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When the planned economy became a market economy after the turn of the century, Detlef Scheunert was the link between two alien systems. As the only East German he moved to the board of trustees, a young man from Saxony between jovial managers from the boardrooms of West German companies. They were looking for buyers for more than 8,000 GDR businesses.
Treuhand boss Detlev Karsten Rohwedder wanted to actually redeem 600 billion D-Mark. Scheunert knew better because he knew the dilapidated businesses. As a young functionary of a GDR ministry he had rummaged in the late '80s industrial companies. The further away they were from Berlin, the more desolate they were.
Scheunert says that the East has led the West by the nose with the legend that the GDR is the world's number ten economic power. In the end, the trust made more than 200 billion D-mark loss.
Melanie Ahlemeier / DER SPIEGEL
Detlef Scheunert, 59, talking at his house in Gütersloh
The young privatizer of the time is now 59. He lives in a detached house in Gütersloh, about 450 kilometers west of his Saxon home. From the mid-nineties he has made a career in the environment of the Bertelsmann Group. An offer from Estonia to accompany the privatization in the former Soviet republic, he refused. It might sound a bit odd from his mouth, but he also wanted "not further east, but always west".
SPIEGEL: Mr. Scheunert, the trust was called the "largest slaughterhouse in Europe", you were the only East German director among West German bosses. What are your memories of the inner German Tohuwabohu on Berlin's Alexanderplatz?
Scheunert: I had the grace of late birth, was little contaminated with the old system and have seen the many changes as an opportunity. In the fall of 1990, the old apparatchiks from the GDR era still played Modrow-Treuhand in the fiduciary on the fifth floor. And on the seventh and eighth floors, the West Treuhand slowly established itself from top to bottom. I always went back and forth, switching between the comrades on the fifth floor and the Wessis in the seventh and eighth.
SPIEGEL: How should we imagine this "switching"?
Scheunert: I tried to mediate. And I wanted to know what's going on down there. I hated petting at school. But at some point I told my board: what's going on down there, goes in the other direction.
SPIEGEL: What was going on?
Scheunert: They had to manage the order to help the companies - these were their wards. Privatization was not in focus. The state should continue to be in custody and the West should pay.
SPIEGEL: And what did the West German Treuhand employees do?
Arne Kulf / THE MIRROR
Economic balance of German unity
Scheunert: The Wessis were looking for their well-known structures and processes in companies - but they did not exist as well known in the West. They did not manage at all and were completely helpless. Those who discussed jurisdiction, as usual with officials, had already lost. The makers have prevailed, because I fit in.
SPIEGEL: How did you assert yourself?
Scheunert: With aggressiveness and speed.
SPIEGEL: You do not look like that afterwards.
Scheunert: That was different then. I was an aggressive guy, my fighting weight was 100 kilos. Where I was was the light. That sounds arrogant, it was a protection around me. I was overwhelmed, had no methodical training. I did not have a West German degree, I did my MBA in my day job, I had top people around me.
Hubert Link / DPA
The Treuhand headquarters in Berlin at the beginning of the nineties: "This was not an organization, but an inflating something," says Detlef Scheunert
SPIEGEL: At the age of 30 you were a youngster compared to the predominantly older West colleagues. Did you even take it for full?
Scheunert: Limited. The trustees who were there at the very beginning, the so-called one-dollar people, looked at it with sympathy and said, "Great that you can face that." They did not laugh at a stupid question. The next generation, those from the second, third row, who have seen a career opportunity in the East, and those who had run it down the career ladder in the West, did not listen or even seek advice from me.
SPIEGEL: When you went into trust on September 1, 1990, the organization had about 8,500 companies.
Scheunert: That was not an organization! It was an inflating thing that was just beginning to become an organization. The trust was set up on the ruins of the GDR, located in the former Ministry of Electrical Engineering and Electronics. The top floors were not even renovated. If someone needed an office, it looked like in the fifties - no phone, no nothing. He first had to find a craftsman who renovated the place for him. Everything was done just in time.
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SPIEGEL: The trust has caught many West German managers from the second row.
Scheunert: At the beginning of the trusteeship, there was not a lot of shaking and not a lot of checks. I was extremely lighted up. For me, the staff checkers had found that in the seven weeks between my diploma and the beginning of my first job on May 18, 1983, a gap in my CV gaped.
imago images / photothek
The Electro-Physical Plant in Neuruppin: The company was occupied by the workforce to protest against the dismissal of 2800 workers by trusteeship.
