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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think people often forget that, but it was a really, really, really conservative society. That's partially, I think, because suddenly, so Germany is a kind of Protestant and Catholic country because of the way that the Reformation kind of worked out. You got the northern part being Protestant largely in the South Catholic. And then suddenly when you split Germany and the way that happened after the Second World War, you ended up with a 50-50 ratio of Catholics to Protestants in West Germany. So that's much higher than any other kind of Germany that's ever existed in terms of the Catholic proportion. And they were socially more conservative and placed emphasis on things like family values, raising children at home in a conservative way. My mom said in the 90s when she went on a kind of course on a further education course in the West and then she said in the evening, you know, I just got to call home quickly and make sure that my children are okay. And then they said, well, how old are they? And she said, well, one of them is a baby. The other one.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never did. I found that out again the hard way when you go to university, and then suddenly I had a really broad Berlin accent when I grew up. And so going to university somewhere else quite far way up, studied in Jena, which is about two, three hours away from Berlin. And suddenly you've got these Bavarian professors who think it's hilarious that you speak in a Berlin accent. That wouldn't have happened to a West Berliner who might have been able to switch to High German more easily. So these differences still exist. Growing up, my parents both work, that was quite unusual in West Germany still that the mothers worked when they had young children. And so you grow up in a different way. You know, you come home from school when you're sort of six, seven, cook your own food to your own homework, go shopping, take over responsibility, that kind of thing more early. So culturally, there's a difference still between East and West for those sorts of reasons. And I could give you a hundred other examples, but there are still differences between East and West Germans in those kind of subtle ways.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people, yes. I mean, I certainly realize when I go back now, I've lived in Britain for quite a long time now. And so I've got a bit of distance. But when I go back to East Germany, I immediately feel I know how to talk to people, you know the types of people that you encounter, even if it's somebody that you'd never met before, because you recognize from your own experience growing up in the East what these people are basically like and what types exist and how to talk to them. So say, for example, talking in an accent or in a local dialect is still much more common, I would say, in the East, because it wasn't seen as a marker of your social standing. Quite the contrary, politicians would even speak with kind of regional dialects and accents, whilst in the West it's a sort of marker of your middle and upper class status if you can switch to high German when required in formal situations. That marks you out as somebody who's kind of well educated, well-read, and so on, and it's seen as something that you have to learn whilst in the East.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conspiracy to keep East Germans out as such, I think, is just a question of those hidden structures underneath society still being there.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People get given positions that you didn't even know how to sort of vie or compete for. And I think that's a more subtle way of thinking about it. And the other thing I would say is because of kind of over 40 years of socialism, you have a very working class orientated culture. People don't have wealth built up and all of these figures exist as well. Basically, East Germans are a lot less kind of economically secure. And as a result of that, you take fewer risks as well. So if you're sitting there wondering, should I do a PhD or not, for example, and you think that's three years of not really having an income, I don't really know how to do that and you haven't got a family that can back you up, you haven't got a house to live in no matter what because it doesn't belong to you, those kinds of things also mean that people tend to make the safe option and go with the easy kind of way forward with earning an income if there's any doubt over that. And all of these things, I think class differences and so on, I don't think people were aware what that would do to society. So I don't think there's a deliberate...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I mean, take something like networking. I mean, I didn't realize that much later, but even I, having kind of, as I say, I was a child when the Berlin Wall fell. And then I went to university in the former East. All of my professors were West German, because by that point they'd sort of purged the entire academic class, if you will. And I only went to university in the early 2000s. And you go there and they bring their own staff with them. They have a certain way of talking to students. They expect you to know these things when you start kind of networking yourself. I didn't even have a concept of networking in my mind because that sort of type of careerism, of pushing, of ambition just didn't exist in the culture that I grew up in. You were kind of just told what to do really and then climbing a certain ladder that was provided for you, but you had no idea how to do these things yourself. And so that means that things like scholarships, you have no idea how they work. You don't really sound and look like the people that you're trying to impress. And so effectively, other”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just subjective, the figures point to that. I haven't got the exact figure in my mind now, but there was a book that came out at the same time as mine by Doug Oshman called De Ostenis Einfindunges Westens, like the East is an invention of the West, in which he brings out some really quite stark figures. And one of them is something like 1.4% or so of leadership positions across the board, kind of politics, economics, everything, are occupied by East Germans. And given that East Germans make up about a fifth of the population, that's astonishingly low. So this isn't just a subjective kind of feeling that East Germans have. They are genuinely not part of the conversation in proportion to the amount of people that they provide in society.