Katja Hoyer is a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Katja Hoyer discuss why the Weimar comparison is so tempting (and so often misleading), what genuine enthusiasm for democracy in 1919 Germany can teach us about how democracies fail, and whether political fragmentation or economic crisis was the more decisive factor in Weimar’s collapse.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: Katja, we recorded a really interesting episode about the long run of German history a few weeks ago. You kindly agreed to come back for an extra little chat given the horrible events in Berlin this past weekend. Tell us what happened.
Katja Hoyer: There was a terrorist attack, from what we know now, on a pride event in Berlin at the weekend. A man drove a van into crowds. At the moment, we have one victim that was killed and several dozens that were injured. He’s also supposed to have gotten out of the car and conducted a knife attack on the crowds as well.
Police have since found out who it was and chased him down, and the man was shot dead in the process of the police confronting him. So that’s where we currently are with this, and now all sorts of questions are being asked about how this was allowed to happen, what we already know about the perpetrator, and what Germany should do now, if there should be any political consequences to this.
Mounk: There’s been a series of Islamist attacks in all of Europe, including in Germany, a large number of them over the last 10 or 15 years. One of the things that makes this story quite remarkable is that this wasn’t an unknown perpetrator. His radicalism, his extremism wasn’t unknown to the German authorities. In fact, the German authorities brought him back from Lebanon because he had tried to join ISIS. What do we know about the history of this particular perpetrator, and any potential failings of the German state in averting this attack?
Hoyer: He is an interesting case in that he actually holds German citizenship, was born in Germany to Lebanese parents, and therefore is perhaps a little bit different in his background. He didn’t come to Germany himself as a refugee or as an immigrant, but actually grew up in Germany himself. This begs all sorts of questions about spotting radicalism early. He would have grown up in Germany, gone to school there, would have seen GPs, people around him, teachers and so on. He was, as you say, known to the authorities as a radicalized young person for a long time, in that he already tried to make his way to Syria to join ISIS, and then was also convicted of planning an attack against the state and against people in Germany and got a very light sentence. Many people feel that the sentence was actually suspended, and he was allowed to go about his daily life again, and therefore was in a position to conduct this attack rather than being in prison or being under the very careful watch of the authorities.
Mounk: Some of the details about this are really quite striking, and honestly horrifying. He had traveled to Lebanon to try and join ISIS in Syria. He was in jail in Lebanon when German authorities decided to bring him back to Germany in order to put him on trial. Somewhat understandable. But that trial then resulted in him being sentenced under youth guidelines, even though he was older than 18 years old, and all he got was a suspended sentence, which meant that he wouldn’t see a day in jail. A couple of days after the attack—today, as we’re recording—he was meant to have a chat with some German social workers about his extremism, and that was the extent of the punishment that he was facing. And then you add some of the really absurd details to how the German authorities are treating these circumstances, like the fact that I at first thought this must be fake news, but I looked at the actual Twitter account, that the police in Berlin shared a link to the photograph of a perpetrator, but not a photograph directly on the platform, because that, they explained, was not permissible according to German data protection laws.
Hoyer: I think it is tricky, because all of these laws and rules and regulations have got their purpose. You can always explain where they came from, why people introduced them in the first place. For example, the fact that youth sentences are quite light in Germany, comes from the whole idea that you don’t want to mess up a young person’s life forever just because they made a mistake when they were still relatively young. You can see the idea behind that if it’s something like delinquency, or things that a young person might do because they went on the wrong path at some point. But of course, once you are dealing with somebody who’s extremely dangerous, because he’s deeply ideologically convinced that he needs to follow down this path, and you’re not going to change that with a chat or two in a de-radicalization program, and people were at the time aware of how extreme his views were, then of course this entire system, that isn’t really set up to deal with these cases, begins to look rather absurd and bizarre when applied to a case like him. It’s easy, I think, in hindsight, to see where all of the problems are, but I don’t think there’s an easy way of remedying all the bits that make it quite easy for perpetrators in Germany to exist and to exert their freedoms, or use their freedoms, in the way that anybody else might be able to.
