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

20:32Tyler Cowen: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? Oh, yes, usually. I mean Goethe I would say is still the national poet I would say is comparable to the position that Shakespeare has in Britain so you know he's that figure he's the national poet I would say still so you learn at school you have to recite his poetry you analyze the ballads and his work and Faust and all the rest of it so he is big on the literary horizon I would say of all Germans everywhere because you do encounter him at school I find it very hard to imagine that anyone in Germany goes to their school education without being exposed to good in some way.

21:25And 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 in that you do get a lot of people from West Germany there. You can hear different accents. You can hear people from Bavaria and Swabia and from the Rhine region. So there is that tourism, I think similar to Dresden as well, which has got a similar kind of standing 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.

21:56I mean, you've got Beethoven and Liszt and, you know, Nietzsche. You have Kronach, you have Bach, you have Nietzsche, right?

22:04Tyler Cowen:You have Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich. Absolutely. Milan was there. Yeah, it is a very, very cultural place. It's not even 100 ,000 people. It looks fine, but it's not especially beautiful. Why is it at attracting all these people, these incredible thinkers and creators? I mean, it is a lovely place. It is a very cozy little... Imagine your typical German, idyllic German city, and it's pretty much there. It has got the timber-framed houses and the villas and the cobbled streets and things. But you're right, that doesn't explain why it's had this kind of elevated position in German culture. I mean, partially it is because Jena, the University of Jena, where I studied as well, is one of the oldest German universities.

22:43And that's not far from there that's sort of almost next door in jena itself which is about a 15 minute or so train 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 in weimar so it's it's had that kind of attraction of being nearby and then it was also a royal residence of the dukes basically in different incarnations of it because of Germany's fragmented history, but basically it has a glossed 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.

23:22And 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 to 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 gute shrine. It sort of elevated that even

23:44Tyler Cowen:further, that status. How much of a spa town was it? 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 year 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, were 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.

24:15Again, whichever incarnation of Germany you look at, it always ends up being pretty much right in the middle. It's about halfway between Munich and Hamburg. So for that reason alone, it ended up being kind of quite a popular place for people to go to, to visit, to meet up. And accumulatively, I would say that gave Weimar quite a large standing on the sort of firmament of German culture.

24:37Tyler Cowen:Why were relatively few Jews attracted to Weimar over the years? Again, pre-Nazi time, of course. 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 centers, basically. You have to say what I just said. About halfway between Munich and Hamburg, same with Frankfurt. There are no urban centers. and because the vast majority of German Jews lived in urban regions, particularly, of course, Berlin, but also Frankfurt and Hamburg, Munich and so on. And there just isn't a large urban conglomeration anywhere nearby.

25:11So 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. 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 100 Jews in a town of about 35 ,000 people. So it's a tiny population. They're largely people like shopkeepers. And one runs a department store, one family 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? I would definitely make a case. I mean, as I say, I just spent a whole 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 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 Germany that comes afterwards.

26:25Even today still, he's kind of more seen as a humanist, as 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. So in terms of the 20th century and understanding that, there's a very good case. This is why I chose to place my book there as well. There's a very good case of going to Weimar to see both kind of the 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.

27:00And 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. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. this is one of the questions that really occupied my mind whilst 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 center. And he still goes up the hill where the concentration camp is to go hiking and sledging because it was a popular kind of forest area before the concentration camp was put there.

27:48And 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 taken there arrive at weimar train station very public place with a huge square in front of it and they're gathered there and then put onto lorries to be taken up the hill to the camp so people can see them rounded up i found various testimonies where people said you know there was always this excitement when a new Jew transport, as people called it, arrived.

28:24And they would all rush to the station to see that and just to observe it and to gawp effectively. So people did know what it was and what it did. I don't think that meant they understood the actual horrors that were going on there. They did realize, obviously, that people were dying there. And they saw the initially didn't have its own crematorium. So people were still sort of transported, the bodies were transported down the hill again and into the Weimar crematorium, which is in the town center. 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 visualizing the absolute cheer horror, the torture, the imprisonment, that kind of stuff.

29:02Because Weimarers 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 visualizing 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? 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.

30:02So they would sort of tidy up the camp. They'd only show them certain bits of it. So I think it was always a gray area between allowing some of this horror to dissipate so that it would work as terror and it would work in subduing the population, but never enough to really create some sort of public outrage or demonstration or anything like that. So it's a bit of a grey area there in terms of 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, that the Weimar Town Council sits down and decides to buy a new crematorium.

30:46And they're discussing why the old one is broken with the engineers. And they tell them it's because the bodies are unusually emaciated. It's because it's not supposed to function at the high rate that you're using it. So they're very well aware of what they're discussing there. And these are Weimar civilian politicians who are basically sitting in the town council deciding to buy a new crematorium oven because the old one can't cope with the amount of bodies that they're putting through it.

