Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Britain, she has written acclaimed histories of the German Empire, the GDR, and most recently the Weimar Republic. Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler's own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it's no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany's nudist culture, what Merkel's East German background did and didn't give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she'd rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany's current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she'd choose to live on, and much more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/katja-hoyer/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/pziNQu9Ltxs on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded March 30th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Katja https://x.com/hoyer_kat on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:05:34 - East German Artistic Creations 00:10:55 - Angela Merkel's East German Background 00:14:08 - East German Underrepresentation Today 00:17:02 - East Germans vs. West Germans 00:20:32 - Goethe and Weimar's Cultural Heritage 00:27:09 - What Weimar Knew About Buchenwald 00:31:10 - Why the Weimar Constitution Failed 00:35:21 - Prussia, Bavaria, and Where Nazism Took Root 00:38:23 - Rewriting the Treaty of Versailles 00:39:59 - Historical Antisemitism in Germany 00:42:27 - Hitler's Citizenship problem 00:45:14 - Weimar's Best Cultural Creations 00:47:02 - The Most Underrated German Thinker 00:49:07 - Improving Weimar 00:52:58 - Germany's Economic Malaise 00:55:38 - Living in Britain as a German Historian 01:00:49 - Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm chatting with Katja Hoyer. She just published a new and very interesting book called Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. She's well-known for her history of East Germany, called Beyond the Wall, and a broader book on earlier German history called Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire. Katja, welcome.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:50Tyler Cowen?

  Let me start with East Germany more generally. Why was it that communism seems to have made the Poles and Romanians more anti-communist, but it made the East Germans overall more communist?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Do you refer to the time afterwards or during the time that the GDR was kind of going?

• 1:08Tyler Cowen?

  Well, both, actually. Right? So Poland really quite has rebelled against communist ideals, and it was pretty unpopular at the time. In, say, the 1970s and 80s, the D-Day art had a reputation of being relatively loyal within the Soviet Empire. There's a lot of residual communist or sometimes fascist sympathies there today, so both.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  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 from other kind of former satellite states, you know, people from the Soviet Union or from Poland or from Hungary, they always kind of said that there was this 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 conspiracia kind of concept where basically, you know, society has another layer underneath the state and that just doesn't exist in Germany.

• 2:53Tyler Cowen?

  Before the wall came down, how happy or unhappy do you think East Germans were?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I think it completely depends who you ask. I mean, I interviewed lots of people for my book. I also was just about stillborn in East Germany myself in nineteen eighty five. 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. So, you know, people didn't starve. They didn't lack things as such. But the moment you tried to diverge from the path that was sort of, you know, dictated to you, that's when you really very quickly

• 3:37Speaker 01

  discovered that you did live in a dictatorship and there wasn't a way out of that. So the Stasi, the secret police in particular, had means of making your life absolute hell. And there was even a concept, they called this zerstreuung, which kind of means to almost dissolve your your life, where they would really attack even your social structures, your relationships and everything. And so, you know, depending on who you ask, basically, you get very different stories about what it was like to live there, even right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

• 4:03Tyler Cowen?

  I was in East Berlin for a day, only a single day in nineteen eighty four. And it seemed to me as a naive distant observer that everyone was incredibly stressed and fearful. No one would talk to me. Old ladies would yell at me in the street in German. There was nothing in the stores that I could spend my thirty five marks on. I had to change money. Was that a mistaken impression? What's the other side that I didn't see? Or is that correct and the other side is also correct?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think, yeah, 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

• 4:44Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, yes.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, venturing further. I feel that's always part of the story and people say it was so grey and there was always like concrete and nothing going on. I think, you know, 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 needed connections to try and get that. You needed to find a way of getting hold of things. But nonetheless, you know, people, you wouldn't have gone, say, to the Baltic Sea to see people on holiday or to, you know, 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

• 5:29Speaker 01

  life, with friendship, with colleagues and so on. So I think there is a bit more nuance than than that to it.

• 5:34Tyler Cowen?

  What was the best literary creation from East Germany?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I 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 seemed quite close to the state. That was quite critical. So if you take Christoph 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

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Of expressing that even though the censorship was in place. So I would say rather than reading one specific work, you know, 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. Krista Wolf being one of them, although she's a difficult read as well, it's not not something to sort of easily get through. Brigitte Rauman 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.

