YouSaid · the spoken record

Katja Hoyer

lines on the record: 74
first: 2026-06-10
most recent: 2026-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I haven't really quite decided yet. I think I want to really delve down into one particular story or case or individual or something really quite distinct and specific because I think that kind of I've looked at the bigger picture for so long now, these kind of telling these big stories that happened over decades that I think just looking at one particular issue might be an interesting or personal whatever might be an interesting thing to do. So I'm bouncing around different ideas there at the moment and sorry to be a bit sort of garden. Whilst I'm still having these ideas swirling around, the moment you say anything, people come back and say, yes, do that or don't do that. And you end up, you know, kind of being influenced by that. So I tend to make a decision at some point and then release it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People joke that there's a Weiss Force Equator, a sausage equator, basically south of which they eat this white sausage that is famous at the Octoberfest. It's kind of like a squishy sausage that you have to cook and boil and then suck out of its skin. If you like that, you tend to live in the south. And then if you don't, you live in the north. And that is usually kind of along the river mine, which crosses Germany horizontally about a third or so is south of it and two-thirds is north. That tends to be sort of about right, I would say. It's also in terms of the geography, if you look at it, the north is quite flat. And then once you get to Thuringia and Hesse and areas like that in the center of Germany, it becomes more mountainous, which is also associated with different types of cultures. It's that kind of foresty mountainous image that people have of Germany that starts about halfway down and then becomes more pronounced the further south you get until you get to the Alps as well. So I would say”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I had to live in Germany, which I would really rather avoid. So I'm very happy in Britain. That would be my first choice. But if I had to live in Germany, it would definitely be somewhere northern rather than in the south because that is the second people always think of in Germany when they think of Germany and East-West terms. But actually the north-south divide is much older and much deeper, I would say. So for someone like me to go to Bavaria, say, it feels like you're in a foreign country. You don't really know the social conventions. They're very conservative, very Catholic still, very different culture compared to kind of the northern house definitely in the north. And I always feel more comfortable the further north I get. So I like being in Hamburg, for example. I like being by the coast. People are very calm and often a bit aloof as well, but I quite like that, sort of a very calm, to me, quite sort of polite, cautious way of being rather than the sort of brash culture.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, well, this is just East Germans not understanding how democracy works. Ah, well, they're only a fifth of the population doesn't matter. Had they looked a little bit further, they could have seen what's going on in France, in Britain, in Eastern Europe, in the US, and in other places, they could have seen that actually the patterns, they are not dissimilar. You have basically a working class population that is deeply unhappy about things and is trying to find a way of expressing that. And they could have addressed it perhaps a little bit earlier and actually taken it seriously. And that, I feel, living outside of Germany, but still close enough and having relatives and friends and people there and I go there a lot as well. So I have enough of a foot in there to follow events, but I feel I'm far enough away as well to have an outsider's kind of perspective on these things.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always find it helps because you sort of sit outside to sometimes joke that I live in exile, so you can kind of observe your own country perhaps in a slightly less cautious and fearful way. I feel that people who live in Germany and their careers depend on what they say and what they write. They tend to be a bit more cautious than people who don't. And then also Germany has got a bit of a habit, I suppose like the US because it's quite large, quite dominant for where it is. It tends to not look across its own borders. It tends to kind of interpret its issues within its own ecosystem and thereby doesn't see that other countries either have the same problems and have dealt with them in some way that might actually be useful to look at or that the problem that they have is distinctly German. So say for example when the AFD began to rise the far right party in Germany people immediately said oh this is an East German problem because it's larger in the East and much larger in the East than it is in the West and so they ignored it for a long time. They basically looked at that and”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovations lacking. People just thought, you know, let's run with the existing thing itself does well without having the kind of nimble footedness that made the system great in the first place, that innovation of the 19th century, that zeal, I think has gone to a large extent”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest problem is complacency. I think people were so used to the idea of this system always going that way. When you look at whatever is 20 largest German companies today, they're all 19th century or a lot of them are 19th century companies like Siemens, Bosch, you know, kind of the big companies that you'd expect chemical industry, electronic engineering, that kind of thing. And because these things survived like two world wars and the