The years that followed were not easy. I very much enjoyed working with so many different people at Bertelsmann, but the man I loved was unavailable. Reinhard Mohn got married and started a family right after the war. He was one of the many men whose youth was stolen by the war, and who only afterward discovered life’s joys. Fate had brought us together, but in the late 1950s divorce was out of the question. We had three children together, born in the 1960s: Brigitte in 1964, Christoph in 1965, and Andreas in 1968. Reinhard Mohn tried to spend as much time as he could with us, but the chance of our having a life together was slim. During this time, my future husband wrote me a letter every day. Long after we were married, he organized those letters into binders. It became a collection of quite a few binders, which contain our worries but also our hopes and dreams of that time. I still find it difficult to look through them. It was not an easy time, but I’m very grateful that we could go through it together.
While my life as a young mother was very fulfilling, it came with a new set of fears and worries. Our daughter, Brigitte, became very sick with severe asthma when she was just four months old. For years her doctors and I fought for her life, and I endured sleepless nights, hours of terror, and moments of desperation at my little girl’s side. As I watched her suffer, I developed a more critical viewpoint toward the Catholicism of my youth, and I began to gain confidence in the power of my own strength of will. A mother who has spent so many years living in fear for her sick child either breaks down or recognizes that in her darkest hours of hopelessness and need, she can gain unknown strengths that help her continue down her path.
During this time my children and I had to overcome a number of other serious health setbacks. While this can put a severe strain on any relationship, it only brought my husband and me closer together. We learned to talk about even the most difficult and painful things. One of the most important prerequisites for having a successful relationship is to speak candidly with each other, and I consider it a great gift that my husband and I were able to have such an open exchange of ideas. I learned a lot from him, but he, too, greatly valued my intuition and my sincere and spontaneous exchanges with others.
When he was with our children, my husband became a child himself. He enchanted Gitte, Chris, and Andreas with his humor and imagination. For the children, he was their beloved “Tata,” who concocted practical jokes with them and told them elaborate, made-up stories. When it came to raising a family, we fully agreed on the important principles. We wanted our children to remain down to earth and to treat everybody politely and with respect. We worked hard to instill in them the value of responsibility and fairness when dealing with others. And while we were always open to discussion, we also set boundaries when a debate had no end in sight.
As the children got older, my husband told them more about his work and the needs of his company. For a passionate entrepreneur like Reinhard Mohn, there was no such thing as leaving work behind in the office. Even in his free time he thought about the company’s growth and the changes to the corporate culture that he wanted to implement with his coworkers. His work fulfilled him.
In the 1960s and 1970s it was still fairly common for women to fully dedicate themselves to housework and child rearing, if financially feasible. But more often than not whenever my husband spoke with such enthusiasm about his work, I felt a pang of longing. I, too, wanted challenging work and a position of communal responsibility. And as our children grew older, they clearly needed my presence less and less.
My first corporate undertaking grew out of my own life experiences. Reinhard Mohn was twenty years older than me and a hard-working businessman. He was also a deeply philosophical man, who examined everything he did and who invited me to take part in his critical thinking. There is no doubt: he was my teacher, and he gave me insight into politics and society, morality and ethics, and management and leadership principles. His analytical skills were impressive, and I was his eager student. But with time I learned to ask questions and to point out concepts that seemed incomplete or even erroneous to me. What was once a monologue became a dialogue, a mutual give-and-take. I now recognized problems, found gaps within existing structures, and saw where remedial action was needed. “Why don’t you give it a try?” my husband would say. And so I did.
One of my first initiatives, somewhat reflective of the time, was the establishment of the Bertelsmann Women’s Circle, which would give the wives of the Bertelsmann leadership insight into their husbands’ work. Over the years, the Women’s Circle grew from offering lectures and academic trips to creating social aid projects and other initiatives.2 Quite a few Women’s Circle volunteers were able to turn their passion into their profession and became indispensable employees of the Bertelsmann Foundation.
My husband presented me with another project: overseeing the construction of Bertelsmann’s headquarters, slated for completion in 1976. Dissatisfied with the architect’s initial designs, he asked for my help. The planning phase lasted for over a year, during which time I strongly advocated opening up the interior of the building to achieve transparency and clarity. (To this day, those qualities distinguish our Gütersloh headquarters.) My husband was extremely satisfied with the result. He was impressed that I stood behind my work 200 percent. And he was very aware of how much my enthusiasm grew when I was developing my own ideas.