Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedKatja Hoyer: belief
10 Jun 2026 Conversations with Tyler Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character
“I haven’t got the exact figure in my mind now, but there was a book that came out at the same time as mine by Dirk Oschmann called Der Osten: eine westdeutsche Erfindung—The East is an Invention of the West, in which he brings out some really quite stark figures.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Katja Hoyer
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 10 Jun 2026
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…There’s a common claim. I don’t know how true it is, but that many East Germans still today are somewhat resentful or upset because they feel pushed out of leadership positions in business, in culture, in media, often in politics. Do you think that’s true? It’s not just subjective. The figures point to that. I haven’t got the exact figure in my mind now, but there was a book that came out at the same time as mine by Dirk Oschmann called Der Osten: eine westdeutsche Erfindung—The East is an Invention of the West, in which he brings out some really quite stark figures. One of them is something like 1.4 percent or so of leadership positions across the board—politics, economics, everything—are occupied by East Germans. Given that East Germans make up about a fifth of the population, that’s astonishingly low. This isn’t just a subjective feeling that East Germans have. They are genuinely not part of the conversation in proportion to the amount of people that they provide in society. Why is that? The schooling was very good in East Germany, right?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.