08/22/2014

To the article on the website of Triodos Bank

We are once again introducing you to a Triodos Bank loan customer in our newsletter. This time Michalis Pantelouris was visiting the Stober estate in beautiful Havelland near Berlin. He spoke to Michael Stober, who breathed new life into the forgotten but historically rich place. By the way: The Stober estate is also featured in Triodos Bank's new international image film alongside other loan customers. The image film is also presented in this newsletter.

The magic of the place. In the end, Michael Stober can trace everything back to this moment when he considers how the huge project that is being built on the Stober estate came about. Because when he decided to buy this special place, he knew almost nothing about the great history of the Stober estate, about the spirit, about the possibilities. “I stood here and felt it,” he says simply. Today everyone who comes to visit feels it. But that's easy now, because Michael Stober has already achieved the great miracle.

The estate was a ruin when he took over, classified as no longer capable of being restored, actually just a plot of land full of stones - and the rubbish that local residents had dumped into the empty buildings for years or even decades. Today there is a small hotel, a restaurant, rooms for weddings, conferences and courses here, on the picturesque Groß Behnitzer See in Havelland. And a fascinating piece of German history, because the name Borsig stands for revolutionary ideas and developments that have shaped the entire country.

August Borsig was an industrialist in the mid-19th century, founder of the Borsig-Werke and a pioneer in the era of the first railways. There were times when practically all of the newly built railways in the Prussian Empire came from him. But he was also a pioneer in the area of ​​social responsibility: he had the first company-internal social security system - and a company swimming pool to counteract the risks of catastrophic hygiene in Berlin's working-class districts. And with the same pioneering and inventive spirit that underlay the success of his Borsig works, he also approached the renewal of agriculture after he bought an estate in Havelland from an impoverished rural aristocrat: the Stober estate in Groß Behnitz, directly on the shore of the lake.

“You could say I had a vision”

“Down here,” says Michael Stober, pointing into the gaping abyss that was once the cellar, “is the first fully automatic potato steaming machine in Germany.” It is a collection of rollers and chains to which conveyor blades and troughs are attached and tubs, rusted, battered and half-buried. A technical masterpiece of its time, left to decay. You can imagine what the whole property must have looked like when Stober came here for the first time, in 2000, actually looking for a house for himself. “A friend told me that this property was for sale.” , he says, “and I, an idiot, went there.” The trees grew through the roofs of the houses. But Stober, who has had some experience with renovations as a builder — “a few thousand units” — was able to see something that no one but him thought possible. “You can say I had a vision,” he says today, “and unlike Helmut Schmidt, I don’t believe that people with visions should go to the doctor.” He began to implement his vision.

It took a while until the concept was finalized because it was clear that the Stober estate was not suitable as a residential building for a family. “I was looking for an implementation that had a public impact, a sustainable business activity that served a cultural background.” The cultural background that August Borsig and later his sons set could not be broader. Technology, agriculture, biology (all Borsigs were dendrologists - non-utility tree researchers) - combined with social and community commitment right up to the Kreisau Circle, the opposition group of the Nazi era around James von Moltke, from which the resistance fighters of June 20, 1944 around Graf von Stauffenberg emerged. The “Kreisauers” developed ideas for the time after what they saw as the inevitable downfall of the Third Reich, and they discussed their ideas on agriculture here, with Dr. Ernst von Borsig junior (the Borsigs had since been ennobled). He was the great-grandson of August Borsig, the third and last in the line of August Borsig's descendants, who had since taken over the estate. It is an irony of history that Dr. Ernst von Borsig junior, who resisted the Nazis, died of an infection in a Russian internment camp after the end of the war before the family had managed to prove his opposition to the Nazis. It was also the beginning of the decline for the estate.

Progress and resistance united in one place

Technical progress has always been a cornerstone of Borsig’s thinking. Not only in the locomotives that left the Borsig works, or in the engineering achievements, for example in bridge construction (the motorway bridges that are still on rollers today, which compensate for the movement of the material during temperature fluctuations, are based on a Borsig construction) - but also in agriculture on the estate. The cowshed was air-conditioned using a system of pipes using the gases from the manure, the fields were cultivated using steam engines, and the schnapps distillery, for which the potato steaming machine was also developed, was largely automated - the potatoes were not only steamed automatically, but the abrasion over them Conveyor chains are also transported to the pigsty for feeding. That in itself is impressive. But the overall picture only comes together when you read in the writings of the Kreisau Circle that Ernst von Borsig Jr. was not just a brilliant technician. For him, the focus of all agricultural work is people: while practically not a word is said about technology in his remarks, he is concerned with the role and task of the farmer in society, in the village community, in the world. Even in Germany's history, which is rich in great, responsible and committed entrepreneurs, he deserves a special place.

During GDR times, the A. Borsig estate was an LPG (agricultural production cooperative), later individual buildings were still used, for example as a daycare center. But like everywhere else in Havelland, here too more people move away than are born. What can you do with such a large property in such an area? Who should fill all this with a life again? “It probably caught me at a perfect moment,” says Michael Stober. And then, with a slight grin: “The gravity of age drives you to do things that have a deeper meaning.” He is only 52 years old, so age is relative, but he already has at least a professional life as a building contractor behind him. The energy with which he forms the center of this company - constantly approachable, with an overview of every little detail - suggests that it was an intensive entrepreneurial life. This man seems like he can't do things by halves.

The spirit of the Borsigs

The rooms for the courses in the Stober estate are almost ready. You will soon be the center of everything that happens here. Here you will be able to make pottery or learn how the 24-ton steam engine that Stober was donated by the Borsigwerke works. Or schnapps burning, printing, cooking, painting, baking. If you were to sum it up in one sentence, you could probably say that Michael Stober creates a place where people can understand. In the literal sense: learning by understanding, touching, doing things yourself. Of course, you can also simply go on holiday on the estate in the beautiful nature and the wonderful, straightforward, casual hotel, which is housed in the former guest house and will soon be expanded into the former barn. You can get married here, or simply eat out in the restaurant with the lakeside terrace, attend concerts or hold conferences with more than a thousand participants in the large hall in the former cowshed. But in reality, the magic of the place is about how much each and every person can make a difference in this world if they use all of their abilities and actually do it. It's not about the Borsig in us, but about the spirit that also drove the Borsigs and that is in each of us.

Michael Stober doesn't even know exactly what his job is today. “Investor” is written in the brochure that the estate sends to interested parties or gives them when they come to visit. He himself says the correct term is probably “enthusiast.” And it sounds a bit like a guiding principle for what visitors can experience and take away with them when Michael Stober says about his own motivation for the project: “If I don’t do it, no one will.”