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Tobias Schröder's fact sheet

Tobias Schröder September 20, 2015

Heavy machinery is his thing. Tractors are his preferred mode of transport. Tobias is a young farmer whose life has been shaped heavily by the German reunification.

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What is your name?
Tobias Schröder

Where and when were you born?
September 29, 1990, in Grevesmühlen

What is your current place of residence?
I'm back in Grevesmühlen, which is a small town between Vismar and Lübeck.

What is currently on your mind? Send us a tweet about your life (140 characters).
I don't have a Twitter account or any other such nonsense. I'm on Facebook, but even on there I'm pretty inactive most of the time.

What are you proud of?
I'm proud of my little family. My daughter Lütte is five years old. And I'm proud of being a home owner, and having managed to finance the mortgage myself. I'm also proud of my career. I went through an expedited apprenticeship to become a farmer and finished with the best grade possible and have moved on to study at university, where I've also been getting the best grades.

What are you ashamed of?
I don't feel ashamed of anything, really. I stand by the things I do, as I believe anyone should. When you commit yourself to a particular kind of action you have to be able to stick by it.

Tell us about an image that will never be erased from your memory.
I'm not a visual kind of person. I don't even have a picture of my girlfriend in my wallet.

If you could choose one person to meet, dead or still alive, who would this be and why?
I don't think there's anyone in the world who I admire so much that I would try so hard to meet them. Perhaps my two grandfathers - I really learned a lot from them. Other than that I cannot imagine anyone to be that important that I'd bend over backwards to have a conversation with them.

What would have happened if the Berlin Wall had never come down?
I guess I would be a citizen of East Germany. I can hardly imagine that, though. Then again, I suppose that my parents brought me up according to the values of East Germany, which they had learned when they grew up there. For example, I consider myself to be a humble and modest person, and that's mainly due to my upbringing. So if Germany had not reunited I still would have been brought up in accordance with those same values and so I guess I'd be the same person I am now.

But all things considered I believe that it was a good thing that the Wall came down. It epitomized the regime change that we needed: trading in socialism for capitalism.