Mounk: A first step might be stopping the denial about some of the basic realities of what is happening. One of the things that I found striking in the aftermath of the attack is that there’s a number of these strange bureaucrats in Germany who are responsible for fighting against discrimination against all kinds of various groups. A worthy cause, but it’s not always the most capable individuals who are in those roles, and a number of people who are charged with fighting against real discrimination against the LGBTQ community were pressed on what the threats are for that community. When you speak to members of that community, it’s quite clear that unfortunately a lot of the time when they experience hostility in the public sphere across Europe at this point, and certainly when there are attacks as well, that often is from people with an Islamist background, who have extreme theological views, and the animus that is sometimes inspired by that. We’ve seen that also repeatedly with some terrorist attacks, including in that nightclub in the United States a number of years ago. And yet a lot of these bureaucrats were saying, well, the danger is from the right and from conservatives and so on, and there may certainly be some threats from neo-Nazis and others as well, but they really weren’t willing to name the nature of the attackers as Islamist, and the fact that it is that ideology which often targets those groups, which helps to explain to some extent the otherwise very strange and striking fact that the share of gays and lesbians in Europe that now vote for the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France, or for the AfD in Germany, is rapidly growing.
Hoyer: I think people often see this as a zero-sum game. It can’t be that there are several threats to a community. It has to be either or, this competition around which is the biggest threat. If there are far-right threats, that doesn’t mean that the Islamist threat isn’t real. But there’s always this moment now, I think, and this is quite telling as to where we are in terms of our debate here, when an attack like this happens, and then people hope for the perpetrator to be of a certain ethnicity or background or ideological persuasion.
Mounk: I don’t know whether you’re alluding to that, but there was somebody who was holding a speech at Christopher Street Day, informing the crowds of what had happened, who literally said this: “I was hoping”—and it was a strange choice of terms—“it wasn’t a Kanake,” which is a derogative term. I think the person was themselves not white. A Kanake is a kind of self-claimed politicized term about a non-German, in the way that perhaps “queer” has become in reference to the gay community in the United States. So “I was hoping that it wouldn’t be a Kanake, but sadly it has turned out to be one. I was hoping that it would be a white cis person who made this attack.” It’s a very strange thing to express in that moment.
Hoyer: It is, and it’s also utterly callous. It leads a million miles away from thoughts about the victims, about the people that this happened to, about the general situation, that people just don’t feel particularly safe anymore at these sorts of events. And it’s not just political or social events like this one. People say the same about Christmas markets, or about concerts, or about any other public events. We’ve had several attacks even on very small kinds of village fête type things, where people were attacked when they attended something in their local village or small town, or beer festivals and things like that. That just leads to a general perception, I think, that people just don’t feel safer anymore. If you move away from discussing that, and what that means and what to do about it, towards who’s the perpetrator and is it somebody that I can blame, then that becomes a very politicized and ideological debate that isn’t really constructive in terms of actually improving the situation.
Mounk: Towards the end of our substantive conversation about the history of Weimar, as well as present-day Germany, we talked about some of the upcoming state elections in East Germany, in which the far-right AfD was already projected to do very well. We talked in particular about the fact that perhaps in Saxony-Anhalt they may win an outright majority. What impact do you think these attacks are going to have on those elections, and how do you think ordinary Germans are going to react to them?
Hoyer: It’s clearly inflamed passions quite a bit. I’ve lived in Britain for a long time now, but I’ve still got many friends and family members in Germany, and speaking to them over the last few days, it’s really affected them. I know many people in Berlin where this attack happened. People were telling me that their friends or siblings attended this Pride event and were deeply shocked by what happened. They’re going to go away with a different view of how they go about their lives, and I think that is bound to have a political impact as well. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we immediately see a surge of the far right. I think in general, maybe some people may decide not to vote anymore, because they don’t know who to vote for, because they don’t trust any political party to deal with this. We may see an entrenchment on the left, saying now especially we need to fight the far right, so they may be able to mobilize people.