• 6:53Tyler Cowen?

  Oyvah Johnson is good. Speculations over Jacob.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  I haven't read that, to be honest, so I can't.

• 6:59Tyler Cowen?

  That's a great book, yeah. The movie Goodbye Lenin, it's very famous in the United States, is a portrayal of East Germany. How accurate is it?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  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, the just briefly for those who haven't seen it, the premise is 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 Wall hadn't actually fallen. And that is done in a kind of tragicomical 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, you know, 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

• 7:51Speaker 01

  of the era quite well. So I think it's it's done a decent job in encapsulating that.

• 7:55Tyler Cowen?

  Is it an accident that the painters Richter and Polke came from the East? Or were there undercurrents of creativity there, where it's in retrospect not at all surprising that they came from East Germany?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  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 artists. 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 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

• 8:49Speaker 01

  relatively freely, particularly in theatre, you kind of hear that a lot, that 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, of being surrounded by the constraints of that, by having to work around censorship, you have to find sort of quite clever ways of expressing yourself in a different way, I think, that people do in sort of 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.

• 9:19Tyler Cowen?

  You know, the nudity cult from East Germany, FKK, why is that so strong? And it catches on. But there's also this extreme prudishness to communism. How did that picture fit together?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a very good question. I've been pondering that myself for quite some time. I mean, the the whole like FKK, 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 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, that, you know, being together with others, that stripping of clothes means stripping of class boundaries, of politics, of of culture in a way, and everyone looks and is the same.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I think that's partially the appeal of that particularly there. And on top of that, I mean, it's just a pragmatic reason, but the Baltic Sea was in the east largely, most of it. And so kind of the nicest stretch of Germany's coastline, just in terms of developing any kind of beach culture really, was in the former GDR and therefore you you know, 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 So say for instance, the Englisher garden 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.

• 10:55Tyler Cowen?

  If you were to make the case that the rule of Angela Merkel was in some significant way influenced by her East German background, do you think that's true? Is there a case to be made there? And if so, what is it?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Well, she tried very hard for that not to be the case. So she was asked, you know, after her 16 years in power, why weren't you a more kind of East German type of Chancellor? Why weren't you overtly East German? And she initially always said, well, I want to be the Chancellor of all Germans. So if I'd been overtly kind of from the GDR, 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 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 and she tried to avoid that and was very conscious, I think, of not coming across like that.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  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 experience as an East German there and said, you know, people always described this as a kind of dark past that she had to shrug off or 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 experienced there, it's 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, you know, had sort of experienced the same system in her youth and 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

• 12:32Speaker 01

  outlook, she was a huge sort of fan of 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 the first female Chancellor and to this day, 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'd become. A part of the workforce in a less obviously feminist way and a more kind of obvious, you know, 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

• 13:16Speaker 01

  kind of her new colleagues in 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.

• 13:25Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think she was too self-consciously aware of the need to be accepted by a largely West German establishment?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  She was certainly aware of that. She talks about that in her biography as well and 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'd 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.

• 14:08Tyler Cowen?

  There's a common claim, I don't know how true it is, but that many East Germans still today are somewhat resentful or upset because they feel pushed out of leadership positions in business, in culture, in media, often in politics. Do you think that's true?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's not 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 Der Ostens eine Erfindung des 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 that East Germans have. They are genuinely not part of the conversation in proportion to the amount of people that they provide in society.

• 15:01Tyler Cowen?

  But why is that? The schooling was very good in East Germany, right?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I mean, take something like Networking, I mean, I didn't realise 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 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 and I only went to university in the early two thousands. 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.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  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 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 forty 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.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 conspiracy to keep East Germans out as such. I think it's just a question of those hidden structures underneath society still being there.

• 17:02Tyler Cowen?

  Put aside accent, if you meet someone today, do you have a good sense of whether they're East German or West German?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Some people, yes. I mean, I certainly realise 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 recognise from your own experience growing up in the East, you know, 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.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Whilst in the West, it's a sort of marker of your middle or 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, we 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 away, I studied in Jena, which is about two, three hours away from Berlin. And, you know, 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 to switch to high German more easily.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  So these differences still exist. Growing up, my parents both worked. That was quite unusual in West Germany still, that 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, do 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.

