Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is that? The schooling was very good in East Germany, right? Yes. Take something like networking. I didn’t realize that much later. As I say, I was a child when the Berlin Wall fell. Then I went to university in the former East. All of my professors were West German because, by that point, they’d purged the entire academic class, if you will. I only went to university in the early 2000s. You go there, and they bring their own staff with them. They have a certain way of talking to students. They expect you to know these things when you start networking yourself. I didn’t even have a concept of networking in my mind because that type of careerism, of pushing, of ambition just didn’t exist in the culture that I grew up in. You were just told what to do, really, and then climbing a certain ladder that was provided for you, but you had no idea how to do these things yourself. That means that things like scholarships, you have no idea how they work. You don’t really sound and look like the people that you’re trying to impress. Effectively, other people get given the positions that you didn’t even know vie or compete for. I think that’s a more subtle way of thinking about it. The other thing I would say is because of over 40 years of socialism, you have a very working-class-oriented culture. People don’t have wealth built up. All of these figures exist as well. Basically, East Germans are a lot less economically secure. As a result of that, you take fewer risks as well. If you’re sitting there wondering, should I do a PhD or not, for example, and you think that’s three years of not really having an income, I don’t really know how to do that, and you haven’t got a family that can back you up, you haven’t got a house to live in, no matter what, because it doesn’t belong to you—those kinds of things also mean that people tend to take the safe option and go with the easy way forward with earning an income if there’s any doubt over that. All of these things, I think class differences and so on—I don’t think people were aware of what that would do to society. I don’t think there’s a deliberate conspiracy to keep East Germans out as such. I think it’s just a question of those hidden structures underneath society still being there. Put aside accent, if you meet someone today, do you have a good sense of whether they’re East German or West German?…

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