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But I do feel that this is quite a big political thing, because it’s not an isolated event. It came on what some now actually call a bloody summer, because there have been so many events where people were attacked in different contexts. There was a student, for example, who just randomly became the victim of another attack, where I think it was an Afghan individual who basically just killed him on the street during the day. He was completely random, a random victim, they didn’t know one another. There were several of these incidents now over the summer where it involved basically people who had either come to Germany or had a migrant background of some description. I feel that this accumulation is building up. You have people on the left saying, why is this happening now, when we’ve got elections coming up?
Mounk: The conspiracy theory about false flag attacks and all of those kinds of things. It used to be the right that claimed those kinds of false flags in the United States, but it’s also a very tempting idea on parts of the left. Let me sharpen my question perhaps a little bit. The basic claim of parties like the AfD in Germany is that the institutions are failing. The people who are in charge don’t know what they’re doing. They’re too captured in the ideology to take seriously the threats to our safety and well-being. And only we can fix it. I disagree with that in two ways. I disagree that the institutions are as disastrous as these parties say. I think we’re very attuned to the failings of our societies and we tend not to see the things that are working well. Even for Germany, it isn’t quite that bad a situation at the moment, where many things work very well in the country compared to most other places in the world. And secondly, I don’t believe for a moment that the AfD, for example, would do a better job at dealing with these problems, for all kinds of reasons we could go into. Having said that, stepping back a little bit, it’s not surprising if people look at, in particular, the failures of the police, of the court system, of the entire setup, down to this absurdity about not sharing the picture of a perpetrator on social media because that would violate his personality rights, and say, who’s in charge here? Why should we trust them? That, I guess, makes me afraid for the country’s future and the future of other countries where there are similar problems.
Hoyer: I think you’re right to be afraid, because the figures have shown over the last few years that trust in public institutions—and this goes all the way from parliament, as an institution in the abstract, all the way down to things like the police, public civil servants, that kind of thing—has been eroded over the years. This is something that extremist parties can always use as a way of saying we need to stop tweaking things because the system itself isn’t working, so we need radical solutions, and more and more people begin to believe that that is the case, and so you see the political changes happening there. This is a particularly stark case where there are so many little things along the way that kind of went wrong to get to this point, all the way from how he was allowed to grow up with this sort of mindset in the first place without any intervention as such, all the way to the way, as you say, this was dealt with once the incident had happened.
All that people see is politicians coming out with phrases that may have come out of AI. It’s virtually as if you typed into AI, “give me a speech by a politician after a major incident like this has happened.” We won’t have them destroy our way of life. Let’s carry on living the way that we do. We must stick together. All they want to do is divide us. All these clichés, they don’t help. They make things worse. People feel that politicians don’t have any answers to this, and once they feel that, what’s the point in voting for the same politicians again? That’s going to be the next question they ask, and so they vote for parties that have not been in power yet, because they feel they might as well roll the dice and give it a go.
Mounk: Weimar is a topic which has salience beyond the relatively short period during which the Weimar Republic lasted. One of the reasons for it is that people love to use it as a historical metaphor for other political periods, and that’s obviously something that has been very fashionable in the last years, with the rise of the far right and other elements of our politics, like increasing partisan fragmentation in many countries. People are saying we’re back in Weimar. You think that that is a really unhelpful way of thinking about things. Why should we banish the Weimar metaphor?
