Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…If you were to make the case that the rule of Angela Merkel was in some significant way influenced by her East German background, do you think that’s true? Is there a case to be made there? If so, what is it? She tried very hard for that not to be the case. She was asked after her 16 years in power, why weren’t you a more East German type of chancellor? Why weren’t you overtly East German? She initially always said, “Well, I want to be the chancellor of all Germans. If I’d been overtly from the GDR, I would have lost people in Bavaria and other parts of Germany who would have felt culturally alienated by that.” She also admitted later on, after she retired, that there was an element there of people rolling their eyes and saying, “Why do you have to talk about the East,” or, “Why do you have to start talking about the East all the time?” She tried to avoid that and was very conscious, I think, of not coming across like that. There was one speech, which I mentioned in the book as well, where, in 2021, it was her last big speech in office. She actually talked about her experiences in East Germany there and said people always described this as a dark past that she had to shrug off or get rid of, in a way, her time in the GDR. She bristled against that and said, “Look, this was 35 years of my life. I had experience there. It’s literally half of my life that you’re expecting me to forget or to somehow overcome.” I think it was there. She always also claimed that this made it easier for her to deal with the Russians because she spoke Russian and had experienced the same system in her youth and knew what it was like. There was always an argument there that she said, balancing out her very transatlantic outlook. She was a huge fan of German-American relations as well. Balancing that out with an eastern outlook, she said, was easier for her because of her background. Lastly, if I may, I think the fact that she was the first female chancellor and to this date, the only one, that was easier for her because she’d already got used to working in a way. In East Germany, over 90 percent of women were in full-time employment, and they’d become a part of the workforce in a less obviously feminist way and a more obvious, normal, natural way. Dealing with men in your work area, I think, was a more normal thing in the East than it was in the West at this point. For her to go into the still quite stuffy male environment in Bonn, in the West German capital, and deal with her new colleagues in politics, I think, was easier for her than it would have been for a woman for whom that hadn’t been already a normal way of working. Do you think she was too self-consciously aware of the need to be accepted by a largely West German establishment?…

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