Chapter 13
Overcoming the Barriers Between Us and Them—Germany
WAR, PLASTIC SOLDIERS, AND TANKS WERE HIS CHILDHOOD PASSIONS, and when Andreas was thirteen years old he spent many hours engaging his replicas in battles around the floor. He was quite proud of being German and tried to learn everything he could about World War II. One day while watching a TV documentary about the bombing of Warsaw, he saw a sequence showing Jewish people being transported on the trains to concentration camps. He was so convinced that the Jews were the reason that Germany lost the war that when he turned to tell this to his mother, he was surprised to see her quietly crying. It was then that she told him that parts of his family were Jewish and killed during the war. It was almost too much for him to comprehend, and he finally realized why he had never met any of his mother's relatives.
The next day, Andreas painted all his plastic tanks white with red crosses and instead of playing imaginary battles, he now started to play rescue and began to subconsciously internalize preventing death instead of causing it. He started what became a lifelong process of trying to understand how people can decide which people are more valuable than others. He searched for the reasons that people turn against their friends, their neighbors, and their families, and the factors that make it possible for them to do so. It became a primary preoccupation for Andreas: to find out what turned people from good to evil and how it could happen that millions of innocent people were killed during that war. This interest paved Andreas's way and determined the course of his future.
Only a few years later, while working at a radio station, he was asked to visit a journalist who had recently been blinded in an accident. Andreas was supposed to figure out what sort of job the man could do now that he was without sight. Andreas thought it was all a waste of his time—and that there was nothing they could offer a blind man because he wouldn't be able to do a thing at a radio station.
And I came to his apartment and rang the bell and I felt a little bit awkward. The guy opened the door, he was tall, looked like a rock-and-roller with long hair and a leather jacket. Amazingly he didn't look blind and he actually seemed happy. So I asked if he was Matthias, the person I was looking for, because I could not believe that this man standing in front of me was blind. I followed him in and down the staircase and as he descended the stairs, I told him to be careful. He said don't worry, the blind can walk. Sitting down in his room, he took out a cigarette and I watched him light the end of it. And then he poured coffee while he was walking around and talking to me. He could, of course, do everything rather normally.
I was so surprised that when I left after this interview I was really ashamed and shocked about myself. I was really embarrassed that I, with my education and my family history, could so quickly put him mentally in the distance and not understand that his life is valuable. It felt like I had taken a first step to seeing him as an “other” and that would make it easier to exclude him. And that made me think about how the Nazis made their trial gas chamber experiments with disabled people.
Immediately after this encounter, Andreas went back to learn more about “the differently abled.” He learned that 610 million people are disabled worldwide, out of whom 400 million live in the developing world, and 38 million in Europe. Now, not surprisingly to Andreas, the research showed that while they are all labeled disabled, only approximately 5 percent of them regard themselves as such. So it seemed that it was the outside world that made the differently abled into the disabled—and not the people who were missing some abilities themselves. The “normal” people were disempowering “the others.” He became committed to the cause of diversity acceptance.
Andreas became a documentarian and journalist, and as he observed Matthias's growing success at the radio station in a more analytical way, it occurred to him that he was the one who was more in the dark than Matthias. Andreas had always intended to continue his career at the radio station, but suddenly that sort of life didn't seem to interest him. All of a sudden his life seemed fragmented and unfilled. And then he found his true north, the life direction he knew was right for him.
One day, purely by chance, he discovered himself in a very low lit, almost dark room in the radio station with Matthias. Andreas couldn't see a thing and he realized how helpless he felt and how he depended on Matthias to find their way. He realized how much this experience affected him, similar to his first encounter with blindness. He was again convinced how competent differently abled people can be—even though we don't see them in that way or recognize them as such. He started to think about ways he could shift perceptions by bringing the blind and the sighted together, determining that the only way people would understand the lesson he learned was by exactly the same route—encounter. But to do this he would have to create a situation where there would be total role reversal and positive results, much like he experienced. He had to reverse circumstances to make people understand their own vulnerability, their own limits. He was certain that this knowledge would help them to open up, to perceive things differently. Andreas strongly believed that if he could show the capabilities of blind people to sighted people who had never interacted with a blind person before, they too would be convinced of their abilities. This would be how he could help engender respect for the blind and bring the abled and differently abled together, for mutual learning encounters.
Andreas started to experiment with “dark” experiences. He was having fun finding situations that would be safe but adventurous enough to create mind shift. As he tells it,
It was 1988 when we first tried a group experience in the dark. And I tried to watch the reaction of my girlfriend in the room. It was a very intimate experience. You are in the dark and you are having a physical encounter but barely seeing anything. And then I saw my girlfriend beside me looking for a kiss. But she moved back before I could respond and there was another lady standing there. I kissed the wrong girl. It was so funny. Funny and totally surprising. It was then that I knew this idea had power.
