Katja Hoyer: belief

Transcript context

…Say, at a deeper level, what do you think went wrong? German trains, they used to almost always be on time. Now they’re quite typically fairly late. Things Germany for a long time was very good at seem to be fraying. What’s the deepest structural model of what’s going on there? I think the biggest problem is complacency. I think people were so used to the idea of the system always going that way. When you look at the whatever are the 20 largest German companies today, they’re all 19th century. A lot of them are 19th-century companies like Siemens, Bosch, the big companies that you’d expect—chemical industry, electronic engineering, that kind of thing. Because these things survived two world wars and the complete moral and economic destruction that the Second World War brought, and came back, bouncing back afterwards with the economic miracle in West Germany, I think people thought that they would always just carry on running, no matter what you do with them. You don’t have to look after the system. You don’t have to reform it. You don’t have to modernize it. As a result of that, I think people didn’t really think, “How do we get this or how do we adapt this thing to the 21st century?” When you look at things like startups, say, in Germany, the rate is much, much lower there than it is in comparable countries because the innovation is lacking. People just thought, let’s run with the existing thing itself as well, without having the nimble-footedness that made the system great in the first place. That innovation of the 19th century, that zeal, I think has gone to a large extent. You’ve now lived in Britain for quite a while. How do you feel that shapes your interpretation of East German history and Germany in general?…

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