Learning from Wolfsburg
#24
We are what we were. The past determines our present. How could it be any different? What we think and do today is a result of our experiences. But how determined are the present and future? How free are we to make self-determined decisions?
Such questions can come to mind when you visit Wolfsburg (which I did last weekend), a German city in the east of the state of Lower Saxony, a pretty crazy city, a city invented by the Nazis and flourished in democracy.
One century ago, on the land where Wolfsburg is today, there was more or less just one building – a castle, the Wolfsburg. Then, dictator Adolf Hitler came up with the idea of building a car that was not a luxury for the few but could be used by the masses – a car for the people.
A huge factory had to be built to put the idea into action. The Wolfsburg lands were ideally suited for this request, as it was located on the so-called Mittelland Canal (built from 1906 to 1938), a waterway that is still, with 325.7 kilometres, Germany’s longest artificial waterway. And so the owner of the Wolfsburg (Günther Graf von der Schulenburg) was forced to sell his land, and on May 26, 1938, Adolf Hitler laid the foundation stone for the plant.
Cars for the people were never built during the lifetime of Hitler. One year after the laying of the foundation stone, Hitler started the Second World War. As a result, in Wolfsburg (which was not yet called Wolfsburg at the time but was named after the name of the car that was to be built there: the "City of the KdF-Wagen near Fallersleben"), there were no cars for the people assembled, but war goods – with the "support" of thousands of forced labourers.
After the war, Wolfsburg became the symbol and reality of the West German economic miracle. Only ten years after the end of the war, in 1955, the one-millionth Volkswagen Beetle was manufactured in Wolfsburg.
Adolf Hitler may have dreamed of this. But the dream came true under entirely different conditions. Under the condition of freedom. People came to Wolfsburg of their own free will, out of economic necessity, but of their own free will. And many came. During the German economic miracle, Wolfsburg experienced a large influx of immigrant workers, mainly from Italy.
Today, more than 120,000 people live in Wolfsburg. Half of them work at Volkswagen. No other major German city is as closely linked to a single company as Wolfsburg.
So here is my point.
A dictator has imagined a city. Wolfsburg would not exist without Adolf Hitler. But that doesn't mean that the city, that the people of Wolfsburg, are slaves of this dictator, slaves of the past, right? That doesn't mean that Wolfsburg is a Nazi city. Of course not. Not anymore. The town has a beautiful art museum, a respectable football club and in the city museum the terrible history of the Nazi era is vividly described. Wolfsburg's present is the result of the past. But it has a self-determined present. For me, Wolfsburg is proof and a symbol that we can live self-determined lives.
PS: Voting has ended in the Netherlands. A first exit poll shows the far-right Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, got the most seats by a stretch.