Katja Hoyer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is it an accident that the painters Richter and Polke came from the East, or were there undercurrents of creativity there, where it’s, in retrospect, not at all surprising that they came from East Germany? No, I don’t think it is surprising. You do have a system where, when you speak to artists, again, you get very different views. Some people say it was absolutely oppressive, and they had to get out. That’s often creatives who will tell you that because by definition, they were the most exposed trying to do their own thing to censorship and to state oppression. At the same time, the state also spent a lot of money on arts and literature, culture, and film, and things like that. There were also artists who said, that there was a degree of freedom in being given the means to do these things, to not have to worry about the day-to-day financial concerns that artists are often exposed to. That in itself set the economic parameters for some people to work relatively freely, particularly in theater. You hear that a lot, that because of the amount of money that was spent by the state that that gave a degree of freedom. I also think just the sheer experience of living in a dictatorship, of being surrounded by the constraints of that, by having to work around censorship, you have to find quite clever ways of expressing yourself in a different way, I think, than people do in freer societies. I don’t think it is surprising as such that you get a different type of creativity coming from those sorts of systems. The nudity cult from East Germany, FKK, why is that so strong? It catches on, but there’s also this extreme prudishness to communism. How did that picture fit together?…

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