Dialogue in the Dark: “Now a social mission with an entrepreneurial approach is the enfant terrible”

Strolling from Hamburg’s city centre towards the Elbe, you will be forced to pass through the Hafencity, where an entire residential area has been built in the old Speicherstadt in the Freeharbour next to the Elbphilharmonie over the past 20 years. Depending on which path you take, you may pass the Old Wall Cream, a small street where, in front of one of the red brick houses, usually crowds of young chatting people gather in front of one of the red brick houses, who want to enter the dialogue house. In recent weeks, however, it seems rather as if one of the exhibition ideas of the Dialoghaus has become strangely self-sufficient outside. There is silence outside the door.

Hamburgers are known as “dialogue in the dark”. Even though they may not have visited the exhibition themselves, they have at least heard about it. Over the past 20 years, around 1.5 million people in Hamburg have experienced what it feels like to go blind through life – especially school classes are taking part in the experiment. And those who were not at the “dialogue in the dark” may have chosen a different form of conversation: dialogue in silence, with time or with the end. Andreas Heinecke came up with these kinds of communication after the former journalist was to teach a blind colleague how to make radio. That was more than 30 years ago. Not only his colleague, but especially the 64-year-old Heinecke learned a lot at the time and realized that deficits have potential. Since then, he has pursued the goal of building bridges between people with and without disabilities.

Instead of a birthday party, Corona came

Over the past ten years, around ten million visitors worldwide have experienced the exhibitions, and 12,000 people who would otherwise hardly have found work have been employed: blind people, deaf people, over 70s and people whose lives are foreseeable. In Hamburg alone, 129 people who are currently working on short-time work work. They generate 87 percent of the annual 2.7 million turnover themselves. The rest was donated or donated by the public sector, which promotes the employment of people with disabilities. The hamburgers had just prepared to celebrate the 20th birthday of the Dialoghaus on April 1, 2020. Then came Corona. And now the closure may be imminent.

“We always fall through the net”

“I just read in the newspaper this morning,” Heinecke says in a phone call with the Star on 23 April , “new programmes for the conservation of gastro and the digital boost of schools have been adopted. But the sector that serves the common good, non-profit organisations and social enterprises, always falls through the net. And I have to say, “I don’t understand that.”

Heinecke wished that in Germany there was the social impact credit that social enterprises, especially in the UNITED Kingdom, can use to get through a crisis. The German alternative, a loan guarantee by KfW, applies only to commercial companies. The Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau is a promotional bank that was created after the Second World War and pursues a state mandate. It could give Heinecke the financial air he needs to get through the Corona crisis. “If I had the opportunity to get a loan secured by KfW from my bank, GLS,” says Heinecke, “KfW would step in in the event of insolvency and my bank would not be harmed, that is the mechanism. We need such equal treatment.”

Too social for Germany?

The fact that this option does not exist for non-profit companies “is a scandal that has not yet been resolved,” says Heinecke. Although the Federal Government is currently very creative, as he praises, and has also decided, for example, to make amaging foundations.

“The nonprofits are very mission-driven, that’s in the foreground, less about profitability,” Heinecke sees as the reason why there is no help for them yet. “We are victims of our charitable nature and lack of capital power.” Although the Dialogue House does not receive institutional regular funding, such as museums, and donations are not a major source of income, it still usually manages a black zero at the end of the year. But that doesn’t help Heinecke at the moment. “What used to be seen as a kind of beacon, that it is possible to combine a social mission with an entrepreneurial approach, is now the Enfant terrible“, he says. For more than 20 years, the entrepreneur has received international awards and prizes for his vision and entrepreneurship – but now his life’s work seems to be going down the drain.

SPD man Bartke: “It can’t be more inclusive”

The Star spoke to The Hamburg SPD man Matthias Bartke, MdB and chairman of the Committee on Labour and Social Affairs, and asked him how this was possible. “I know the dialogue house very well,” says Bartke, “I sit on the advisory board. In the beginning it was massively supported by the social authority, but then it got on its own – and is probably the most successful spin-off we have ever had. They have 100,000 visitors a year.”

Bartke enthusiastically describes his own experience of walking through the “dialogue in the dark”, where “the blind are the seer and the seer the blind”. The exhibition is mainly attended by school classes and the students are “still lastingly impressed ten years later,” he reports. “It’s not more inclusive. The blind get to reduce the inhibition threshold towards people with disabilities by leading.” But school classes and touch are two key words that are banned by the Corona pandemic.

Bartke hopes for help in early May

Bartke freely explains that he himself did not know that social enterprises could not benefit from KfW-backed loans. “When I first heard this two weeks ago, I thought it was a mistake,” he says. And everyone he told about it would have said that something had to change. On 23 April, Rolf Mützenich, chairman of the SPD parliamentary group, then referred precisely to the project “Dialogue in the Dark” in his response to the chancellor’s government statement.

Now he is very optimistic, Bartke says, that something will happen in early May. Because so much is clear: “If the non-profit companies go down the drain now, we will never get it rebuilt. For the ‘dialogue in the dark’ blind people have even moved to Hamburg, which has a certain magnetic function. We must not allow them all to become unemployed now.”