In this photograph, taken at the ceremony, we can see most of the major public figures who supported and assisted the concept of making West Berlin home to a specialist hospital for thoracic and cardiovascular diseases with special focus on cardiac surgery and the growing field of interventional cardiology.

In the first row, to the left, we can see the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, performing the opening ceremony, and next to him the German President, Dr. Richard von Weizsäcker, who was Governing Mayor of Berlin at the time the decision to found the Heart Institute was taken in 1981. He also held this position during most of the planning phase. Next to him we can see the Senator for Health and Social Affairs, Ulf Fink, the untiring promoter of the project, who always refers to Berlin as the new "Mecca of Medicine". Then comes the American military commander, Major General, Mitchell, representing the Allied Forces. He was to become a personal friend of mine, and visited the Heart Institute frequently, accompanied by state guests from the USA whom he took on a tour of the institute. Sitting next to him is Friede Springer, successful head of the Axel Springer publishing house and who up to this day is a very supportive and reliable member of the institute’s board of trustees. Her husband, Axel Springer, had died the previous September, shortly after donating a considerable sum to the Heart Institute for the construction of a guest house. Sitting to the left of Friede Springer is the State Secretary for Health, Albrecht Hasinger, who was the main driving force behind the Heart Institute. It was his activities and negotiating talents to which the Heart Institute owes its existence, its structure, its co-operation partners and its general environment. Right at the end of the row we can see the Senator for Economic Affairs, Dr. Günter Rexrodt. In the second row down, partly hidden by Eberhard Diepgen, we can make out Prof. Wolfgang Dissmann, Chief Consultant at the Urban Hospital. It was originally his idea to set up a large and highly capable heart surgery centre in Berlin and it was his initiative which led to the first deliberations at Senate level. To his right we can see Dieter Havliczek, councillor responsible for health matters in the borough of Wedding, who did everything in his power to get the Heart Institute installed at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in this borough. The third person from the right is Heinrich Frommknecht, Chairman of the Association of Private Health Insurance Funds and member of the board of trustees up to December 1997. To his right is Prof. Gerhard Blümchen, cardiologist from Roderbirken in the Rhine District, who acted as advisor to Mr. Hasinger and Mr. Fink and has remained faithful to the board of trustees to this day.

Looking at this photograph takes us back to a bygone era which we now find difficult to imagine. It was an incredible political adventure to even consider building Germany’s largest heart surgery centre in West-Berlin, a political "island" in East Germany. Countless media reported the idea as a "gross misjudgement" in view of the fact that more than half of the patients would have to be flown in from West Germany, since in those days noone from East Germany was allowed to travel to West Berlin.

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