complete moral and economic destruction that the Second World War brought and came back bouncing back afterwards with the economic miracle in West Germany, I think people thought that they would always just carry on running no matter what you do with them. You don't have to look after the system. You don't have to reform it. You don't have to modernize it. As a result of that, I think people didn't really think how do we get this or how do we adapt this thing to the 21st century. So when you look at things like startups, say in Germany, the rate is much, much lower there than it is in comparable countries because the”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it would be odd not to be pessimistic because all the experts are telling us to be pessimistic, as do the people in the field. And you do see entire industries breaking away at the moment. I mean, there's a huge issue, particularly with energy that isn't being addressed and isn't being resolved. So if you have a part of the, or if you run a part of the economy that relies on stable and affordable energy, there isn't an obvious solution. This isn't the kind of temporary crisis that you just have to sit out and hope that it'll go away. But actually, the structural things that are wrong with the German economy don't seem to be going anywhere. So I'm quite pessimistic at this point, but I'm hopeful that the election results that are coming in thick and fast now and you begin to really see that in politicians that it's beginning to sink in just how pessimistic other people are and how fed up they are that this is now hopefully leading to some reforms and there's certainly talk of that at the moment in Germany.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, most people, when I go there and speak to people, most people are very concerned with the state of the economy and with the interference they feel is coming from the state without it being helpful. So they feel that it's too much regulation. You know, it's still a place that's dominated by lots of kind of small independent places like, you know, little shops and that kind of thing. And people feel that their own personal kind of progress is being hampered by the way that the state, Berlin in particular, which seems very far away from Weimar, is setting the parameters for their economic activity. So that was certainly the biggest issue that I heard a lot is that people were grumbling about that, about the regulation, the taxes and so on.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are actually fewer, a lot fewer than you would expect kind of given Germany's overall population. So when you walk through Weimar, you see a few kind of foreign students, particularly at the Bauhaus University, which is sort of modeling itself on that tradition and therefore attracts some. But largely it's the people who run the kebab shops who run the takeaways who drive the taxi into town, that kind of part of the population. And it's not huge, it's just a few people basically much, much smaller than lots of other places.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comparatively, but it's still there, and people also vote for the far left de linker in higher numbers as well. So it's still a place where if you look at it across the board, where the numbers are still relatively high, but not as high as the rest of the state of Thuringia around them. I think that's because it's always been socially different from its environment. So Thuringia itself is quite like working class lower middle class. It's got lots of small businesses, things like garden gnomes, for example, famously come from there. You have these kind of small craft industries. That means that people tend to go with whatever the working classes are doing and they're currently voting for AFD. So does Thoringia. But Weimar itself is very middle class, very sort of not just middle class, but a particular branch of the middle class is the kind of educated, the professorial types, the intellectuals who move there. And so you end up with quite a small Conservative kind of culture there that sets it out a little bit from the”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years of what people call the classical Weimar, basically, because it's a very artificial place in many ways. You know, you go there, it's super neat, super clean, looks after itself, it's very confident about these visitors coming in and out because it's been so used to that, but it shows the world a very, very narrow image of itself, namely, you know, that of the so-called classical era when Goethe and Schiller lived and worked there.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would certainly, I mean, maybe that's because I'm a historian rather than a mayor. I think there is a lot of focus in Weimar or obsession almost still with the things it's always been obsessed with. So it's culture, it's schloss, it's Goethe, you know, you go there and it's basically impossible to escape these things. And there's very little emphasis on its role actually in the 20th century because there's almost an uncomfortable notion there that if we go there, we have to deal with this legacy as well. So I would be a bit more brave with that and try and show visitors of whom there are still many that come to Weimar, a town that is comfortable with its own history and goes back not just to these kind of cultural stars that has harbored and fostered, but actually, you know, a more kind of nuanced picture across the board. So trying to show the people who come there basically Weimar across the ages rather than just focusing on this kind of glory days on the goal.