What is really important What touches us today – and does not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence has existed: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen, who comes from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
I’ll bet a cucumber that German unity is far better than many think. Why a cucumber? My colleague Anja and her husband, a Wessi from Berlin, moved to the Spreewald in Brandenburg – the stronghold of cucumber cultivation. What the two of them experienced there is a piece of East-West coexistence – completely different.
“When you move from the big city to a small village with five house numbers, you are afraid of not being accepted,” reports Anja. Motto: The snobs come from the city. And then another Wessi.
“We paddled (a boat is a car replacement here) with our luggage to our new home,” says the colleague. When they arrived at the restaurant, exhausted, the waiter suddenly and unexpectedly said: “Come on, I’ll drive you home and help you unpack.” Colleague Anja: “We were touched and delighted.”
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
The two city dwellers wanted to create a cucumber bed – what else in the Spreewald! They tried to loosen up the soil with a spade and pickaxe – ouch. Didn’t go too tight. A neighbor saw her, came over and hacked with … Strangers became friends, very quickly, overnight. Or, better said, over the bed!
▶ ︎ I hear from many sides what my colleague has experienced in the Spreewald. Wessis are no longer the conquerors, but welcome friends. Ossis arrived in Wessiland? For a long time.
Another colleague of mine, Eileen, studied as an Ossi at the TU Berlin. What she felt at first: prejudice, distrust. “Ossis are superficial, not purposeful,” she often heard.
She liked to wear mini-skirts and pumps – branded clothes, of course. “I had worked hard for all of them alongside my Abitur and wore them with pride,” she says. She was drawn together with fellow student Bettina on her architecture degree – a year older, a seemingly typical Wessi, determined, always well prepared. Could that go well?
Then the professor had an idea. Eileen: “She locked the east-west seminar participants in a room for six hours – plus loud, experimental music to test our creativity. ‘Now show what you can do,’ said the lecturer. And so we were forced to talk to each other, to exchange ideas. We quickly realized that we had more in common than we thought. ”Very quickly, East-West no longer played a role. Today they are best friends. And no one speaks of East or West any more.
Two stories of charity and neighborhood, of people who were different – and yet came together.
Sunday is October 3rd, the day of German unity. How nice that we can celebrate life – together.
Louis Hagen (74) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. You can also find his texts at: thebusinessbeast.com. More about the author: www.louishagen.de.
.