Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Both, actually. Poland really had rebelled against communist ideals, and it was pretty unpopular at the time. In, say, the 1970s and ’80s, the DDR had a reputation of being relatively loyal within the Soviet Empire. There’s a lot of residual communist or sometimes fascist sympathies there today, so both. Yes. I think during the time there was certainly, I wouldn’t say rumor, but certainly the story was going around that this was a very German thing. Basically, this compliance with the state that if there’s a rule, you stick to it. That was something that was so instilled in the German mindset already because of the previous forms of autocratic regimes that people had gone through, particularly the 12 years of Nazism, and then coming out of that into another form of dictatorship. There wasn’t really a time in between where people were used to a more democratic way of thinking. There is a line of thinking that says that this was instilled in generations of Germans already at that point, without any break. I think also if you look more widely at German culture, there’s a really strong adherence to rules and order and discipline. That sounds like a bit of a cliché, but I think there’s something to that. Yes, you’re right. When I talk to people from other former satellite states, people from the Soviet Union or from Poland or from Hungary, they always said that there was the stereotype about East Germans being the most hardcore communist state, because there wasn’t a layer underneath the state where people just went on and did their own thing. There’s a long tradition of that, for example, in Poland, where they have this conspiratia concept, where basically society has another layer underneath the state, and that just doesn’t exist in Germany. Before the Wall came down, how happy or unhappy do you think East Germans were?…

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