History of Science: East-West: Delayed Blossoming | nd-aktuell.de

Today, Adlershof likes to celebrate itself as the largest and most successful science and technology park in Germany and emphasizes its innovative strength for the future. In fact, the area in the southeast of Berlin with its own motorway exit is also a historically packed location of technological and scientific pioneering achievements: the first aircraft took off into the Berlin sky from the adjacent Johannisthal airfield, the GDR Academy of Sciences had its largest collection of institutes here and the GDR Television had its true beginning here. One of the actors from back then, the physicist Ingolf Hertel, has now written a book about the most exciting Adlershof years, the period of change after 1989 and the integration into the overall German science system.

For the book title “Blooming Landscapes,” Hertel, who comes from Freiburg, chose a tongue-in-cheek formulation that Chancellor Helmut Kohl used in 1990 to promote unification in the new federal states. For the science of those most intense months of change, he unearthed an interesting statement from the West German Science Council from the beginning of 1990, which said: “Overall, it cannot simply be a matter of transferring the Federal German science system to the GDR. Rather, the process of unification also offers the Federal Republic of Germany the opportunity to self-critically examine to what extent parts of its education and research system need to be reorganized.

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Transfer of the West structures

But this window of synthesis, in which the East also partially changed the West, was closed again with the signing of the Unity Treaty at the end of August 1990. From now on, the Western structures were transferred to the East, which for science meant the clearing of SED cadres from the universities and, in research, the dissolution of the GDR Academy of Sciences, which was centralized according to the Soviet model. While the Science Council prepared the new research institutes with a major evaluation – including the Max Born Institute for Short-Time Spectroscopy (MBI), for which Ingolf Hertel came to Berlin as one of three founding directors – the “coordination” set up by the Federal Research Ministry was responsible for the “clearing up”. – and processing office of the institutes and facilities of the former Academy of Sciences of the GDR”, KAI-AdW for short. As in universities, most scientists in research also lost their jobs. Those who were lucky got the chance for a temporary position through the “Scientist Integration Program” (WIP).

In any case, these were not “blooming landscapes” in Adlershof in the first half of the 1990s. “There is no overarching concept for the overall project and there is no concept for common facilities,” says a note from the Berlin Senate from August 1992. “The area still makes a depressing impression!” The biggest organizational problems were the different Senate responsibilities and the Question of ownership. Only when these had been clarified could millions of euros for new buildings, much of it from EU funding, flow to Adlershof. This also made it easier to rebuild the scientific community, which soon included the relocation of the Humboldt University’s natural science institutes from Mitte to the outskirts of the city.

Foundings out of necessity

The development of a new, innovative economy in Adlershof was completely different. There were no companies here during the GDR era. Only scientific institutes where a young physicist named Angela Merkel worked at the time. Many application-oriented researchers who were thrown out the door were forced to become founders of small technology start-ups. This happened in such large numbers that an early innovation ecosystem was formed in Adlershof. What economic policy today tries to stimulate with incentives was born out of necessity back then. A surprising number of start-up companies made their way into the capitalist economy. A company that specialized in X-ray technologies, Röntec, was taken over by the analysis giant Bruker 15 years ago with a turnover of six million euros. Today the Röntec division has a turnover of 100 million euros.

One of the people who has worked in Adlershof the longest is the now 89-year-old engineer Norbert Langhoff. In 1963, as a young student, he entered the GDR Academy’s Center for Scientific Instrument Construction (ZWG), of which he later became director. The institute, which recently had 500 employees, primarily produced high-tech measuring devices for the GDR industry, such as Carl Zeiss in Jena. After the fall of the Wall, Langhoff founded his own company, the Institute for Device Construction (IfG), which still exists and is expanding today. “He was one of the very few AdW directors who apparently still enjoyed the full trust of their employees even after the fall of the Wall,” describes Hertel in his Adlershof book. »He was not replaced and recognized the change as an opportunity for himself to start his second life, so to speak: as an entrepreneur – and was extremely successful in the following years.«

Existing knowledge not used enough

In an interview with »nd.DieWoche« Langhoff confirms what he sees as a positive development. “I can’t complain,” he says, looking back on the decades in which a lot of things changed. “I courageously took advantage of the opportunities that were offered to me.” However, there was one thing he would have wished for during the transformation in Adlershof: “That the experienced people from the GDR era would have had more opportunities to have a say.” The local knowledge was not used enough, and The decision-makers from the West initially had to go through lengthy learning loops. “With our help, some things could have been realized much more quickly,” Langhoff is convinced. So it didn’t happen that he became a Fraunhofer professor. According to an initial evaluation in the last year of the GDR, 20 percent of the ZWG was suitable for becoming an application-oriented research institute of the Fraunhofer Society. But the thumb in the Berlin Science Senate went down.

However, MBI director Ingolf Hertel soon became interested in another research organization. Many new institutes in the eastern states that could not be accommodated by the established research companies such as Fraunhofer, Helmholtz or Max Planck were grouped into the so-called “Blue List Working Group”: a kind of scientific general store of institutes financed by the federal and state governments, including that MBI belonged. Hertel now set out to form a new, “fourth pillar” of the German research landscape, which called itself the “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community” (WGL). The image of an ugly duckling next to the proud research swans should be put to an end. In 1995, Hertel was elected the first president of the Leibniz Association in Mainz, a position he held until 1998. Today the research organization includes 97 institutions in all disciplines with 20,000 employees and a budget of more than two billion euros. This is also a transformation of the German research landscape, which had its starting point in Adlershof.

Today a vibrant location

Today Adlershof has developed into a vibrant science-tech location. According to the site management company “Wista”, a total of 1,330 companies and 18 scientific institutions, in which around 28,000 people work, have settled on the 4.6 square kilometer site. In addition, there are around 6,400 students at Humboldt University in the subjects of chemistry, geography, computer science, mathematics, physics and psychology. There are 230 companies in the neighboring media city on the former site of German television. The big Berlin election campaign debates and political talks are also broadcast from here.

In the core area of ​​the science and technology park, on the former AdW area, there are around 590 companies and non-university research institutes, including Langhoffs IfG and the Max Born Institute. In terms of content, the location focuses on the technology fields of optics, photovoltaics, microsystems technology as well as biotechnology and the environment. Large centers were established for each technological field.

“Adlershof is now preparing for the future,” says Ingolf Hertel, giving a brief outlook after his long review. What is important to him as a physicist is that “the next generation of a brilliant light source is currently being intensively planned,” which is intended to replace the electron storage ring BESSY II – also an Adlershof investment from the 1990s. “The Adlershof Mission 2030 begins,” it is announced, with the new topic areas of climate protection and energy, circular materials management and sustainable mobility. “Three issues are without question extremely important, even essential to the long-term survival of all of humanity,” says Hertel, who is particularly pleased about the focus on transport. As he writes, it is “a pleasant confirmation of what I tried to do as State Secretary in 1999: to establish traffic technology as a focus.” So now finish in the second round.

Ingolf Volker Hertel: Blooming landscapes – How science was united. Epubli, 756 pages, hardcover, €79. A PDF version can be downloaded free of charge from BBAW: https://edoc.bbaw.de/frontdoor/index/index/start/1/rows/20/sortfield/score/sortorder/desc/searchtype/simple/query/ Hertel/docId/3957