Western Europe held its breath in the autumn of '89. As the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Eastern Europeans thronged to the West in search of a better life. In the end, a mass exodus did not materialise.

But what about the Westerners who jumped through the hole in the Wall in the opposite direction? They included Dutch bankers, farmers and small businesses. Pioneers who decided to unleash their entrepreneurial spirit in the former Eastern Bloc.
 
Common sense
Herman Hutten owned a metal company in the Netherlands. He was already trading with East Germany to a limited extent when the Wall came down. Hutten immediately recognised his opportunities:
 
"Large companies would most likely have sent a couple of analysts to check things out, but if you take a common sense approach, what you see in East Germany is a large country with a strong financial brother, unlike the other Eastern Bloc countries. We knew of course that West Germany would shoulder that financial burden."
 
In February 1990, Hutten moved into an old hangar on a rented site and started production in East Germany.
 

Tropical fruit
Self-made businessman Frans Nieuwenhuizen had already seen a lot of East Germany from the motorways: he drove trucks carrying aid to Poland. Nine days after the fall of the Wall he was in East Germany looking for a market for his anti-rust treatment for cars. A couple of weeks later, it turned out that the tropical fruit trade was a better option. Speaking only three words of German, he hit the local markets. "I traded out of the back of my van with only a set of scales, a pile of plastic bags and a bucket for small change".
 
In a matter of months, Nieuwenhuizen had set up an extensive network of customers:

"Later I drove through the country in a camper van. There weren’t any hotel rooms. As a travelling salesman, my camper was my warehouse, my office and a place to sleep. I parked outside my customers’ front doors. In the first few months, I bunked down in my old Volvo with a sleeping bag and a pillow."
 
Middle man
Ad Heymans and his father, both steeped in the farming business, were ready to roll when 1989 came around:

"At the time we had good contacts with the Polish ambassador in The Hague. You hear the odd thing and your mind starts ticking over ... There’s an enormous country there, home to 40 million people. Things were already beginning to stir and it started to dawn on everyone that Communism wouldn’t last that much longer. Then there comes a time when you just have to take the plunge and go and see for yourself."
 
When the Wall tumbled at last, Heymans senior and junior already had one foot in Poland. The Poles were looking for the capital and the know-how to reform their agricultural sector and Dutch farmers were champing at the bit to expand their activities. Heymans acted as a middleman between the two parties.
 
Building boom
Ad Heymans is still in Poland, these days as a property developer. In 1991, searching for a suitable base to work from and faced with a desperate shortage of office space, Heymans senior and junior decided to build their own. Now they manage just under 400 million euros’ worth of real estate.
 
Herman Hutten also benefited greatly from the East German building boom in the 1990s. West Germany was willing to pump a lot of money into the reconstruction of its Eastern neighbour. The Dutch profited considerably from this, not least because, as Hutten puts it, “the East Germans were not exactly keen on the West German mentality”.

Ice to the Eskimos
Frans Nieuwenhuizen also enjoyed considerable success in the early days. The demand for tropical fruit knew no limits. Within nine months, Nieuwenhuizen had turned over 14 million Deutschmarks, an achievement he repeated a year later with beer. What started as a stack of lager cans in the back of the fruit van grew into a roaring trade that notched up no less than 17 million Dutch guilders. Even though, as the man himself puts it, selling beer to the Germans was akin to "selling ice to the Eskimos".

The pioneering spirit is in the blood of these entrepreneurs. Little wonder then that they have moved on once again to fresh fields of opportunity. The economies of Poland and the former East Germany have grown up. But in Romania and as far away as Asia there’s plenty of pioneering left to do.

Photo: Berlin Wall, 1975. Photo: Fauxaddress - Edward at Flickr