Katja Hoyer: belief

Transcript context

…Put aside accent, if you meet someone today, do you have a good sense of whether they’re East German or West German? Some people, yes. I certainly realize when I go back now—I’ve lived in Britain for quite a long time now, and so I’ve got a bit of distance—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’ve never met before, because you recognize from your own experience growing up in the East what these people are basically like, what types exist, and how to talk to them. 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 regional dialects and accents. Whilst in the West, it’s a 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 well educated, well read, and so on. 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. I had a really broad Berlin accent when I grew up. Going to university somewhere else, quite far away—I studied in Jena, which is about two, three hours away from Berlin—suddenly, you’ve got these Bavarian professors who think it’s hilarious that you speak in a Berlin accent. That wouldn’t have happened to a West Berliner who might have been able to switch to high German more easily. These differences still exist. Growing up, my parents both worked. That was quite unusual in West Germany, still, that the mothers worked when they had young children. You grow up in a different way. You come home from school when you’re six, seven, cook your own food, do your own homework, go shopping, take over responsibility, that kind of thing, earlier. Culturally, there’s a difference still between East and West for those sorts of reasons as well. I could give you 100 other examples, but there are still differences between East and West Germans in those subtle ways. 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.…

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