Lennart Brand, Managing Director of the Leadership Excellence Institute of Zeppelin University, Lake Constance, Germany. He pursued a career in the aviation industry before taking his D.Phil. at the University of Oxford (St. John's College). He joined Zeppelin University in 2012 and was appointed to his current position in 2015. In 2018, he also became Managing Director of the Lake Constance Innovation Cluster Digital Transformation.
The legendary song “Wind of Change” from the West German rock band, Scorpions turns 30 this year. For many of us, this song stirs vivid memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall along with the end of the Soviet military occupation of the Central European countries. This was not only the moment of the long-awaited German unification, but Europe also regained their barricaded parts, countries and regions. Central European countries could once again look at Europe as their own future. How do you think back to this period?
Curiously it’s been only much later that the full significance of those events has come home to me. Back in the late 80s and early 90s,
we lived in a Western European cocoon which was so well-padded that even world-historical events could scarcely pierce it.
Subsequently, that padding got increasingly worn away, and it was only then that I and many others really, fully understood the true meaning of “1989” beyond the obvious.
Nevertheless, the past thirty years of the European history have not always been as hopeful. In fact, the reality is that Europe is in decline in terms of their reproduction rate, defense spending as well as their weight in the global economy. What did in your view lead to this decline over the decades?
As a matter of fact, I’m quite open to the idea that decline is only half the story. If we adjust our perspective in line with my favorite philosopher, Nietzsche, it is quite conceivable that what we experience as decline is really a metahistorical shift rather than sheer destruction. Back in his day, Nietzsche attributed the decline he perceived to an all-powerful nihilism permeating and destroying Western culture and civilization from within. But he wasn’t a pessimist! Once we hit bottom, he said, we’ll actually overcome that nihilism and enter a new era, a new paradigm. The most interesting implication of his argument is that what appears as the destruction of our heritage may, at the same time, constitute the very growth of that new paradigm, whose outline we cannot discern yet but which carries all the historical substance previously contained in our Western traditions. – Now, this is a very protracted answer to a simple question, but I’ve always felt that there’s much more to history than what meets the eye. And my guess is that, if Nietzsche was right, that new paradigm will be heavily informed by technology. Actually, this is what another of my favorite thinkers, Ernst Jünger, predicts.