Arrest of Audi boss Rupert Stadler: The parallel worlds of German top managers

06/19/2018

Arrest of the Audi boss Rupert Stadler The parallel worlds of the German top managers

AFP

Here as a free man: Rupert Stadler in mid-March 2018 at the Audi annual press conference.

Of course, the newly imprisoned Volkswagen star Rupert Stadler continues to be presumed innocent. However, the naivety of the man who spent more than eleven years until the beginning of the week is unequivocally proven AudiBoss was.

For months, small and big secrets about unlawful Audi models that have hitherto been unknown have been repeatedly scared into the public eye. The signal: Big, unreadable problem.

Alone through his defiant whereabouts in the office Stadler sent in this time exactly the opposite, provocative signal: Great, incorrigible problem solver.

The fact that such a conflict screams for dissolution reveals the slightest trace of life experience. Then, when the prosecutors let searches on Audi and Stadler roll in personam, and the policy barely concealed in the phrase, it must somebody “take responsibility”, a head demanded, it would not even needed.

Stadler would have saved himself, the corporation and the German nuclear industry a great deal of suffering with a resignation – of course without admission of guilt. But Stadler felt too safe in his world: the patronage of VWMajor shareholders, the families Piëch and Porsche, the staffs and consultants, the high-powered CEO talking about the mouth. A parallel world.

Of course, Germany is a constitutional state. But Germany is also a moralizing state. And in such cases, his verdict is always: resignation, verbal penance, retreat to privacy, usually on the grounds that the adversary, if he may have been guilty of personally wrongdoing, is nevertheless to blame for the failure of his organization ,

For Stadler, this perspective may have felt like an unwarranted defeat. That is, if he is really innocent in the legal sense, comprehensible. However, the move would have been much better for him and the image of top executives in this country compared to the picture he is now giving.

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