Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently. Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state. ” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are 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. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly. 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. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system. As you mentioned, there’s this cliché 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?…

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