31:10Tyler Cowen:Why did the Weimar Constitution fail? How much time have I got? 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 what else is there? There are plenty of factors, I think. I mean, some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. And another one that's often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the Constitution that allowed the president to bypass Parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.

31:47But 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. And I don't think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. And I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra democratic system without any guardrails.

32:21guardrails. 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 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place which allows kind of extremists to hijack it. So that is part of the reason. I think the other kind of group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born is basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly.

32:55That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. But all of that is propped up by American money, even the kind of stability years of the middle 1920s. And the moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again. I mean, the subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I'm trying to hint at the fact that that's how a lot of people felt. They were kind of literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food.

33:32People 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 1933, years before Hitler comes into power as a democracy. And he takes over a system, I think, that's already given up on being a democracy, even at that point.

34:03But as I say, I could talk about this for two days instead of be lining up factors.

34:07Tyler Cowen:So it is complex. And the army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently. Yeah, I mean, they still think that because of the nature of, you know, the Prussian system previously, it's 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 newspaper output and everything else.

34:46Again, they don't just suddenly turn that off in 1919. So they do try and make their influence heard ongoingly. And then the Young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing putschers. 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 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, or especially militaristic? Yeah, I mean, coming from that part of Germany myself, that was sort of the Prussian heartlands I grew up just outside of Berlin, that often annoys me that people still sort of think, well, if only Prussia hadn't been there, then you would have had some sort of lovely Catholic-dominated, more civilian-type Germany. I think that fails to acknowledge the fact that Prussia also was quite liberal.

35:58it'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 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 splinter system that it allows the Nazis to build little islands of support and the central state can't do very much about that.

36:31So if the Bavarian state decides that actually they want to allow, say, the Nazi party to reform after Hitler comes out of prison and they want to allow him to speak again, or even in 1923, it's partially the Bavarian elites who are plotting against the central state in Berlin as well, then the authority is just not there from Berlin to try and impose anything else on Bavaria. There's separatism everywhere. So even when Hitler tries a coup in 1923 and then everywhere the Nazi party gets banned, individual states and regions slowly start lifting those bans again and the central government can't do much about that.

37:08And 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. All the parts contribute to the Nazis being able to build their movement.

37:31Tyler Cowen:And what about the towns on the sea? You know, Königsberg, Rostock, Wismar, smaller place. But were they more cosmopolitan or not really? No, I mean, certainly not the East Prussian ones. So like Königsberg 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.

38:03And 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 bloc 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? It's always, in hindsight, I think it's always a bit much to sit there as a kind of armchair politician and say, you know, this is what I would have done differently. I think it sort of is the worst of both worlds. It's harsh enough to give Germany grievance to make it feel like it's punished alone for the first world war, particularly the article 231 that gives it the war blame, basically, and says, it's your fault and your fault alone. This is something that unites bizarrely all of these fractured political movements in Germany.

38:59So even Social Democrats find that unfair. And so that, I think, builds grievance. But on the other side, it wasn't harsh enough to subdue Germany. it wasn't split up it was still a whole state it was still powerful enough to do something with that grievance so i think in a way it would have made more sense to go either way or the other either make it even harsher and basically create a weak 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 reparation some as such that is slapped onto germany they basically just say let's just take out what's actually there, and then start rebuilding Germany because of the Cold War.

39:42But this means that there's now this quite close relationship between Western parts of Germany and the US and Britain and France in particular, because they very quickly began to see them as allies. So I would say a decision just had to be made either way. This compromise treaty, I think, is part of the problem.

39:59Tyler Cowen:And why, in your view, does anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semitism there. But how and why did it explode? 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 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.

40:41So even then, there's still a degree of tolerance there. I think partially it's because anti-Semitism tends to always be a symptom of a society in crisis, kind of the worse it gets, the worse anti-Semitism gets. So that's partially, I think, an explanation for that is that particularly because it's economic grievances. People then look for scapegoats for the Great Depression, but also hyperinflation. And they see that the Jewish Germans who are largely in middle class and upper class kind of social environments, that they're still doing 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.

41:21And then there's also, I mean, a journalist put it quite well recently on a different reason, but he said to be German means to walk down every cul-de-sac to the end. And so, you know, the idea that there's anti-Semitism already latent in society, this becomes Hitler's own obsession. People are working towards the Fuhrer, as Ian Kershaw, the historian, put it. 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 anti-semitic grievances and prejudices in your head or you talk about it in the pub somebody will say why don't we do something about it because that's what Hitler wants and then they need to be heard amongst the field of competitors and they find the most radical and the most 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.

42:20It's bit by bit the escalation that you see is due to the radicalism of the Nazi movement and the way that people follow orders and go along with it.