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he died just before the Wall Street crash happened. And so forever in my head, there's been this What-If moment? How would he have dealt with that? Because he had solved seemingly unsolvable problems before in terms of dealing with hyperinflation and those kinds of things. And, you know, to me, it's this kind of idea of he almost saved Germany and therefore Europe and the world from this catastrophe that was befalling it later on. And that tantalizing moment of had he not died there and then could he have done something about it, perhaps make some underrated because he never got the opportunity to. And we might be living in a completely different world today if he had survived.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's very true. And the impact, certainly the long term impact perhaps isn't quite as well understood. But of course, it does feature larger in Germany and you do have things named after him and people sort of referring to him in that essential way as part of the kind of central strand of German culture that comes through. Well, because my brain's kind of permanently stuck in the 19th and 20th century, I'm going to pick someone from there. I think Gustav Strezermann, who was the foreign minister in the Weimar Republic, and as such, you know, he was more than just a politician. You really had a big kind of ideas to where he would take Germany, how he would tackle the problems. And I think he got a long way along that in the 1920s. He was really rehabilitating Germany in the world. He was presenting an image of a country that was recovering, restoring its kind of morality. And people believed him. I mean, he did rebuild Germany's position in international treaties and so on. He had an idea as to how to take the economy forward.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I wouldn't really put him as underrated. I mean, he's one of the sort of stars, I would say, of the German self-image and self-appreciation in lots of ways, both of them brothers.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, felt they had nothing to lose. You know, there wasn't this kind of fear now when you think, oh, can I really say this? Can I really do this? You know, will I get cancelled? What will it do to my career? People were almost like hedonistic in a way, you know, that they would just go out and try things because of this absolute kind of dizzying state where there are no certainties, where there's nothing to cling on to. So that's unique, I would say, to that time period. And it created this absolutely dazzling cultural scene that you see in the 1920s, particularly in Berlin, of course.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do appreciate that, and especially the creativity of the 1920s. I mean, there's something about the utter devastation of the First World War that creates this absolute creativity and create a freedom that you see and the willingness to experiment in the 1920s. I mean, when you look at films like Metropolis or M or, you know, they're so innovative. The whole idea of the kind of vampire movie in the 1920s with Nosferatu, that's a kind of German creation because they're looking at these really dark, twisted horror themes as well. So I think that's certainly something about the 1920s. That's incredibly precious, this kind of willingness to just break the boundaries, try again, start from scratch because the world that people had come from and that they knew had gone. They knew that the First World War was an absolute kind of turning point. It was really, it wiped the slate clean and you could start again. And people, because of hyperinflation and all those things, people...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say I'm personally sort of nostalgic in that sense. I mean, as a historian, I always find it a bit, you know, it's my job to analyze what happened in the past rather than. Something from there, if that makes sense in an emotional sense.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In concentration camps as well as guards, which is an interesting development. There's almost a more fervent, more extremist type of kind of Nazism going on in Austria. They almost feel like they have a point of proof that they want to be part of the same system. And you see the same with Kristalenacht with the pogroms against Jews in 1938. They take a much more violent turn in Austria, where in Germany it's mostly shops and synagogues and so on that are being attacked, although people also die and get murdered and arrested. But in Austria, it's very much targeted at the people themselves, at Jews, because of this kind of emotionality of wanting to prove that you're part of this. So it's not as odd as it looks today when we're looking at two very distinct states there, basically, that isn't really the case in the 1920s where there's still arguments about some form of unification of Germany and Austria, which Hitler, of course, ends up doing.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Australia, there was a huge movement in the 1920s because Austria was basically after the First World War was split from its own empire and it became the small German-Austrian rump state and it suddenly feared for its own existence and survival because it was so small, having previously been an empire. And so there's a huge movement even from left-leaning and progressive Austrians towards a unification process with Germany in the 1920s, which is forbidden in the Treaty of Versailles, so they're not allowed to do that. But the movement exists. And so it's not an unnatural position for Hitler to say, or he's certainly not alone in that for Hitler to say, actually, I'm German. We're all Germans because we're Austrians and we should be part of this. Look at the 19th century when there were debates about a greater Germany that included Austria at that point. So he's harking back to that and he's saying actually we shouldn't be in two separate countries and this works for many Germans and you actually see a much higher than average proportion of Austrians serve”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that is certainly an aspect of this. I described that a bit