Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
12 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”