A warm welcome

Angela Ryll has been part of the Technology Park’s history at SENTECH Instruments

Angela Ryll has been a part of the Technology Park’s history since the outset, as an assistant for SENTECH Instruments. Our author Simon Wolff met her for a walk.

It is February, and Adlershof is wrapped in a damp, wintry grey. “So many of the old buildings have disappeared. It all looks completely different now,” says Angela Ryll. We pass the iconic heads at Forum Adlershof and the stark concrete of the aviation monuments before arriving at the headquarters of SENTECH Instruments—the company where she spent most of her life. She is recognised immediately. With an immaculate Berlin inflection, someone says: “Hello there. Miss us already?” Ryll, who grew up in Köpenick, slips easily into the dialect herself. However, nobody would mistake her for someone who is freshly retired. And yet she was the person at the front desk at SENTECH for 35 years, making sure everything—and everyone—received a warm welcome.

Whether it was room-sized plasma systems, sensitive deliveries or international visitors—all things passed through her hands. SENTECH Instruments develops, manufactures and services specialised instruments for measuring ultra-thin coatings. These high-tech systems are used, among other things, in quality control for photovoltaic systems in China. For a medium-sized company from Berlin to succeed on a global scale, it needs people like Ryll. As executive assistant, she was the first point of contact for emails and post, guests and deliveries, invoices, office supplies, scheduling and events. The history of the company as well as the Technology Park run in parallel in many ways. All three set out after reunification into an uncertain new future.

In former East Germany (GDR), Ryll trained as a plant engineering technician. Shift work at the cable-making factory in Köpenick was tough. “After the night shift, I’d hear the birds singing at six in the morning, but I’d be going to bed.” After retraining for office work, she moved from southeast Berlin to Mitte, to the Democratic Women’s League on Breite Straße. As a young woman, she never planned to stay anywhere for more than four years. In 1986, her daughter Cassandra was born. The commute became too long to manage with childcare hours—so she moved on again. Ryll then found a new position at Pionierpalast, today’s FEZ leisure centre. She loved the modern architecture, the polished wooden floors—and for the first time, she felt settled. “If the Wall hadn’t come down, I’d probably still be there.” But the Wall did come down. And with it came a period of great uncertainty.

Staying passive in the face of impending unemployment was not Ryll’s thing. Without a car, without a phone, she searched for a new role in a world that had changed overnight. Like many former GDR citizens, she found herself standing in line for state employment programmes and completed a retraining course. Instead of becoming another statistic, she learned to work with computers. In 1991, she went to the job centre in Adlershof—just five minutes from the buildings where she would later spend decades—to apply for unemployment benefits. Instead, the clerk pulls out a job from her drawer.

On our walk, we have now reached the spot where everything began: Just down the road from where we’re standing, at Adlershof S-Bahn station, Ryll once stood in a phone booth and dialled the number on the form. On the other end was Albrecht Krüger, one of the founders of SENTECH Instruments—like her, an East German. His business partner Helmut Witek was from the West. A pan-German joint venture in a newly reunited country. With Angela Ryll at the front desk, the company began to take off, initially based in a prefabricated building of the former Academy of Sciences—the nucleus of today’s Adlershof Technology Park. “When that old building was demolished, we moved into the one with the amazing exterior. The amoeba.” That is what locals call the Centre for Photonics and Optics, one of Adlershof’s most striking buildings. In 2010, SENTECH, then with 45 employees, moved into its own headquarters, which was soon expanded. Today, the workforce has nearly tripled.

Back inside, it feels as though Ryll never left. Former colleagues gather around her—among them senior manager Krüger. Co-founder Witek passed away last year. A young woman comes over to greet us. “That’s my daughter,” Ryll says to me. The daughter who once sat under the tables at the company’s Christmas parties, drawing pictures, now sits behind the reception desk herself. After many bold new beginnings, Ryll’s sense of continuity has passed to the next generation.

Simon Wolff for Adlershof Journal

SENTECH Instruments