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was certainly aware of that. She talks about that in her biography as well in kind of later interviews. So it's certainly something that was going around her mind. But as I say, not in an obvious kind of way, you know, in the way that, say, as a feminist, you'd go in and you deliberately kind of try and rail against what you would see as a sort of male environment. I don't think it was that that she went in there as an East German and said, I'm facing a West German establishment here. I need to be particularly aware of this. I think it was almost like she was trying to blend into that a bit more to scale down her East Germanness and to try and basically adapt to the culture that she found rather than providing an obvious counterpoint to that.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A part of the workforce in a less obviously feminist way and a more kind of obvious normal natural way. So dealing with men in your work area, I think, was a more normal thing in the East than it was in the West at this point. And so for her to go into the still quite stuffy male environment in Bonn in the West German capital and deal with kind of her new colleagues and politics, I think was easier for her than it would have been for a woman for whom that hadn't been already kind of a normal way of working.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or get rid of in a way her time in the GDR. And she bristled against that and said, look, this is 35 years of my life. I had experience there as literally half of my life that you're expecting me to forget or to somehow overcome. So I think it was there. She always also claimed that this made it easier for her to deal with the Russians because she spoke Russian and had sort of experienced the same system in her youth and sort of knew what it was like. So there was always an argument there that she said balancing out kind of her very transatlantic outlook. She was a huge sort of fan of German-American relations as well. But balancing that out with an Eastern outlook she said was easier for her because of her background. And then lastly, if I may, I think the fact that she was a first female chancellor and to this state the only one, that was easier for her because she'd already got used to working in a way in East Germany over 90% of women were in full-time employment and they become”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, she tried very hard for that not to be the case. So she was asked after her 16 years in power, why weren't you a more kind of East German type of chance? Why weren't you overtly East German? And she initially always said, well, I want to be the Chancellor of all German. So if I'd been overtly kind of from the GDI, I would have lost people in Bavaria and other parts of Germany who would have felt sort of culturally alienated by that. But she also admitted later on after she retired that there was an element there of people kind of rolling their eyes and saying, why do you have to talk about the East or why do you have to start talking about the East all the time? And she tried to avoid that and was very conscious, I think, of not coming across like that. And there was one speech which I mentioned in the book as well, where in 2021 it was her sort of last big speech in office, she actually talked about her experiences in East German there and said, you know, people always describe this as a kind of dark past that she had to shriek.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stretch of Germany's coastline just in terms of developing any kind of beach culture really was in the former GDR and therefore you naturally have kind of the landscape that lends itself to that. There's a bit of that in the West as well. So when you go to certain areas in say for instance the English Agarten in Munich is quite famous even today sometimes you see kind of people sunbathing in the nude or topless there because there are sort of pockets of that but it's never that mass movement that it is in the east and I think that comes out of those two factors that I just explained.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. I've been pondering that myself for quite some time. I mean, the whole FCA, the kind of free body culture, I don't know how it's actually translated into English, but this kind of nudist culture is actually much older than East Germany. I mean, it's something that came out of the 19th century. And again, you could ask the same question there. You have a kind of very prudish conservative society that develops this kind of culture. And I think in part it is a counterculture to that. So the idea that this comes out of the people themselves and is an expression of people's freedom, you know, this feeling of kind of just jumping into the ocean naked, being surrounded by nature, being together with others, that stripping of clothes means stripping of class boundaries, of politics, of culture in a way, and everyone looks and is the same. I think that's partially the appeal of that, particularly there. And on top of that, I mean, it is just a pragmatic reason, but the Baltic Sea was in the east largely, most of it. And so kind of the night.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being surrounded by the constraints of that, by having to work around censorship, you have to find quite clever ways of expressing yourself in a different way, I think, that people do in freer societies. So I don't think it is surprising as such that you get kind of a different type of creativity coming from those sorts of systems.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think it is surprising. I mean, you do have a system where when you speak to artists again, you get very different views. Some people say it was absolutely oppressive and they had to get out. And that's often creatives who will tell you that because by definition, they were the most exposed kind of trying to do their own thing to censorship and to state oppression. But at the same time, the state also spent a lot of money on arts and literature and culture and film and things like that. So there were also artists who said that there was a degree of freedom in sort of being given the means to do these things, to not have to worry about the day-to-day kind of financial concerns that artists are often exposed to. And that in itself kind of set the parameters, the economic parameters for some people to work relatively freely, particularly in theater. You kind of hear that a lot because of the amount of money that was spent by the state that that gave a degree of freedom. And then I also think just the sheer experience of living in a dictatorship.