• 18:56Tyler Cowen?

  Why have so few mothers in West Germany worked over previous decades? If you compare it to the rest of Western Europe, it's still often a marked difference.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  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 in the South Catholic. And then suddenly, when you split Germany in the way that happened after the Second World War, you ended up with a fifty fifty 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 in quite a conservative way.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Uh. My mum said in the nineties, when she went on a kind of course, on a 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's five or six. That was me, the 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've 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 Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the in the seventies as more left leaning, more progressive leaders,

• 20:30Speaker 01

  who break up these structures a little bit.

• 20:32Tyler Cowen?

  Uh. Turning to Weimar, how much do West Germans today still care about Goethe and Weimar? So right after the wall comes down, it's a big thing to go visit the East, go around, see everything that was much harder to see before. Is that still alive? Is Goethe something in people's minds that's discussed or shared?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, hugely. I mean, Goethe, I would say, is still the national poet. I would say he's comparable to the position that Shakespeare has in in Britain. So, you know, he's he's that figure. He's he's the national poet, I would say, still. So you learn at school, you you have to recite his poetry, you analyze the ballads and and his work and Faust and and all the rest of it. So he is big on the literary horizon, I would say, of 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 Goethe in some way. And then if you're in Weimar, I spend a lot of Time there now researching for my latest book. You see the type of tourism is very different from other parts of Germany and that you do get

• 21:34Speaker 01

  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 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 Goethe. I mean, you've got Beethoven and Liszt and, you know.

• 22:00Tyler Cowen?

  You have Kronach, you have Bach.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:03Tyler Cowen?

  You have Nietzsche, right? You have Bauhaus, Marlene Edetrich.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 22:06Tyler Cowen?

  Was there.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is a very, very cultural place, yeah.

• 22:10Tyler Cowen?

  It's not even a hundred thousand people. It looks fine, but it's not especially beautiful. Why is it attracting all these people? These incredible thinkers and creators?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I mean, it is a lovely place. It is a very cosy 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 Jena, the University of Jena 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 fifteen minute or so train ride 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, who lived in Weimar. So it's had that kind of attraction of being nearby.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  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, you know, kind of representative buildings are being built and so on. And it becomes quite a prestigious place for that reason as well. And when Goethe moved there and then suddenly, you know, Goethe shot his fame as he did, he was. The theatre 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.

• 23:45Tyler Cowen?

  How much of a spa town was it?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  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 of 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 central, it's right in the heart of Germany. Again, whichever incarnation of Germany you look at, it's 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, and accumulatively, I would say that gave Weimar quite a

• 24:33Speaker 01

  a large standing on the sort of firmament of of German culture.

• 24:37Tyler Cowen?

  Why were relatively few Jews attracted to Weimar over the years? Again, pre-Nazi time, of course.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  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, there are no urban centres, basically. You have to say what I just said. Oh, about halfway between Munich and Hamburg, same with Frankfurt, you know, there are no urban centres 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 class, the professions.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  There just wasn't much along those lines in Weimar. So the time that I'm looking at in my book, Between the Two World Wars, you have about a hundred Jews in a town of about thirty five thousand people. So it's a tiny population. They're largely people like shopkeepers and one runs a department store, one family in in Weimar, that kind of thing. But, you know, it is a small town and that's, I think, partially why that's the case.

• 25:44Tyler Cowen?

  If you're trying to talk an American into visiting Weimar, say they don't know German, they don't have German heritage, is there a case you would make? Or are they just not going to grok what's going on there?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  I would definitely make a case. I mean, as I say, I just spent a whole like years 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 is there. But because Goethe's legacy lasts for so long and he gets sort of reinterpreted by every incarnation of kind 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. You know, 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.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  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. Uh, to see both kind of the ambitions 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.

• 27:09Tyler Cowen?

