Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. Yes. I think people often forget that, but it was a really, really, really conservative society. That’s partially, I think, because Germany is a Protestant and Catholic country because of the way that the Reformation worked out. You got the northern part being Protestant largely, and the South Catholic. Then, suddenly, when you split Germany in the way that happened after the Second World War, you ended up with a 50-50 ratio of Catholics to Protestants in West Germany. That’s much higher than any other Germany that’s ever existed in terms of the Catholic proportion. They were socially more conservative and placed emphasis on things like family values, raising children at home in quite a conservative way. My mom said in the ’90s when she went on a further education course in the West, and then she said in the evening, “I just got to call home quickly and make sure that my children are okay.” They said, “Well, how old are they?” She said, “Well, one of them is a baby. The other one’s five or six.” That was me, the five, six-year-old. There were these old West German professors, and they all looked at her aghast, like, why are you here, hundreds of miles away from home, when you’ve got two small children at home? What are you like?” This difference there, I think, partially comes out of this West German society being socially very conservative for a long time and led by conservative leaders for most of their time as well, until you get Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the ’70s as more left-leaning, more progressive leaders who break up these structures a little bit. Turning to Weimar, how much do West Germans today still care about Goethe and Weimar? 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?…

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