SPIEGEL: The West German managers were not checked?
Scheunert: The East Germans were more suspicious and the West Germans trust rather, that was also understandable.
SPIEGEL: All this is now 30 years ago, but the trust is still polarizing. Are you surprised that Linke and AfD are calling for a committee of inquiry in unison?
Scheunert: I find the harmony of the argument remarkable. When I hear Dietmar Bartsch and Björn Höcke making almost exact demands, I do not know if Bartsch has considered who he is in harmony with. Legend education, which is driven by AfD and Left, contributes to the polarization of society - especially in East Germany. In Thuringia, 54 percent have chosen Left and AfD - so you have to think about what has stuck in the minds of the past 30 years.
SPIEGEL: What has settled?
Scheunert: I am disturbed by the fact that it is always said: "We are so bad, we are so frustrated." Please more objectivity! What was created in the East! It also starts with the Treuhandanstalt. There are countless billions flowing into the East.
SPIEGEL: Do we need a Fiduciary Committee of Inquiry to perhaps conclude with the topic?
Scheunert: This is high-level political populism of the AfD and the Left, it's history baffling. The left are the political successors of the SED, and that has driven the economic model to the wall. It was a moral, but above all an economic bankruptcy. 70 years of Soviet socialism, 40 years of GDR socialism were at an end. Public participation was something of out, nobody wanted that. It was a triumph of the market economy.
SPIEGEL: Bartsch argues with the damage caused by the trust. He was "until today a major cause of the economic backwardness of the East and for political frustration."
Scheunert: The fact that no Dax company is in the East today is historically justified. How long did Daimler take to gain strength? 100 years! BMW? 50 years. Here in Gütersloh there is Bertelsmann - 70 years. That will take generations. Kohl's flourishing landscapes were created in the east in the infrastructure. What should we have done in 1990? Should we have converted the combinate with tax money into corporate headquarters?
Arne Kulf / THE MIRROR
Economic balance of German unity
SPIEGEL: The Thuringian AFD top candidate speaks of the "machinations of the trust".
Scheunert: Höcke has presented himself before the Thuringian election and said that the suffering in East Germany after the turn has a name - Treuhandanstalt. What a demagogue!
SPIEGEL: Once again on the strategy of that time. The trust has handled operations in series. Could more time have been needed to help save more businesses?
Scheunert: That's an academic consideration. The pressure from the road was too high. The people were like thirsty in the desert. They wanted to have it all at once, even though they felt it was unrealistic. Just because they grew up in the East, they were not stupid. They pushed each other and risking things, had taken to the streets, had dealt with the system - now you wanted the dividend. Kohl had delivered the D-Mark.
SPIEGEL: You were there for half a year when Treuhand boss Detlev Rohwedder was killed on Easter Monday in 1991 by the RAF. Have you considered if you hit in the bag?
Scheunert: Of course I thought about that. I was frustrated. My father was old, my ministers were in dust, and I was at an age where I was looking for guidance. In Rohwedder I saw a personality that was for me a guy who had the power of integration and motivation. That was unreservedly the personality that led the store. He was the patron saint - and then he was gone. Rohwedder had successfully renovated the Dortmund steel company Hoesch, who could have been sitting there warm and dry until retirement.
Rainer Klostermeier / AP
Protests at the Treuhand headquarters in May 1993
SPIEGEL: Were you afraid?
Scheunert: Yes, I've already looked over my shoulder in the evening, who's behind me. There were many frustrated people running around. Privately in the circle of friends, I have become very reserved.
SPIEGEL: Did you have to justify yourself because you were on the trust?
Scheunert: Of course. I was a collaborator because I talked to the occupiers.
SPIEGEL: With your biography, would not it have been your task to promote the East German view of the West German trust managers?
Scheunert: At that time I did not feel that way myself. I was interested in economics, read Hayek, later on Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. The Jammerossi came on and this lamentation got on my nerves. I was for this creative destruction. You had to send the old men home.
SPIEGEL: Are you confident today that the creative destruction was right?