in my book as well because Hitler didn't even have citizenship, German citizenship. When he wanted to become president in 1932, he stood for the election then against Hindenburg. He actually needed to become a German citizen very quickly so that he could even exercise his passive electoral rights. And that was a problem. So all the Nazi leaders were falling over themselves to try and find a way of giving him citizenship. It's certainly not something that's automatically there. He himself always argued that he always felt German. He was from the far western part of Austria by the German border, where he sort of was born and where he grew up in Brauna Inn, which is literally just the other side of the border. So he argued that actually his accent is Bavarian. And it does have that, you know, because it is so close to the German borders. It's that sort of, you know, being Catholic, being alpine, being from that region. It's not an obvious distinction, I would say, in the way that people think of it now. And then people also forget that in”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extreme solution and take that forward, and this is something that spirals very quickly out of control. I mean, most historians now agree that there wasn't a master plan that led to Auschwitz, basically, in the 1920s within the Nazi movement, despite the rhetoric that you see there. It's bit by bit the escalation that you see is due to the radicalism of the Nazi movement and the way that people follow orders and go along with it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, for themselves. And so, you know, this kind of narrative of their exploiting the poverty of the others is particularly easy to exploit in a situation like that. And then there's also, I mean, a journalist put it quite well recently on a different reason, but he said to be German means to walk down every cul-de-sac to the end. And so, you know, the idea that there's anti-Semitism already latent in society becomes Hitler's own obsession. People are working towards the F ⁇ hrer, as he incurs the history and puts it. They're kind of finding more and more extreme ways of dealing with things that are already latent in society and the system that Hitler sets up allows this to happen. So rather than saying, you know, you sit there with your anti-Semitic grievances and prejudices in your head or you talk about it in the pub, somebody will say, why don't we do something about it because that's what Hitler wants. And then they need to be heard amongst the field of competitors and they find the most radical and the most”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a very good question because you do see it across Europe. And even in the 1920s, you still get an influx of Jews to Germany from the east because they find much harsher conditions there in many states. So for example, I saw that there were lots of people at Munich University who were complaining that suddenly lots of Hungarian Jews would kind of turn up and enroll at the university because they introduced quota for Jewish Hungarians at their universities. So even then there's still a degree of tolerance there. I think partially it's because anti-Semitism tends to always be a symptom of a society in crisis, kind of the worse it gets, the worse anti-Semitism gets. So that's partially, I think, an explanation for that is that particularly because it's economic grievances, people then look for scapegoats for the Great Depression, but also hyperinflation. And they see that the Jewish Germans who are largely in middle class and upper class kind of social environments, that they're still doing reason.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Germany in Central Europe, or go the other way and rebuild from the beginning, as was the strategy after the Second World War. So this is interesting, the lesson that they draw from that is after the Second World War, there is no reparation some as such that is slapped on to Germany. They basically just say, let's just take out what's actually there and then start rebuilding Germany because of the Cold War. But this means that there's now this quite close relationship between Western parts of Germany and the US and Britain and France in particular because they very quickly began to see them as allies. So I would say a decision just had to be made either way, this compromise treaty, I think, is part of the problem.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's always an hindsight, I think, is always a bit much to sit there as a kind of armchair politician and say, you know, this is what I would have done differently. I think it sort of is the worst of both worlds. It's harsh enough to give Germany grievance to make it feel like it's punished alone for the First World War, particularly the article 231 that gives it the war blame basically and says it's your fault and your fault alone. This is something that unites bizarrely all of these fractured political movements in Germany. So even social democrats find that unfair. And so that, I think, builds grievance. But on the other side, it wasn't harsh enough to subdue Germany. It wasn't split up. It was still a whole state. It was still powerful enough to do something with that grievance. So I think in a way, it would have made more sense to go either way or the other, either make it even harsher and basically create a weak.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I mean, certainly not the East Prussian ones. So, like Kunig's burg and that kind of entire region along the Baltic coast, that was where some of the most staunch support for Nazism was. They had grievances because of the settlement after the First World War, where Poland is founded as an independent state after the First World War. It's given access to the sea. And so you end up with a part of From the rest of Germany, and that creates a lot of grievance and very staunch support for Hitler there when Hitler basically promises to undo all of that and reunite all of these parts of Germany into one kind of block state again. So they're not as such averse to Nazism at all. They basically think that Hitler is restoring kind of the old Germany as was before the First World War.