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? Yeah, I mean, that is certainly an aspect of this. I describe that a bit in my book as well, because Hitler didn't even have citizenship, German citizenship. When he wanted to become president in 1932, he stood for the election then against Hindenburg. He actually needed to become a German citizen very quickly so that he could even exercise his passive electoral rights. And that was a problem. So all the Nazi leaders were falling over themselves to try and find a way of giving him citizenship, but certainly not something that's automatically there.

43:02He 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 Braunauheim, which is literally just the other side of the border. So he argued that actually his accent as Bavarian. And it does have that, you know, because it is so close to the German borders. It's that sort of, you know, being Catholic, being Alpine, being from that region. It's not an obvious distinction, I would say, in the way that people think of it now. And then people also forget that in Austria, there was a huge movement in the 1920s, because Austria was basically after the First World War, it 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.

43:46And so there's a huge movement, even from left-leaning and progressive Austrians, towards a unification process with Germany in the 1920s, which is forbidden in the Treaty of Versailles, so they're not allowed to do that, but the movement exists. And so it's not an unnatural position for Hitler to say, or he's certainly not alone in that, for Hitler to say, actually, I'm German. We're all Germans because we're Austrians and we should be part of this. Look at the 19th century when there were debates about a greater Germany that included Austria at that point. So he's harking back to that and he's saying, actually, we shouldn't be in two separate countries.

44:18And 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. And you see the same with Kristallnacht, with the pogroms against Jews in 1938, they take a much more violent turn in Austria, where in Germany is mostly shops and synagogues and so on that are being attacked, although people also die and get murdered and arrested.

44:52But in Austria, it's very much targeted at the people themselves, at Jews, because of this kind of emotionality of wanting to prove that you're part of this. So it's not as odd as it looks today when we're looking at two very distinct states there, basically, that isn't really the case in the 1920s, where there's still arguments about some form of unification of Germany and Austria, which Hitler, of course, ends up doing.

45:14Tyler Cowen:To the extent you have fondness or nostalgia for cultural creations of the Weimar era, what is it for? I wouldn't say I'm personally sort of nostalgic in that sense. I mean, as a historian, I always find it a bit, you know, it's my job to analyze what happened in the past rather than to crave something from there, if that makes sense, in an emotional sense. But there's Rilke, there's Thomas Mann, there's incredible cinema. No, absolutely, yeah. Amazing music. And I do appreciate that and especially the creativity of the 1920s. I mean, there's something about the utter devastation of the First World War that creates this absolute creativity and creative freedom that you see in the willingness to experiment in the 1920s.

45:55I mean, when you look at films like Metropolis or M, they're so innovative. The whole idea of the kind of vampire movie in the 1920s with Nosferatu, that's a kind of German creation because they're looking at these really dark, twisted horror themes as well. So I think that that's certainly something about the 1920s that's incredibly precious, this kind of willingness to just break the boundaries, try again, start from scratch. because the world that people had come from and that they knew had gone. They knew that the First World War was an absolute kind of turning point. It was really, it wiped the slate clean and you could start again.

46:31And 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 try things because of this absolute kind of dizzying state where there are no certainties, where there's nothing to cling on to. So that's unique, I would say, to that time period. And it created this absolutely dazzling cultural scene that you see in the 1920s, particularly in Berlin, of course.

47:02Tyler Cowen:Who is the great underrated German thinker or writer? In the 1920s? Well, any time. Oh, an underrated one, now I have to really think, because rather than coming up with the kind of obvious answers. For me, it's von Humboldt, but I'm an American classical liberal, right? Right. So, 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 Thunberg brothers. But he's identified with building up state education, right? And in that sense, he's underrated because he did other important things.

47:35No, 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 larger 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 kind of central strand of German culture that comes through.

47:52Tyler Cowen:Well, because my brain's kind of permanently stuck in the 19th and 20th century, I'm going to pick someone from there. I think Gustav Stresemann, 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 idea as to where he would take Germany, how he would tackle the problems. And I think he got a long way along that in the 1920s. He was really rehabilitating Germany in the world. He was presenting an image of a country that was recovering, restoring its kind of morality, and people believed him. I mean, he did rebuild, you know, Germany's position in international treaties and so on.

48:27He 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 about it perhaps makes him underrated because he never got the opportunity to.

49:04And he might be living in a completely different world today if he had survived.

49:07Tyler 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? 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 but actually you know a more kind of nuanced picture across the board.

50:03So trying to show the people who come there basically Weimar across the ages rather than just focusing on this kind of glory days on the 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 shows the world a very, very narrow image of itself, namely, you know, that of the so-called classical era when Minguta and Schiller lived and worked there.

