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

**Tyler Cowen** (0:04)
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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.

**Katja Hoyer** (0:50)
Thank you.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:50)
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?

**Katja Hoyer** (1:03)
Do you refer to the time afterwards or during the time that the GDR was going?

**Tyler Cowen** (1:08)
Well, both actually.
Poland really quite has rebelled against communist ideals, and it was pretty unpopular at the time. In, say, the 1970s and 80s, the day-to-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.

**Katja Hoyer** (1:30)
Yeah. 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 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 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 conspiration kind of concept where basically, you know, society has another layer underneath the state and that just doesn't exist in Germany.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:53)
Before the wall came down, how happy or unhappy do you think East Germans were?

**Katja Hoyer** (2:58)
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 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. So, 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 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 life, where they would really attack even your social structures, your relationships and everything. And so, you know, depending on who you are, Stasi, you get very different stories about what it was like to live there even right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

**Tyler Cowen** (4:03)
I was in East Berlin for a day, only a single day in 1984
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 35 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?