No Longer the Capital, but a Global Destination

Some of you have been part of a study abroad program in Bonn with Dr. Jeremy Wasser already and have written down their experiences below. And I am excited to welcome those of you that going to visit us in Bonn this summer! I would like to share with all of you the following abstract of a great article by Nicholas Kulish for the New York Times about the city of Bonn's recent history:

Germany’s former capital, known derisively as the “Hauptdorf,” or capital village, is supposed to be a relic of the past, nine years after Parliament and the embassies picked up and moved to Berlin. But the little city on the Rhine, immortalized by John le Carré as “a small town in Germany” in his spy novel of the same title, has succeeded in the unlikely goal of remaking itself as a place of the future.

Local officials and entrepreneurs combined shrewd spending and no small amount of federal largess with the city’s prime location in the Rhine Valley to refashion it into an international campus for everything from medical research to alternative energy to the United Nations, which began opening offices here in 1996.

Since the Bundestag and the Chancellery left in 1999, Bonn, rather than watching employment plummet, has seen an increase of more than 12,000 jobs in a modest-size city of just 315,000 people.

Bonn, like Germany itself, appears to have been written off far too soon. Unemployment in Germany is at its lowest level in 15 years. And while it is expected to slow, the German economy grew at an annual rate of 6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Though it is bound to be overtaken by the breakneck growth of China, this old standby in Old Europe — with only one-sixteenth of China’s population — is by many statistical measures still the world’s third biggest economy, behind only the United States and Japan. It is also the world’s leading exporter of goods, second to none thanks to its thriving, high-end manufacturing sector.

The country’s former Parliament building is now a convention center, with a bigger facility going up beside it amid a thicket of cranes. Bonn is also home to SolarWorld, one of the leading companies in Germany’s top-flight solar-energy industry.

Health care accounts for 1 in 10 jobs in the city and surrounding area. The central government announced in March that Bonn had been selected as the site of a new $1 billion dementia research center.

Downtown, the dominant feature of the city’s skyline has appeared since the central government left. The 40-story steel and glass Post Tower of Deutsche Post, the postal service that employs 7,000 people in and around Bonn, towers over the city. It opened in December 2002, two years after Deutsche Post went public. Deutsche Telekom is the region’s largest employer, with some 12,000 employees.

“It’s really a city that I feel growing in importance and not the other way around,” said Torbjörn Possne, an executive at the wireless equipment maker Ericsson, which has offices here.

Both Germany and its former capital, which former Chancellor Helmut Kohl referred to as a “symbol of conspicuous modesty,” have reasons to be understated about their strengths. Germany’s tendency to bury its power and influence in international institutions, chiefly the European Union but also the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, allows it to exert its influence without tempting accusations of revanchist ambitions after the two world wars.

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The city still benefits from its time as the cold war capital. The federal government spent half a century trying to give Bonn the trappings of a historic capital. As a result, Bonn sometimes feels like a small city on steroids, with all the perks and benefits normally associated with big-city living, like a subway system and top-notch museums and concert halls, not to mention international schools.

Its time as the capital also gave the city name recognition few smaller cities could hope for, which helped it gain a reputation for medical tourism among civil servants from less developed countries.

Jürgen Reul, a specialist in neuroradiology, just opened a private clinic specializing in minimally invasive surgery for neurovascular and spine problems. Operations started on the first of the month and foreign patients from everywhere from Persian Gulf states to Russia have helped the clinic fully book its first month of appointments, leaving it with a waiting list.

“Bonn was pronounced dead, and then everybody went ahead and proved the opposite,” Dr. Reul said. “Now there’s a gold rush mood.” Dr. Reul has a unique perspective. Before starting his medical studies, he worked as a police officer on diplomatic security details in the mid-1970s. “We used to say that it was a sleepy nest of bureaucrats,” he said. “It’s a living city now.”