Hoyer: I wouldn’t outright banish it, but just use it constructively and a bit more cautiously, I think. I certainly get the feeling it’s used mostly now as a bit of a tool for expressing emotions like fear and anxiety about what’s currently going on, and it doesn’t tend to go beyond that most of the time. We’ve just had the Bavarian Minister-President, for example, in Germany, one of the key conservative politicians, saying that Germany is on a Weimar path. That sounds quite daunting without actually saying anything useful or helpful as to what the situation actually is and what we can do to solve it. I feel the same goes for things like Hitler comparisons, calling people fascists, that kind of thing, is usually done not necessarily with a direct look to history, but more out of a sense of fear that history might be repeating itself. So I’m not saying let’s banish the whole thing. I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that we could learn something from history. But at the same time it’s got to be done in a way that is actually helpful and forward looking.
Mounk: Why is this metaphor so tempting? Obviously the Third Reich is the great catastrophe of modernity, and Weimar is the thing that led up to the Third Reich. There’s a kind of very straightforward answer to that, but different parts of the political spectrum seem to see different things in the Weimar comparison. It’s interesting that you used as your example Markus Söder, the Prime Minister of Bavaria, and Bavaria has been ruled since the end of World War II by a very conservative sister party of the Christian Democrats nationally. A lot of the time when people use the Weimar comparison, it tends to come from the left. It’s like everybody on the right is fascists, and these populists particularly are fascists, and if we don’t stand up to them, then we’ll end up back there. So there is this way in which this metaphor is appealing across the political spectrum.
Hoyer: I think there’s now a sense, certainly I can say that for Germany, where the center parties, people who see themselves as the old, established party spectrum, both left and right of the center, seem to rally together against the emergent parties, particularly on the far right, but also on the far left. There’s now a sense that if that doesn’t get stopped, then the center will erode. I think that’s why the center-right, the conservatives, are also now beginning to use this as a metaphor to warn against political fragmentation and extremism. I feel that the appeal of that is quite stark now because, first of all, I think it is genuinely the most terrifying example of a collapsed democracy that we’ve got in Western history, given where it ended and what we know happened afterwards. So it’s kind of the most extreme example to grasp if you want to make a point about saving democracy. Perhaps more speaking to the last ten years or so, I think there’s a sense, particularly in Germany but across the West, that the established postwar order is beginning to look less certain and more fragile than it perhaps did ten or twenty years ago. In terms of issues like migration, the economy, the economic system, the way that we see the voter spectrum fragmenting into smaller bits, all of that points to big political changes, and people are looking to the past, I think, to find explanations for why that is. In terms of Germany, you’re looking back to the last failed example of a democracy, and that is the Weimar Republic.
Mounk: The other thing that’s interesting is that the Weimar comparison has historically been made a lot in Europe, and particularly in Germany, but it sort of jumped across the Atlantic. Niall Ferguson has talked about “Weimar America,” and it seems to me that for the left, the idea of Weimar is really the idea about what happened at the end of Weimar. When you’re making Weimar comparisons, it’s really about the rise of the Nazis, including the fact that there wasn’t a cross-partisan enough rejection of the Nazis early on, that there were conservatives who thought they could make deals with the Nazis. So when there’s a question about whether you should go into governing coalitions with right-populist parties, the Weimar comparison is a way of saying what you’re going to end up with is the Nazis. For the right, when they talk about Weimar—I didn’t see that quote by Markus Söder, so I don’t know in what context he used it—but certainly when somebody like Niall Ferguson uses it, I think they mean something more about dysfunction. They’re less focused on the end of the Weimar Republic and the catastrophe it led to, than on the fact that Weimar itself was deeply dysfunctional in all kinds of ways. They’re saying our country today is becoming as dysfunctional as Weimar, obviously also with the frisson of what terrible things that might lead to in the background. But I think the emphasis is slightly different.