  During the Holocaust, how much were citizens of Weimar aware of what was going on at Buchenwald? They would have seen the smoke come up, right? There were all kinds of provisions and supply contracts for something.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  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, you know, and people still walked up there. My main guy, who I kind of use as a bit of a protagonist in the book, he's a shopkeeper. He has a stationary shop right in the town centre 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 his diary at one point, oh, I can't even go hiking properly anymore because of the stupid concentration camp. Because the, you know, 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

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Taken there, arrive at Weimar train station, very public place with a huge square in front of it. And they are gathered there and then put onto lorries to be taken up the hill to the camp. So people can see them rounded up. I found various testimonies where people said, you know, there was always this excitement when a new due transport, as people called it, arrived and they would all rush to the station to see that and just to observe it and to gawk 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 realise, obviously, that people were dying there and they saw the, initially it didn't have its own crematorium, so people were still sort of transported, the bodies were transported down the hill again and into the Weimar crematorium, which is in the town

• 28:50Speaker 01

  centre. So people did know that, that there was a large amount of deaths going on there as well. But I don't think that that meant kind of really visualising the absolute sheer horror, the torture, the imprisonment, that kind of stuff. Because Weimarer's 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 by 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 visualising that if you hadn't actually seen it.

• 29:23Tyler Cowen?

  And the people who worked there didn't talk, or they told a false story, or they were self-deceiving? What do you think?

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of them actually lived on site, so they had barracks built for the SS. And so they, 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, the Nazis 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 grey area between allowing some of this horror to dissipate

• 30:11Speaker 01

  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 demonstration or anything like that. So it's a bit of a grey area there in terms of, you know, the 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 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.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:10Tyler Cowen?

  Why did the Weimar constitution fail?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  How much time have I got?

• 31:16Tyler Cowen?

  Americans typically think it's that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. And that's one factor, but but what else is there?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  There 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 forty eight, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass Parliament and the 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 in the road as to where things could have done differently.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  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 nineteen nineteen to think that you could have this ultra democratic system without any guardrails. I mean, when you think how long it took, you know, the American founding. Fathers to sort of sit there and really work out every angle and what if we got a mad president, what to be put in there to try and protect against that? Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in nineteen nineteen. 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.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  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 the kind of stability years of the middle nineteen twenties. 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 a lot of people felt. They were kind of literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really. After nineteen nineteen, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  People were dying of diseases. There's the 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 the decisions. So the Weimar Republic actually dies in nineteen thirty three, 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.

• 34:09Tyler Cowen?

  And the army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, they still think that because of the nature of, you know, the Prussian system previously has often been said that Prussia isn't or 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, you know, newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don't just suddenly turn that off in nineteen nineteen. So they do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  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 putchers. And so, you know, they kind of depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a 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.

• 35:21Tyler Cowen?

  Now, as you mentioned, there's this cliche that Prussia has been especially militaristic. There's also the observation that Hitler often had his strongest support in South Germany. How does all that fit together? Both the North and the South are especially militaristic, or?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  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 know, you would have had some sort of lovely Catholic-dominated, more civilian-type Germany. I think that fails to acknowledge the fact that Prussia also was quite liberal. It's it's a real hub of social democracy, actually, in the Weimar Republic, which is the reason why the first time it gets abolished, it's 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.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  So it gets even more complicated than kind of northern Prussian militarism and then the South comes in with its 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 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 nineteen twenty-three, 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.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  There's separatism everywhere. So even when Hitler tries a coup in nineteen twenty three, 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 that is the answer, I suppose, to your question. It's all the parts contribute to the Nazis being able to to build their movement.

• 37:31Tyler Cowen?

  And what about the towns on the sea, you know, Koenigsberg, Grochstock, Weimar, smaller place. But were they more cosmopolitan or not really?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  No, I mean, certainly not the East Prussian ones, so like Koenigsberg 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 Germany, East Prussia, being split off 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's restoring kind of the old Germany as was before the First World War.

• 38:23Tyler Cowen?

  So if you had written the Treaty of Versailles, what would you have done differently?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  As always, 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's sort of, it's 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 the Article two, three, one, that gives it the war blame, basically, and says, it's your fault and your fault alone. This is 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

• 39:11Speaker 01

  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 Germany in 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 reparations 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, you know, 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.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  This compromise treaty, I think, is is part of the problem.

• 39:59Tyler Cowen?