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That so, if the Bavarian state decides that actually they want to allow, say, the Nazi Party to reform after Hitler comes out of prison and they want to allow him to speak again, or even in 1923, it's partially the Bavarian elites who are plotting against the central state in Berlin as well, then the authority is just not there from Berlin to try and impose anything else on Bavaria. There's separatism everywhere. So even when Hitler tries a coup in 1923 and then everywhere the Nazi Party gets banned, individual states and regions slowly start lifting those bans again and the central government can't do much about that. And that's partially the reason why in Weimar, the Nazis also relaunched their movement because the Thuringian government, the state around Weimar is Thuringia and they also allow the Nazis basically to rebuild from there because there's local sympathy for that. And I think it's that fractured nature of the German state.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, being coming from that part of Germany myself, that was sort of the Prussian heartlands I grew up just outside of Berlin, that often annoys me that people still sort of think, well, if only Prussia hadn't been there, then you would have had some sort of lovely Catholic-dominated, more civilian type Germany. I think that failed to acknowledge the fact that Prussia also was quite liberal. It's a real hub of social democracy actually in the Weimar Republic, which is the reason why the first time it gets abolished is by the Nazis, they get rid of kind of Prussia, if you will, because the idea was that it was so left-leaning and so dominated by social democracy that they have to get rid of it. So it gets even more complicated than kind of northern Prussian militarism, and then the South comes in with this kind of cultural contributions to Nazism. I think the other thing is that you do have such a splintered system that it allows the Nazis to build little islands of support and the central state can't do very much about it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new military, but they never go kind of Stalin style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place so they kind of inherit an army that isn't loyal to them, that's still loyal to the old system.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, they still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it's often been said that Prussia wasn't a state with an army, but it was an army with a state. You know, and that kind of intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are kind of really calling the shots, that doesn't really go away. People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg's system from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else, again, that they don't just suddenly turn that off in 1919. So they do try and make their influence heard ongoingly. And then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing butchers. And so they kind of depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people felt they were kind of literally balancing constantly for this entire time really after 1919 on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying off diseases. There's a Spanish flu, there's tuberculosis. It's always something or other and people don't feel that the system is giving them stability. So I don't think there ever really is a feeling that this can really kind of work long term and people do at the slightest whim kind of think oh maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes a decision. So the Weimar Republic actually dies in 1933 years before Hitler comes into power as a democracy and he takes over a system. I think that's already given up on being a democracy even at that point. But as I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors so it is complex.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think how long it took the American founding fathers to sort of sit there and really work out every angle and what if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that, those sorts of things? That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place which allows kind of extremists to hijack it. So that is part of the reason. I think the other kind of group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born is basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly that never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. But all of that's propped up by American money, even the kind of stability years of the middle 1920s. And the moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away. Again, I mean, the subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. I'm trying to hint at the fact that that's how...