50:32Tyler Cowen:RF Day is relatively weak there, is that correct, compared to the rest of East Germany? Comparatively, but it's still there. And people also vote for the far-lefty linker in higher numbers as well. So it's still a place where, if you look at it across the board, where the numbers are still relatively high, but not as high as the rest of the state of Thuringia around them. I think that's because it's always been socially different from its environment. So Thuringia itself is quite like working class, lower middle class. It's got lots of small businesses. Things like garden gnomes, for example, famously come from there.

51:06You know, you have these kind of small craft industries. That means that people tend to go with whatever the working classes are doing and they're currently voting for AFD. So does Thuringia. 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 sea conservative kind of culture there 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? 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 attract 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 AFD, not the European Union, but local? I mean, most people, when I go there and speak to people, most people are very concerned with the state of the economy and with the interference they feel is coming from the state without it being helpful. So they feel that it's too much regulation. You know, it's still a place that's dominated by lots of kind of small independent places like, you know, little shops and that kind of thing. And people feel that their own personal kind of progress is being hampered by the way that the state, Berlin in particular, which seems very far away from Weimar, is setting the parameters for their economic activity.

52:51So 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: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 and 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? I mean, it would be odd not to be pessimistic because all the experts are telling us to be pessimistic, as do the people in the field. And you do see entire industries breaking away at the moment. I mean, there's a huge issue, particularly with energy that isn't being addressed and isn't being resolved.

53:32So 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 the kind of temporary crisis that you just have to sit out and hope that it'll go away. But actually, the structural things that are wrong with the German economy don't seem to be going anywhere. So I'm quite pessimistic at this point, but I'm hopeful that the election results that are coming in thick and fast now, and you begin to really see that in politicians, that it's beginning to sink in, just how pessimistic other people are and how fed up they are, that this is now hopefully leading to some reforms.

54:10And there's certainly talk of that at the moment in Germany. But say at a deeper level, what do you think went wrong?

54:15Tyler Cowen: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? I think the biggest problem is complacency. I think people were so used to the idea of the system always going that way. When you look at whatever is 20 largest German companies today, they're all 19th century. 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.

54:49and because these things survived like two world wars and the complete moral and economic destruction that the second world war brought and came back bouncing back afterwards with the economic miracle in west germany i think people thought that they would always just carry on running no matter what you do with them you don't have to look after the system you don't have to reform it you don't have to modernize it as a result of that i think people didn't really think how do we get this or how do we adapt this thing to the 21st century? So when you look at things like startups, say, in Germany, the rate is much, much lower there than it is in comparable countries because the innovation is lacking.

55:24People just thought, you know, let's run with the existing thing itself does well, without having the kind of nimble footedness that made the system great in the first place. That innovation of the 19th century, that zeal, I think has gone to a large extent.

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? 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.

56:09It tends to not look across its own borders. it tends to kind of interpret its issues within its own ecosystem and thereby doesn't see that other countries either have the same problems and have dealt with them in some way that might actually be useful to look at or that the problem that they have is distinctly German. So say for example when the AFD began to rise the far-right party in Germany people immediately said oh this is an East German problem because it's larger in the East and much larger in the East than it is in the West and so they ignored it for a long time they basically looked at that and said well this is just East Germans not understanding how democracy works.

56:43Oh, well, they're only a fifth of the population, doesn't matter. Had they looked a little bit further, they could have seen what's going on in France, in Britain, in Eastern Europe, in the US and in other places. They could have seen that actually the patterns, they are not dissimilar. You have basically a working class population that is deeply unhappy about things and is trying to find a way of expressing that. And they could have addressed it perhaps a little bit earlier and actually taken it seriously. And that I feel living outside of Germany, but still close enough and having, you know, relatives and friends and people there.

57:16And 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? Well, if I had to live in Germany, which I would really rather avoid, so I'm very happy in Britain, that would be my first choice. But if I had to live in Germany, it would definitely be somewhere northern rather than in the south, because that is the second people always think of in Germany, when they think of Germany 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 Hamburg for example I like being by the coast people are very calm and often a bit aloof as well, but I quite like that sort of a very calm, to me, quite sort of polite, cautious way of being rather than the sort of brash culture that is associated with other parts of Germany.

58:36Tyler Cowen:So I'd probably end up somewhere along the coast. Hamburg, to me, is the most British part of Germany, of course. Yeah, people say that. Yeah, they say it's the most British city in Germany. So that's maybe part of the reason. For you on the map, where does North Germany stop and South Germany begin? Well, people joke that there's a Weisswurst equator, 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.

59:08And 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 center of Germany, it becomes more mountainous, which is also associated with different types of cultures. It's that kind of foresty mountainous image that people have of Germany that starts about halfway down and then becomes more pronounced the further south you get until you get to the Alps as well.

59:45So I would say, yeah, probably the top half to two thirds is 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 Hoyard, Weimard, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. Finally, what will you do next? 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 release it.

1:00:46Great.

1:00:46Tyler Cowen:Katja Hoyer, thank you very much. 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 at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.