2026-06-10
1 小时 1 分钟For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, hello, everyone,
and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
Today I'm chatting with Katja Hoyer.
She just published a new and very interesting book called Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
She's well known for her history of East Germany called Beyond the Wall,
and a broader book on earlier German history called Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire.
Katja, welcome.
Thank you.
Let me start with East Germany more generally.
Why was it that communism seems to have made the Poles and Romanians more anti-communist,
but it made the East Germans overall more communist?
Do you refer to the time afterwards or during the time that the GDR was kind of going?
Well, both, actually.
So Poland really quite has rebelled against communist ideals, and it was pretty unpopular at the time.
In, say, the 1970s and '80s, the GDR had a reputation of being relatively loyal within the Soviet Empire.
There's a lot of residual communist or sometimes fascist sympathies there today.
So both.
Yeah, no, I think during the time there was certainly a kind of—I wouldn't say rumor,
but certainly the story was going around that this was a very German thing.
Basically, there's compliance with the state: if there's a rule, you kind of stick to it.