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it toys with the idea of nostalgia quite well, you know, this kind of idea that people struggled with the transition from one system to the other. So, you know, just briefly for those who haven't seen it, the pre-misers that you have a mother falling into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then she's not to be disturbed afterwards, the doctors are worried. And so her son basically tries to recreate this illusion that the Berlin Ball hadn't actually fallen. And that is done in a kind of tragic comical way that I think encapsulated the experience quite well. Most people were happy they were euphoric. They wanted reunification, but they were also worried about losing their entire sort of way of life, the world around them, and especially that insecurity of not knowing what was coming next, I think that really describes the zeitgeist of the era quite well. So I think it's done a decent job in encapsulating that.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of them, although she's a difficult read, as well, is not something to sort of easily get through. Gued Reimann is a very good reader. I find her books again try and be, they are openly critical of the state, but at the same time, she was also somebody who did well for herself in the GDR. So, you know, that nuance again is kind of coming through quite well there.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wouldn't necessarily point to one single thing. I was quite struck when I was researching this that artists did take a fair amount of freedom from the state back and basically did write literature, even those that seem quite close to the state, that was quite critical. So if you take Gustav Wolf, for example, who wrote a famous book called Divided Heaven, which was also translated, and also very a huge bestseller also in West Germany, that's highly critical of the Berlin Wall, of the way that lives were quite often ruined or split by this, and yet it became a bestseller in the GDR as well. So I would say kind of overall the corpus of literature is well worth looking at because people lived in a dictatorship in a different world and tried to find ways of expressing that even though the censorship was in place. So I would say rather than reading one specific work to try and read maybe four or five different things and get a kind of cross-section of what was going on at the time. Christopher, worth being”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But nonetheless, people, you wouldn't have gone, say, to the Baltic Sea to see people on holiday or to a factory and see people working in there with their colleagues or to observe a football match or whatever. Kind of these day-to-day things that made people's lives filled them basically with life, with friendship, with colleagues and so on. So I think there is a bit more nuance than that to it.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think they are probably all correct in the sense that, you know, as I was just saying, you will find people in East Germany who will confirm that view and who will say, yes, that's exactly what it was like. I think partially the issue is that I presume you went to East Berlin rather than venturing further afield. That's always part of the story and people say it was so gray and it was always concrete and nothing going on. I think if you'd gone to say a village or a town somewhere where people lived a kind of different life that would have given you a slightly different impression as such. But of course there were shortages and people do, you know, talk about having to kind of make, do find. So say if your car broke down and you needed like a replacement part for something, you need it connections to try and get that. You needed to find a way of getting hold of things.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attack even your social structures, your relationships, and everything. And so, you know, depending on who you are, basically, you get very different stories about what it was like to live there, even right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it completely depends who you ask. I mean, I interviewed lots of people for my book. I also was just about still born in East Germany myself in 1985. So, you know, talking to family members, to friends over the years. I think so long as you were happy to live a reasonably kind of quiet, humble life, as it were. So you were happy and content to have your job go on holiday, get married, kind of live your family life. You did have a reasonable quality of life because just the living standards were higher than in all of the other communist states. you know, people didn't starve, they didn't lack things as such. But the moment you try to diverge from the path that was sort of, you know, dictated to you, that's when you really very quickly discovered that you did live in a dictatorship and there wasn't a way out of that. So the Starzi, the secret police in particular, had means of making your life absolute hell. And there was even a concept they call this trojung, which kind of means to almost dissolve your life, where they would really...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of form our satellite states, you know, people from the Soviet Union or from Poland or from Hungary, they always kind of said that there was the stereotype about East Germans being kind of the most hardcore communist state because there wasn't a layer underneath the state where people kind of just went on and did their own thing as there was there's a long tradition of that for example in Poland where they have this conspirazia kind of concept where basically you know society has another layer underneath the state and that just doesn't exist in Germany.”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think during the time there was certainly a kind of, I wouldn't say rumor, but certainly the story was going around that this was a very German thing, basically this compliance with the state, that if there's a rule, you kind of stick to it and that that was something that was so instilled in the German mindset already because of the previous forms of kind of autocratic regimes that people had gone through, particularly the 12 years of Nazism and then coming out of that into another form of dictatorship. There wasn't really a time in between where people were kind of used to a more democratic way of thinking. So there is a line of thinking that says that this was kind of instilled in generations of Germans already at that point without any break. I think also if you look more widely at German culture, there's a really strong adherence to rules and order and discipline. And that sounds like a bit of a cliche, but I think there's something to that. So yes, you're right. I mean, when I talk to people from other...”
2026-06-10 · Conversations with Tyler · Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source