Katja Hoyer: belief

Transcript context

…If you had written the Treaty of Versailles, what would you have done differently? As always, in hindsight, I think it’s always a bit much to sit there as a kind of armchair politician and say, “This is what I would have done differently.” I think 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 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. Even Social Democrats find that unfair. That, I think, builds grievance. 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. 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 Central Europe, or go the other way and rebuild from the beginning, as was the strategy after the Second World War. This is interesting. The lesson that they draw from that is after the Second World War, there is no reparation. Some, as such, are slapped onto Germany. They basically say, let’s just take out what’s actually there and then start rebuilding Germany because of the Cold War. 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. I would say a decision just had to be made either way. This compromise treaty, I think, is part of the problem. 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. How and why did it explode?…

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