  And why, in your view, does antisemitism so take off in Germany? Because earlier in history, sometimes Jews would go to Germany for a better life, or it was not obviously worse than many other places, though there was always plenty of antisemitism there. But how and why did it explode?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a very good question, because you do see it, you know, 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 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, you know, quota for Jewish Hungarians at their universities. So even then, there's still a degree of tolerance there. I think partially it's because antisemitism tends to always be a symptom of a society in crisis, kind of the way. The worse it gets, the worse antisemitism gets. So that's partially, I think, an explanation for that is that particularly because it's economic grievances.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  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 reasonably well for themselves. And so, you know, this kind of narrative of they're 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 antisemitism already latent in society, that it becomes Hitler's own obsession, people are working towards the Führer, as Ian Kershaw, the historian, puts it.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  You know, 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 antisemitic 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 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

• 42:25Speaker 01

  follow orders and go along with it.

• 42:27Tyler Cowen?

  To what extent did people think it was weird that you had a highly nationalistic movement, but it's led by an Austrian with a very bizarre accent?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  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 there 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 Brauenarm in, which is literally just the other side of the border. So he argued that actually his accent is Bavarian.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  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 Austria, there was a huge movement in the nineteen twenties. 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 nineteen twenties. Which is forbidden in the Treaty of Versailles, so they're not allowed to do that, but the movement exists.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  And so it's not an unnatural position for Hitler to say, well, 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 nineteenth 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 serving 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 to prove that they want to be part of the same system.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And you see the same with Kristallnacht with the pogroms against Jews in nineteen thirty eight. 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, you know, two very distinct states there, basically. That isn't really the case in the nineteen twenties where there's still arguments about some form of unification. Of Germany and Austria, which Hitler, of course, ends up doing.

• 45:14Tyler Cowen?

  To the extent you have fondness or nostalgia for cultural creations of the Weimar era, what is it for?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Um, I wouldn't say I'm personally sort of nostalgic in that sense. I mean, as a historian, I I always find it a bit, you know, it's it's my job to analyze what happened in the past rather than to crave something from there, if that makes sense, in an emotional sense.

• 45:33Tyler Cowen?

  But there's Rilke, there's Thomas Mann, there's incredible cinema.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  No, absolutely, yeah.

• 45:37Tyler Cowen?

  Amazing music.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  And I do appreciate that, and especially the creativity of the nineteen twenties. I mean, there's something about the utter devastation of the First World War that creates this absolute creativity and creative freedom that you see and the and the willingness to experiment in the nineteen twenties. I mean, when you look at films like Metropolis or M or, you know, they're they're so innovative. The the whole idea of the kind of vampire movie in the nineteen twenties with Nosferatu, that's a a kind of German creation because they're looking at these really dark, twisted horror themes as well. So I think that that's certainly something about the nineteen twenties that's incredibly precious, this kind of willingness to just break the boundaries, try again, start from scratch.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  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 it wiped the slate clean and you could start again. And people, because of hyperinflation and all those things, people also felt they had nothing to lose. You know, there wasn't like 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 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, yeah, absolutely dazzling cultural scene that you see in the nineteen twenties, particularly in Berlin, of course.

• 47:03Tyler Cowen?

  Who is the great underrated German thinker or writer?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  In the nineteen twenties?

• 47:07Tyler Cowen?

  Well, anytime.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Oh, an underrated one. Now I have to really think, because I, rather than coming up with the kind of obvious answers.

• 47:14Tyler Cowen?

  For me, it's von Humboldt, but I'm an American classical liberal, right? So.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I wouldn't really put him as underrated. I mean, he is, 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, the Humboldt brothers.

• 47:28Tyler Cowen?

  But he's identified with building up state education, right? And in that sense, he's underrated because he did other important things.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  No, that's very true. And the the impact, certainly the long term impact perhaps, isn't quite as well understood. But of course, he is, he does feature large in Germany and you do have things like named after him and and you know, people sort of referring to him in that essential way as part of the 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 gonna pick someone from there. I think Gustav Streßemann, who was the Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic. And as such, you know, he was more than just a politician. He 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

• 48:15Speaker 01

  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, you know, Germany's position in international treaties and so on. He had an idea as to how to take the economy forward. 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

• 49:00Speaker 01

  about it? Perhaps makes him underrated because he never got the opportunity to. And we might be living in a completely different world today if he had survived.

