At the beginning of my bachelor's degree, I noticed that I was in East Germany every day at my lecture rooms.

This is not meant to be a dig at poor infrastructure, no, I actually heard most of my basic lectures in a building that could hardly have been more emblematic of the former GDR: in the old party in the south of Erfurt.

The building complex was completed in 1972 as the SED district party school "Ernst Thälmann".

Where young party officials learned the basics of Marxism up until 1989, around 40 years later they wanted to convince me of roughly the opposite world view: in management and economics lectures I was supposed to understand that capitalism was the only right and by far the best economic model for our world .

As much as the East spoke out of space, the spirit of the GDR was no longer felt in the content or structure of my studies.

Also in another respect, "East German" was no longer noticeable: in terms of teaching staff.

People who have been socialized in East Germany very rarely call the shots at universities.

I, too, have hardly encountered them in lectures and seminars.

According to a study by the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE), in 2019 not a single university management came from an eastern German state, in 2020 there was just one.

The psychologist Gesine Grande now heads the Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus-Senftenberg.

In addition, a handful of technical colleges are now run by East Germans.

But: "There has never been a native East German who has headed a West German university," says Peer Pasternack.

He is head of the Institute for University Research at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.

No coincidence

There is no question that identitarian representation is not the only or most important quality that a university president or university rector must have, but the fact that so few universities in Germany are headed by East Germans is no stupid coincidence but structural.

If you want to understand how this came about, you have to look back a few years.

After reunification, universities in East Germany changed very quickly and drastically:

On the one hand, many jobs were cut at the former GDR universities: at the University of Leipzig, the Technical University of Dresden and also the Humboldt University in Berlin, around a third of the employees had to go.

GDR science was settled.

On the other hand, in the 1990s, most university teaching positions in eastern Germany were newly advertised.

Although those who held the posts in the GDR could apply again, they were now in competition with West German colleagues, who often had experience abroad and a much better network.

The consequence of this approach: East German universities westernized very quickly and very suddenly.

"The West German university system was declared the norm," says Peer Pasternack.

This was particularly noticeable in the social sciences and humanities.

Almost all political science chairs were occupied by people from the West - also because this department had not existed in the GDR.

It's no secret that some scientists, who would have had only difficult chances of advancement in West Germany, used East Germany as a career springboard after reunification.