Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Before the Wall came down, how happy or unhappy do you think East Germans were? I think it completely depends who you ask. I interviewed lots of people for my book. I also was just about born in East Germany myself in 1985. Talking to family members, to friends over the years. I think so long as you were happy to live a reasonably quiet, humble life, as it were—you were happy and content to have your job, go on holiday, get married, live your family life—you did have a reasonable quality of life because just the living standards were higher than in all of the other communist states. People didn’t starve. They didn’t lack things as such. The moment you tried to diverge from the path that was dictated to you, that’s when you really, very quickly discovered that you did live in a dictatorship and there wasn’t a way out of that. The Stasi, the secret police in particular, had means of making your life absolute hell. There was even a concept they called this Zersetzung, which means to almost dissolve your life, where they would really attack even your social structures, your relationships, and everything. Depending on who you ask, basically, you get very different stories about what it was like to live there, even right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was in East Berlin for a day, only a single day in 1984. It seemed to me, as a naive distant observer, that everyone was incredibly stressed and fearful. No one would talk to me. Old ladies would yell at me in the street in German. There was nothing in the stores that I could spend my 35 marks on. I had to change money. Was that a mistaken impression? What’s the other side that I didn’t see, or is that correct, and the other side is also correct?…

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