Calling his program “Dialogue in the Dark,” he established a laboratory for overcoming barriers between “us” and “them”—a platform for immersing people in worlds very different from their own in order to break down prejudices and to communicate and understand barriers that exist across different cultures. It was predicated on action, not words. Sighted people had the chance to experience total darkness in which blind people taught them to see. It was never Andreas's primary intent to turn the experience into one that created jobs for blind people, or one empowering them to go out and get jobs. More important, it was about how to close a mental gap, how to force people on both sides of the dialogue to think differently about each other. Eventually a major focus became the redefinition of disability as ability and otherness as likeness through shared experiences.
The idea is simple: In complete darkness, blind individuals lead small groups of people through a series of ordinary situations that are suddenly experienced extraordinarily, without eyesight. As one reporter described the process:
Visitors are led by blind guides in small groups through totally darkened rooms where sounds, wind, temperatures and textures convey the characteristics of daily environments such as a park, a city or a bar. In the dark, daily routines turn into new experiences. The effect is a role-reversal: sighted people are torn out of their familiar environments, losing the sense they rely on most: their sight. Blind people guide them; provide them with security and a sense of orientation, transmitting a world without pictures. The blind and partially sighted guides open the visitors' eyes in the dark to show them that their world is not poorer—just different.1
Dialogue in the Dark has now transformed into Dialogue Social Enterprise (DSE), a corporation that, by franchising exhibition and exhibit opportunities, has enabled the concept's impact to broaden and result in unparalleled spread and scale. DSE is the laboratory for mind shifting that now encompasses Dialogue in Silence, conceptually similar to Dialogue in the Dark except the focus is on deaf people, and most recently, Dialogue of Generations, which is “an exhibition that will encourage intergenerational dialogue in order to change the public's attitude towards aging. The exhibit will focus on the current demographic age shift that the entire world is experiencing. It will give the elderly a platform where they can share their thoughts, sorrow, dreams and needs.”2
Complementing the exhibitions are a host of other activities, from educational activities for pupils, teachers, and the general public to business workshops worldwide for large to small companies and institutions. In 2009, Allianz Global Investors (Allianz GI, a global investment and insurance firm) saw the potential for using Dialogue in the Dark workshops for leadership development training. It set up a Dialogue experience as a human resource training center at its headquarters in Munich and implemented workshops for different sets of managers around the world. Gerhard Hastreiter, SVP at Allianz, has been through four Dialogue in the Dark training sessions, three of which he organized for the three hundred employees who report to him. Each time he's come away with something different: “You have to change your perceptions the minute you step into that darkened environment. This in turn causes you to alter your behavior; to slow down; to reflect a little longer; to listen more attentively and to communicate more clearly. You definitely see behavior and team dynamics change as you go through the experience.” Allianz GI is using Dialogue as its internal methodology for building trust and leadership. It is a corporation that is changing the face of human resource development in its sector and will no doubt become a model institution for creating a working understanding of diversity. As of 2010, DSE has conducted more than five hundred business workshops for a variety of corporations in various sectors around the globe.
Occasionally, special events are developed to amplify interaction, like the gastronomic experience called a Taste of Darkness where blind waiters serve sighted participants a surprise four-course dinner in complete darkness. DSE now runs wine-tasting parties and concerts in the dark as well. Mind shift indeed!
Understand Diversity and You Understand Humanity
Since 1988 more than 7 million visitors in thirty-five countries have participated in 160 exhibits and events. More than seven thousand jobs for blind and deaf people who are involved in all facets of DSE has been created. The impact and reaction of exposing people to these types of experiences and encounters has been monumental. Participants are commonly quoted as discovering their own values and humanity while going through the experience or having their worldview completely challenged and changed. INSEAD, one of the leading business schools in the world, introduces Dialogue in the Dark workshops as part of the curriculum in France and Singapore. Along with teaching diversity, INSEAD Professor of Leadership Hal Gregersen maintains, “Dialogue is a powerful medium for provoking powerful change and fostering innovation skills.” It now delivers the Dialogue workshop to social entrepreneurs who enroll in its annual social entrepreneurship leadership development programs. DSE had previously developed a “Redesigning Business Leadership” plan and working with business school students through INSEAD was a giant step in this direction.
Not only are DSE's programs throwing a wrench into traditional thinking about blindness and deafness, they are challenging all sorts of thinking and actions around differences among leaders, managers, socioeconomic classes, people of all sizes, shapes, and colors. Dialogue is effecting change in business settings and university classes alike. But at the end of the day it also changes the differently abled themselves, who are for the first time “seeing and hearing themselves in a new light.” Tail Elimelech, a Dialogue in Silence human resource manager at the Israeli Children's Museum in Holon, says it best:
I am a person with many identities. A deaf person, a daughter of deaf parents, a mother, a woman, a wife. Everything is mixed together. Deafness is strongly expressed in all of these identities. For the first time I can put my deafness in a secondary place and allow other things to be expressed. My world isn't sliced in two when I arrive at work. My world is one. I have the power to change things, even slightly. Every person who leaves viewing things in our world a bit differently is a success for me—it's so strong, so productive…. I am there, opposite them, opening a window to my world, welcoming them into my world with joy, illuminating their eyes.
Andreas is helping create a world of change by breaking through prejudices, where everyone from business leaders to students to differently abled people can find their place in DSE's catalytic cycle of change that affects us all along with our notions of “others.”