Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
11 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 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / belief
“As I say, I just spent a whole year basically researching this because it is so crucial to understanding Germany, I think.”
07 / 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.”
08 / belief
“I think that’s because it’s always been socially different from its environment.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”