Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why were relatively few Jews attracted to Weimar over the years? Again, pre-Nazi time, of course. Yes. When I lived in Jena, and then you travel abroad, and people say, “Where in Germany do you live?” There’s no other reference point. There are no urban centers, basically. You have to say what I just said, “Oh, about halfway between Munich and Hamburg.” Same with Frankfurt. There are no urban centers because the vast majority of German Jews lived in urban regions, particularly, of course, Berlin, but also Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich, and so on. There just isn’t a large urban conglomeration anywhere nearby. It just doesn’t have the traditional areas that German Jews were involved with, things like culture, banking, finances, that kind of thing, the higher middle class. The professions. There just wasn’t much along those lines in Weimar. The time that I’m looking at in my book, between the two world wars, you have about 100 Jews in a town of about 35,000 people. It’s a tiny population. They’re largely people like shopkeepers. One runs a department store, one family in Weimar, that kind of thing. It is a small town. That’s, I think, partially why that’s the case. If you’re trying to talk an American into visiting Weimar, say they don’t know German, they don’t have German heritage, is there a case you would make, or are they just not going to grasp what’s going on there?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.