• 49:08Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say you're mayor of Weimar today. You have more or less absolute power. How would you improve the city? What would you do? What should they be doing better?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  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 it's harbored and fostered,

• 49:59Speaker 01

  but actually, you know, a more kind of nuanced picture across the board. So trying to to show the people who come there, basically Weimar across the ages, rather than just focusing on this kind of glory days, on the, on the golden 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, it shows the world a very, very narrow image of itself, namely, you know, that of the so-called classical era when Mungut and Schiller lived and worked there.

• 50:32Tyler Cowen?

  AfD is relatively weak there, is that correct, compared to the rest of East Germany?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Comparatively, but it's still there and people also vote for the far-lefti LINKE 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 know, you have, 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, so does Thuringia.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  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 C conservative kind of culture there that, that sets it out a little bit from the rest of the region there. So the numbers are a little bit lower.

• 51:36Tyler Cowen?

  And putting aside both tourists and student populations, who are the immigrants who move into Weimar?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  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 in lots of other places.

• 52:10Tyler Cowen?

  What's the biggest issue in purely local politics there? Not immigration, not off day, not European Union.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  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 activities. 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.

• 52:58Tyler Cowen?

  Now, there's a common sense that the German, you know, Mittelstand, you would call it, is disappearing, that there's more competition from China. In general, employment in manufacturing is going down. A lot of German sectors such as automobiles don't seem well poised to do well over the next 10 years. How pessimistic are you about that?

• 53:17Speaker 01

  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 the 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, then there isn't an obvious solution. This isn't a 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

• 53:56Speaker 01

  that the election results that are coming in thick and fast now and 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.

• 54:12Tyler Cowen?

  But say at a deeper level, what do you think went wrong? So German trains, they used to almost always be on time. Now they're quite typically fairly late, things Germany for a long time was very, very good at seemed to be fraying. What's the deepest structural model of what's going on there?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I think my 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

• 55:10Speaker 01

  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 innovation is lacking. People just thought, you know, let's let's run with the existing thing itself as 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.

• 55:38Tyler Cowen?

  You've now lived in Britain for quite a while. How do you feel that shapes your interpretation of East German history and Germany in general?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  I always find it helps because you sort of sit outside. I sometimes joke that I live in exile, so you can kind of, you know, 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,

• 56:27Speaker 01

  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 than, 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 said, well, this is just East Germans not understanding how democracy works. Oh, 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,

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I feel, living outside of Germany, but still close enough and having, you know, 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.

• 57:25Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say someone, you know, pays you a good stipend, so you can live where you want. Put aside work commitments, family commitments. Where in Germany would you actually want to live? That was what you had to do to get the stipend. Where would you pick?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Well, if I had to live in Germany, which I would really rather avoid, so I would, 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 in 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, a very different culture compared to kind of the northern half. So definitely in the north. And I always feel more comfortable the further north I get. So I like being in

• 58:20Speaker 01

  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 polite, cautious way of being rather than the sort of brash culture that is associated with other parts of Germany. So I'd probably end up somewhere along the coast.

• 58:39Tyler Cowen?

  Hamburg, to me, is the most British part of Germany, of course.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, people say that. Yeah, they say it's the most British city in Germany. So that's, that's maybe part of the reason.

• 58:47Tyler Cowen?

  For you on the map, where does North Germany stop and South Germany begin?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Well, people joke that there's a Weißforst Äquator, a sausage equator, basically south of which they eat this white sausage that is famous at the Oktoberfest. 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 Main, 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 centre of Germany, it becomes more mountainous, which is also

• 59:32Speaker 01

  associated with different, you know, types of cultures. It's that kind of, that 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, yeah, probably the top half to two thirds. It's a bit larger than half, I would say, in the top.

• 59:52Tyler Cowen?

  For my final question, just to plug your book again, Katja Hoyer, Weimar, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. Finally, what will you do next?

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  I haven't really quite decided yet. I think I want to really delve down into one particular story or case or individual, 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 happen 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 guarded still about that. It's just that 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, yeah, release it.

• 1:00:45Tyler Cowen?

  Great. Katja Hoyer, thank you very much.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:00:51Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan, and the show is @CowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.