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are plenty of factors, I think. I mean, some of these are inbuilt flaws like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that's often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the Constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and other democratic structures in time of emergency. But if you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable, right? If you're just assuming that there were all these flaws in the Constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail. And I don't think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all of these kinds of forks on the road as to where things could have done differently. And I don't think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. And I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The actual details that people know, but they certainly do know what this camp is and what it's for, not least because it's so closely tied to the town as well. So for example, when later on when the crematorium actually breaks because they put too many bodies in there, the bodies are emaciated, it doesn't work properly, the Weimar Town Council sits down and decides to buy a new crematorium and they're discussing why the old one is broken with the engineers and they tell them it's because the bodies are unusually emaciated. It's because it's not supposed to function at the high rate that you're using it. So they're very well aware of what they're discussing there. And these are Weimar civilian politicians who are basically sitting in the town council deciding to buy a new crematorium oven because the old one can't cope with the amount of bodies that they're putting through it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While a lot of them actually lived on site. So they had barracks built for the SS. And so, yes, they did come into town to drink and to shop and so on, but they didn't actually live in Weimar, a lot of them. And I think that helped keep that a secret. And then the other thing is that they quite often were quite open about this. I mean, they wanted the terror of this to really seep into German society. So they had tours, for example. There's one instance that I found where a German-American group who'd come over to sort of see Nazi and tour Nazi Germany, they were taken up to Buchenwald and shown around. So they would sort of tidy up the camp. They'd only show them certain bits of it. So I think it was always a great area between allowing some of this horror to dissipate so that it would work as terror and it would work in subduing the population, but never enough to really create some sort of public outrage or a demonstration or anything like that. So it's a bit of a gray area there in terms of, you know, the”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And watched happen. And there's genuine shock there when they go up and they see the actual reality of what was going on there because I don't think the human mind was even capable of visualizing that if you hadn't actually seen it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It up. I found various testimonies where people said, you know, there was always this excitement when a new Jew transporters, as people called it, arrived, and they would all rush to the station to see that and just to observe it and to gorp effectively. So people did know what it was and what it did. I don't think that meant they understood the actual horrors that were going on there. They did realize obviously that people were dying there and they saw the initially didn't have its own crematorium so people were still sort of transported the bodies were transported down the hilligan and into the Weimar crematorium, which is in the town center. So people did know that there was a large amount of deaths going on there as well. But I don't think that that meant kind of really visualizing the absolute sheer horror, the torture, the imprisonment, that kind of stuff. Because Weimaras do get taken there when the Americans occupy Weimar at the end of the war and they decide to show the population kind of what they'd tolerated, what they'd stood.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. This is one of the questions that really occupied my mind boss. I was researching this as well, because it's so close. And people still walked up there. My main guy who I kind of uses is a bit of a protagonist in the book. He's a shopkeeper. He has a stationary shopwriter in the town center. And he still goes up the hill where the concentration camp is to go hiking and sledging because it was a popular kind of forest area before the concentration camp was put there. And people carry on and he even writes in Astari at one point. Oh, I can't even go hiking properly anymore because of the stupid concentration camp because some of the walking kind of routes were cut off because there were fences and things now. So people definitely know it's there. The prisoners, it never gets its own train station, so the prisoners who get taken there arrive at Weimar train station very public place with a huge square in front of it. And they're gathered there and then put onto lorries to be taken up the hill to the camp. So people can see them round.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the nation and where they unfolded after the First World War, as well as the fall of those ideals, because you have the Buchenwald concentration camp just on its doorstep as well. And to see that side by side, I think is really quite enlightening in lots of ways to see kind of the high ambition of the era as well as the fall of those ideals.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would definitely make a case. I mean, as I say, I just spent a whole year is basically researching this because it is so crucial to understanding Germany, I think. You get a good handle on what Germany is if you go to Weimar. And that's across different centuries. So you do have this sort of cultural legacy we just discussed. You know, that really isn't just at the time when Goethe's there, but because Goethe's legacy lasts for so long and he gets sort of reinterpreted by every incarnation of Germany that comes afterwards. Even today still, he's kind of more seen as a humanist or someone who's into the European idea. Every generation of Germans takes something new out of Goethe. So to understand that again, it makes sense to go there. And then, of course, it was where the Weimar Republic was founded. So in terms of the 20th century and understanding that there's a very good case, this is why I chose to place my book there as well. There's a very good case of going to Weimar to see both kind of the ambition.