by Dr. Janine Ludwig
On May 19, 2019, we had the great pleasure to visit Dr. Rudolf Seiters who had been the Federal Minister for Special Affairs and Head of the Office of the German Chancellery of the FRG under Helmut Kohl from April 1989 to November 1991. In this position, he successfully negotiated with the GDR government under Erich Honecker the passage of the East German refugees in the West German embassy in Prague to the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1989. He was responsible for diplomatic relations with several East German governments during the 1989 revolution (Honecker, Egon Krenz, Dr. Hans Modrow) and later involved in negotiating the contract for German Unity.
Thus, he was able tell our students about the events of 1989/90 from the deepest political insight in highest positions at the time. He is a wonderful person who did so in a charming way. For instance, he described how he took over his position and all the files from Wolfgang Schäuble in April 1989, being alerted about the most pressing issues – of which the GDR was none. Nobody knew what was coming and how drastically things would change just a few months later. He also told the anecdote how an employee asked him on the afternoon of November 9 whether he could leave early for his child’s birthday. He said, “sure, nothing much will happen today anymore.” What an error of judgement: That night, the Berlin Wall fell. His honest and entertaining way of explaining political work from the inside perspective was most intriguing to our students – some of whom had already met Modrow in Berlin and could now hear about the same political events from the other side.
In 1991, Seiters became Minister of the Interior, a position from which he had to step back in 1993 due to the shooting of the RAF terrorist Wolfgang Grams in Bad Kleinen, although it was widely agreed that he had not done anything wrong. From 1998–2002, Seiters was Vice President of the German Bundestag and until 2017 President of the German Red Cross.
It was a wonderful opportunity for us and very kind that Dr. Seiters and his wife, despite busy calendars, hosted us in their house in Papenburg, a small town roughly two hours away from Bremen. After that meeting, we visited the “Van Velen Complex,” a settlement of mostly tiny houses and cots from the 17th century – in a town that was built on dried marshland.
Please find a video in German here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jeh_gdDtF6I
After that, some of us went to see our beloved soccer team Werder Bremen who happened to play a friendly match that day against SC Blau-Weiß 94 Papenburg – on a small playing field that allowed us to see the likes of Claudio 
Pizarro, Max Kruse, and Josh Sargent from close up.
We also made a short video of a corner kick: