Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
26 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“Say, for example, talking in an accent or in a local dialect is still much more common, I would say, in the East because it wasn’t seen as a marker of your social standing.”
02 / uncertainty
“The whole FKK, the free body culture, I don’t know how it’s actually translated into English, but this nudist culture is actually much older than East Germany.”
03 / evaluation
“Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.”
04 / evaluation
“Königsberg and that entire region along the Baltic coast, that was where some of the staunchest support for Nazism was. They had grievances because of the settlement after the First World War, where Poland is founded as an independent state after the First World War.”
05 / evaluation
“It would be odd not to be pessimistic because all the experts are telling us to be pessimistic, as do the people in the field.”
06 / evaluation
“It’s that foresty, mountainous image that people have of Germany that starts about halfway down and then becomes more pronounced the further south you get until you get to the Alps as well. I would say, yes, probably the top half to two-thirds.”
07 / belief
“I haven’t got the exact figure in my mind now, but there was a book that came out at the same time as mine by Dirk Oschmann called Der Osten: eine westdeutsche Erfindung—The East is an Invention of the West, in which he brings out some really quite stark figures.”
08 / belief
“I’ve looked at the bigger picture for so long now, telling these big stories that happened over decades, that I think just looking at one particular issue might be an interesting thing to do.”
09 / belief
“Her son basically tries to recreate this illusion that the Berlin Wall hadn’t actually fallen. That is done in a tragic, comical way that I think encapsulated the experience quite well.”
10 / belief
“I think if you’d gone to, say, a village or a town somewhere where people lived a different life, that would have given you a slightly different impression as such.”
11 / belief
“As I say, I just spent a whole year basically researching this because it is so crucial to understanding Germany, I think.”
12 / belief
“I think, in a way, it would have made more sense to go either way or the other, either make it even harsher and basically create a weak Germany in Central Europe, or go the other way and rebuild from the beginning, as was the strategy after the Second World War.”
13 / belief
“I think that’s because it’s always been socially different from its environment.”
14 / belief
“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.”
15 / belief
“If you’re like an old general and you want to spend your last years somewhere prestigious, somewhere where there’s still a bit of culture going on, that’s more of a thing, I would say.”
16 / belief
“I think that’s certainly something about the 1920s that’s incredibly precious, this willingness to just break the boundaries, try again, start from scratch, because the world that people had come from and that they knew had gone.”
17 / evaluation
“I think partially it’s because antisemitism tends to always be a symptom of a society in crisis; the worse it gets, the worse antisemitism gets. That’s partially, I think, an explanation for that is that particularly because it’s economic grievances, people then look for scapegoats for the Great Depression, but also hyperinflation.”
18 / evaluation
“I think people often forget that, but it was a really, really, really conservative society. That’s partially, I think, because Germany is a Protestant and Catholic country because of the way that the Reformation worked out.”
19 / evaluation
“Lastly, if I may, I think the fact that she was the first female chancellor and to this date, the only one, that was easier for her because she’d already got used to working in a way.”
20 / evaluation
“I didn’t even have a concept of networking in my mind because that type of careerism, of pushing, of ambition just didn’t exist in the culture that I grew up in.”
21 / evaluation
“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.”
22 / evaluation
“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.”
23 / preference
“If I had to live in Germany, it would definitely be somewhere northern rather than in the south because that is the second people always think of Germany, when they think of Germany in East-West terms.”
24 / evaluation
“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.”
25 / evaluation
“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.”
26 / recommendation
“I would say, overall, the corpus of literature is well worth looking at because people lived in a dictatorship in a different world and tried to find ways of expressing that, even though the censorship was in place.”