CP Zeitinger — A Farewell

This image mattered to CP.

It shows Federico da Montefeltro with his son.

A renowned military leader during Renaissance.

Ruler of a small and exposed principality.

Surrounded by stronger powers.

Trained for war.

And yet the image does not show him fighting.

It shows him reading.

Investing in learning, in culture, in the life of the mind.

For CP, the message was simple and uncompromising:

Always be ready to fight.

But never stop being open and curious.

---

I worked with Claus-Peter Zeitinger for 17 years.

That is not a biographical footnote.

It is a chapter of my own life.

Our first conversation took place in the summer of 2005.

You laid out your vision — an academy for the leadership of the ProCredit Group.

While doing so, you smoked roughly ten cigarettes.

At the time, around twenty banks, twenty countries, three continents, and about twenty thousand employees.

I told you that I was critical of banks and their role in the economic system, and that I was not sure I wanted to help educate their managers.

You laughed. Loudly. That unmistakable laugh.

Then you placed a draft contract on the table.

With a face like Marlon Brando in The Godfather:

an offer I could not refuse.

Power was never hidden with you.

Never morally disguised.

It was there. Tangible. And asymmetrical.

But power was never an end in itself.

For you, it was always tied to responsibility — for institutions, for people, for societies.

Not as a marketing idea.

Not as a vision statement.

But as an operational reality.

You had your own conception of banking, management, and corporate culture.

Formed by the student movement of 1968, actively involved in "APO" at the University of Frankfurt, rebellious toward the establishment — and at the same time immune to communist romanticism.

Pragmatic. Power-conscious. Charismatic.

And yet with a deep, instinctive understanding of human and societal needs.

You could not be classified.

I often tried to provoke you. You only laughed.

And you did not resolve your contradictions — you lived them.

That attitude became the core of the Academy.

History, philosophy, religion, politics, anthropology — all of this became an immanent part of the curriculum.

Equal in weight to classical leadership training.

Three years. Thirty-six weeks of presence. More than seven hundred graduates.

And a campus that grew over time — not just as a location, but as an environment.

A place that shaped generations of participants.

The outcome was visible.

An unusually high degree of cohesion among staff and management of the entire Group. Stability. A shared group identity.

Common narratives, memes, stories.

Everything that cannot be engineered — and yet emerges when education is understood as cultural work.

You were my mentor.

And that was not a gentle role.

In class, we could play the ball to each other blindly.

During breaks, we often laughed about the folly of historical figures.

You gave young people the chance to prove themselves. In classes and in banks.

You corrected mistakes.

You gave hard feedback.

You despised harmony and empty consensus.

You empowered — and you fired.

We had many conflicts.

About the Academy. About teaching. About Plato. About students.

I believe we both enjoyed testing each other’s limits — provoking, debating, pushing back.

The power relationship was not symmetrical, and you made that felt at times.

At the same time, I never felt easily replaceable.

That gave me a certain freedom.

You respected my perspective and my knowledge in history and philosophy.

I had full autonomy in my teaching — in Germany, Macedonia, Mozambique, everywhere we built schools.

Only after I left the Academy in 2022 and began pursuing my own projects did I fully realize how much your way of thinking and managing had shaped me.

With a slight smile, I notice how much I now expect from my own team, clients or partners. How I provoke deliberately in discussions with authorities.

How I experience harmony more as a burden than a virtue.

How impatient I am when progress is slow.

You shaped me.

In many ways.

Not all of it was easy.

Not all of it was comfortable.

And not all of it would I still agree with today.

But influence does not ask for consent.

You were a factor in my life.

Positive. Negative. But definitely effective.

This is my farewell CP.

Not a judgment.

Not a gesture of reconciliation.

But a conscious pause.

May the force be with you... hahaha.

Rolf

PS: The ProCredit Academy. Built on the conviction that education is what allows institutions to outlast individuals.