having to pay the new tax, the Solidaritätszuschlag. Of course, the East German regime was repressive, but wasn’t there anything worth keeping or even exporting to the West? I was impressed by the level of English of many of the East German teachers I was training, although they hadn’t been able to travel to English-speaking countries. I found out that they had had a very practical training. Child care and the availability of kindergartens had an ideological side to it but also made it possible for women to work.

All this reminds me of what can happen in business when one company merges with, or takes over, another. One often dominates the other and valuable parts of culture get lost. To prevent this you need to treat "cultural due diligence" as an essential part of the M&A process; this involves carrying out an audit of the cultures so that you can then move on to combine the strengths. During the unification of East and West Germany, no cultural audit took place and many cultural differences have not even been brought to the surface. There was more bulldozing than combining but, if my recent experience with the trainees is anything to go by, some differences still live on.