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stole one family in Weimar, that kind of thing. But it is a small town, and that's, I think, partially why that's the case.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I lived in Jena and then you travel abroad, people say, So where in Germany do you live? There's no other reference point that are no urban centers basically. You have to say what I just said, about halfway between Munich and Hamburg. Same with Frankfurt. You know, there are no urban centers and because the vast majority of German Jews lived in urban regions, particularly of course Berlin, but also Frankfurt and Hamburg, Munich and so on. And there just isn't a large urban conglomeration anywhere nearby. So it just doesn't have that sort of the traditional areas that German Jews were involved with, things like culture, banking, finances, you know, that kind of thing, kind of the higher middle classes, the professions, there just wasn't much along those lines environment. So the time that I'm looking at in my book between the two world wars, you have about 100 Jews in a town of about 35,000 people. So it's a tiny population. They're largely people like shopkeepers. And one runs a department.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say it's a classic spa town, but it is a town for kind of wealthy cultural retirees. So if you're like an old general and you want to kind of spend your last years somewhere prestigious, somewhere where there's still a bit culture going on, that's more of a thing, I would say. Conferences have always taken place. They're like meetings. If you wanted a kind of more prestigious place, if you wanted to say we're discussing something important here, then Weimar was always a place where people would meet. It's also essential. It's right in the heart of Germany. Again, whichever incarnation of Germany you look at, it always ends up being pretty much right in the middle. It's about halfway between Munich and Hamburg. So for that reason alone, it ended up being kind of quite a popular place for people to go to, to visit, to meet up, you know, the cumulatively, I would say that gay fight are quite a large standing on those sort of firmament of German culture.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attraction of being nearby. And then it was also a royal residence of the dukes basically in different incarnations of it because of Germany's fragmented history. But basically it has a blossomed little palace in Weimar and various gardens and pleasure gardens and that kind of thing as well because it was always a royal residence town. And that gives a place kind of the political importance as well over time, which means kind of representative buildings are being built and so on and it becomes quite a prestigious place for that reason as well. When Goethe moved there and then suddenly Goethe shot his fame as he did, he was the theater director there for a long time and then died in Weimar so it became a bit of a Goethe shrine. It sort of elevated that even further that status.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it is a lovely place. It is a very cozy little. Imagine your typical German idyllic German city and it's pretty much there. It has got the timber framed houses and the villas and the cobbled streets and things. But you're right, that doesn't explain why it's had this kind of elevated position in German culture. I mean, partially it is because Jenner, the University of Jiena, where I studied as well, is one of the oldest German universities. And that's not far from there. That's sort of almost next door in Jena itself, which is about a 15 minute or so train right away. So that attracted people like Schiller, for example, who was friends with Goethe and also a very famous German poet. He was a professor at the University of Jena and then went and visited Goethe.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As an all German culture place, the same I would say applies to Weimar as well, where people still come to sort of hail these literary heroes. And it's not just Gut. I mean, you've got Beethoven and Liszt and, you know.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, she usually, I mean, Goethe, I would say, is still the national poet, I would say, is comparable to the position that Shakespeare has in Britain. He's that figure. He's the national poet, I would say still. So you learn at school, you have to recite his poetry, you analyze the ballads and his work and Faust and all the rest of it. So he is big on the literary horizon, I would say, of all Germans everywhere because you do encounter him at school. I find it very hard to imagine that anyone in Germany goes to their school education without being exposed to Gut in some way. And then if you're in Weimar, spend a lot of time there in our researching for my latest book. You see the type of tourism is very different from other parts of Germany in that you do get a lot of people from West Germany there. You can hear different accents. You can hear people from Bavaria and Swabia and from the Rhine region. So there is that tourism. I think similar to Dresden as well, which has got a similar kind of standing.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or five or six, that was me, the five six year old. And there were these kind of old West German professors and they all looked at her aghast, like, why are you here? You know, kind of miles away, hundreds of miles away from home when you got two small children at home. What are you like? And this kind of difference there, I think, is partially comes out of this West German society being socially very, very conservative for a long time and led by conservative leaders for most of their time as well until you get sort of Willie Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the 70s as more left-leaning, more progressive leaders who break up these structures a little bit.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source