Wild times.
Rebuilding the East.
After the euphoria of reunification, a sense of disillusionment set in when people looked at the streets, towns and railways of the former GDR. The infrastructure was in desperate need of renewal, and there was a huge backlog of urban and residential construction. At the end of the GDR, many long-distance roads were still tarmac, and motorways were often as old as the 1940s, with no acceleration or deceleration lanes and no central crash barriers. The railway network was also outdated, with speed restrictions everywhere. At LEONHARD WEISS, there is great motivation to help with the development of the East.
In 1989, Werner Schmidt-Weiss travelled to the East with a delegation of craftsmen led by Prime Minister Lothar Späth and established contacts with Zwickau. As early as 1990, LEONHARD WEISS founded subsidiaries in Gera, Dresden and Hirschfeld and started looking for new employees.
I still remember that we placed an advertisement there with job descriptions. Mr Förster from the personnel department and I went there. When we arrived, we thought we were going to be beaten: there was a queue as long as the one we had seen outside the vaccination centres during the coronavirus pandemic.
LEONHARD WEISS can be found in many places, working on a wide variety of projects. When it comes to restoring historic buildings that were destroyed in the Second World War or have been neglected for years, the expertise of the future subsidiary Steinsanierung Denkmalpflege Crailsheim is in demand. The Crailsheim specialists – who, incidentally, are a team of stonemasons from Stadtroda near Zwickau who fled to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, found their first home in Blaufelden and were hired directly by Werner Schmidt-Weiss – have worked in Zwickau for many years, restoring the Gothic façade of the cathedral, for example. Other major projects include the restoration of Oranienburg Palace, the largest baroque palace in Prussia, and the restoration of the beautiful entrance hall of Magdeburg's main railway station. Thanks in part to these prestigious projects, the still-young team of stone restorers and conservators developed into one of the largest restoration companies in Germany in the 1990s – with an excellent reputation. "The repair, restoration, reconstruction and conservation of historic building materials requires extensive knowledge of art periods and materials, a great deal of sensitivity and exceptional craftsmanship. The stone restoration and monument conservation company in Crailsheim has mastered these increasingly sought-after building tasks, which are closely linked to tradition, like very few others.
LEONHARD WEISS is also involved in the booming new capital city of Berlin. In the newly founded district of 'Französisch Buchholz', the company is building tracks for local transport and 432 residential units. In Tiergarten-Dreieck, an inner-city wasteland until reunification, LEONHARD WEISS is involved in the construction of the Scandinavian and Japanese embassies and the CDU headquarters. In the Neue Mitte district, the company faced a particularly tricky task. An old building next to the Galeries Lafayette department store had to be demolished, right in the middle of the densely built-up city centre. Using a long-liner and demolition tongs, the giant demolition excavator is eating its way through the masonry, right into the busy Französische Straße and Friedrichsstraße.
It was a wild time after reunification. In good times we had 70 or 80 cranes in Berlin. If you took a boat trip on the Spree, you could see our construction sites.
LEONHARD WEISS is also involved in the modernisation and new construction of many road and rail routes in the old and new federal states. Most recently in 2011 on behalf of DB Netz AG in the construction project 'VP Coburg Süd'. This is part of the German Unity Transport Project (VDE), which has solved many transport infrastructure problems on eastwest and north-south routes. Between 1991 and the end of 2022, the German government invested around € 20 billion in railways and more than € 17 billion in motorway projects.
At the turn of the millennium, when the construction boom began to flatten out as a result of the 'Aufbau Ost' programs, LEONHARD WEISS turned its attention to the metropolitan areas around Munich, Frankfurt and Hamburg, where the engineering and turnkey construction business in particular was growing steadily, followed by other areas. Today, the branches in the new German states and in Berlin have been closed. However, many buildings and restored monuments still remind us of the sometimes wild times after reunification.