Scheunert: Back then I was convinced that the orientation towards the market economy is correct, because I have seen people's personal freedom and are firmly convinced that private property is the basis of efficient business. I think little of state involvement. The East, this little GDR, was already a strange society. Led by dilettantes who had developed a fascinating idea from their youth. And then they screwed up so much because they stuck to old dogmas.
SPIEGEL: Is there something that you regret?
Scheunert: I would have wished for economic development in the sense of starting a business from the West. The willingness to initiate was there, but the competence was lacking. There were many small foundations that went bankrupt because they had no idea.
Jürgen Eis / imago images
Terrain of the former wool spinning mill Altenburg in the Saxon town America
SPIEGEL: "The GDR's assets have been redistributed to the West," criticized the Berlin sociologist Steffen Mau. He said that the East Germans should have been enabled by a KfW funding program. More than 10,000 businesses have been sold, but only about five percent to new East German owners.
Scheunert: East German entrepreneurs, who have brought a Wessi as a marketing man or controller, were successful - because of another had training. I would have wanted more ownership in the East and a special economic zone for a few years that would have made starting a business easier. Small entrepreneurial little plants had sprung up in the East, and then the giant bureaucracy's block was put on it. This could be borne by the highly developed West German economy, but not by the then young and still weak East German companies.
SPIEGEL: Why was the Treuhand not considering the effects of the serious systemic changes on people?
Scheunert: There was no time for that. There was an expectation tsunami. It was a new situation every day. In the course of the Trust years, more and more lawyers and controllers have gotten the shots. In 1993, the trust was almost perfect, and it had the highest efficiency. As director I was the eleventh signature, after the twelfth signature the privatization processes went to the board.
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SPIEGEL: With the clear-cut by the Treuhand the new countries fell by the wayside, today entire regions are bled dry.
Scheunert: The social impact did not matter at that time.
SPIEGEL: You plowed through.
Scheunert: In principle, we did the job the SED has failed for decades. The companies were overstaffed and the shift to the market economy has called for a productivity boost per se. The trust has begun. Everything not necessary for operation was split off - polyclinics, military cases, kindergartens. We had to consider many laws, that was not just the trust law. And there was not in it: What does that do with the people in East Germany, what about the region? That was not our job.
SPIEGEL: Executives with turnaround and experience can be valuable to the economy in many ways, because they have a different view and do not see change as a threat. However, East Germans occupy just under two percent of the top positions in politics, business, administration and the media. How frustrated are people in the new countries?
Scheunert: I was also frustrated about this at the end of the trust. That this is still the case today is difficult to explain. Many East Germans have no networks in big companies, politics and administration and just did not get all the way up. Only then do you move someone. There were no executive development programs in the East at the time, and they are not established today.
SPIEGEL: Could an East Quota help?
Scheunert: I do not think that works. The women's quota does not work.
SPIEGEL: Why not?
Scheunert: That may work in parties. But if someone comes into a company position through a quota, he has a spit route, which has a hard time. Those who do not play will ensure that he or she fails.
SPIEGEL: Do you really understand yourself as an East German or a West German?
Scheunert: Neither. I have experienced my youth in East Germany and the time between 30 and 60 in the West. Of course, I have an affinity with my roots inside, I read the "Saxon Newspaper" and I listen to the MDR, but I also share my life here, for example in the Lions Club. When Thuringia chooses, I call someone I know there. And I try to explain the developments to West German friends.
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SPIEGEL: We are having this conversation in your house in Gütersloh and not in your hometown Döbeln near Meissen. Have you ever considered returning to the East?
Scheunert: Sometimes I get sentimental and wonder why I did not start a business in East Germany. I have the knowledge and the access to investment funds. When I'm in Saxony and hear certain concerns like "but that's difficult", I'm off the idea every time. Then I think you still have not learned - and are sobered.
SPIEGEL: You say that during your trusteeship you have "gotten stuck in your face". How much were you influenced by Daimler and Westfalia during these years compared to later stations?
Scheunert: The Treuhand was definitely the most exciting time. We are already talking for a few hours, the stories just come out of me.
SPIEGEL: Do you still think about the Treuhand daily?
Scheunert: I came to Ostwestfalen-Lippe in 1995 and talked about it. People looked at me and said: What? As? Dark Germany? The oriented to the west or south. We have found good and interested friends. But in the company that I managed, you were very focused. One stood with the back to the east. I noticed: This does not interest anyone, and then I stopped talking about it. That's actually been the case since 1995.