Hoyer: Yes, and certainly also more on economics, I would say. There’s certainly a look towards the fact that in Germany in particular, its current economic model doesn’t seem to be functioning properly anymore. It’s the last really deep crisis to look at if you want to exclude the oil crises and the bit of unemployment there was in West Germany in the 1980s. Apart from that, you’ve got to go back before the war and before Nazism to find comparisons. This kind of idea that you were seeing a deep economic crisis off the scale of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed is, I think, a bigger scare factor on the right than it is on the left, where the focus tends to be about combating fascism and the far right. But there’s appeal in that for everybody, because I think it’s perhaps the one example in modern history where everyone can agree that this was bad. So you get the right and the left saying we need to avoid this, but drawing different conclusions from it.
Mounk: In a way we’ve jumped into one of the things that makes the topic so interesting to contemporary readers, that it’s used as this metaphor all of the time. I think it’s really hard to think about a period of time—the Weimar Republic lasted for what, fifteen years between 1918 and 1933, or perhaps it’s really born in 1919, so even a little bit less long than that—in one country, but obviously a significant country in the world, one of many countries. It’s very hard to think of another period of rule that is that brief that people have that much cultural fluency in. That’s really interesting. But at the same time, of course, Weimar is therefore reduced to some of the stereotypes: economic mess, political dysfunction, it all led to the Nazis. That’s the three things that every educated person knows. Then there’s probably a lot of things that a lot of educated people, certainly even within Germany, but certainly beyond Germany, don’t know. So let’s go back to the heart of your new book and your latest work. In what ways is Weimar like the kind of shorthand that educated people are going to have for it, and in what ways is that shorthand really misleading about what that short but important period in German history was like?
Hoyer: I think we have a tendency, as we always do, to look at past events through the benefit or the disadvantage of hindsight, depending on your perspective. We look at the Weimar Republic from its endpoint, from where it led to. I think that we often forget that actually there was a lot of enthusiasm for democracy to start with, and there are some lessons to be learned from that too. If you look at 1919, you see just how keen people are to go voting. Women in particular get given the vote for the first time in Germany after the First World War, and they go out to these political education evenings. I got really quite surprised, researching for my new book, which takes the whole thing down to street level.
I’m looking at Weimar itself, which is the town that the Republic was born in and named after. Once you zoom in that far and you look at individual people’s diaries, for example, you’ll find that women, for example, were actually going to these evenings where all the different political parties were telling them what their programs were, and they go in to listen to old male professors telling them what voting is and what their duties as active citizens are going to be like. But there was genuine enthusiasm. Turnout was very high, in the sort of eighty-odd percent, in 1919. The idea that this mattered, that you wanted to go and decide on the future of your country, was very much there. The fact that that declines later on is in itself worth looking at and is often forgotten, I think, as a lesson, because there is this cliché that Germans just weren’t used to democracy, ergo they didn’t really value it, and therefore they were more prone to give it up. I don’t think that was the case. I think people did take it very seriously to start with, and it’s the disillusionment with the malfunction of it, with the idea that it didn’t deliver, that later on drove them away from it.
Mounk: That’s something where I think the experience, for example, of post-Soviet transitions should also teach us a lot. In the first elections after the fall of communism in Poland and the Czech Republic and Hungary and so on, you obviously had a lot of people participating in voting because you were able to participate in a meaningful election for the first time ever, or for the first time in many decades. But by the third, fourth, fifth parliamentary elections, particularly in countries that at the time felt that a lot of things weren’t going as well as they had hoped, participation in the election had really dropped off. So actually, I think we can now recognize this as a pattern that’s not really that specific to that time and place, but that tends to happen in new democracies.
Now, as you’re saying, one of the reasons why people then became disengaged in the Weimar case is that the political system that was established was very fractious. It looked to people, truthfully or not, that it was not capable of actually delivering results. Why is that? Some of the main explanations that people give for that are that there wasn’t a deep democratic history. Of course, most Germans had voted in some form of election before 1918, so it generally wasn’t for bodies that were as powerful as parliaments are in full democracies, or at least most German men had done so before. So one explanation is lack of democratic experience.
A second explanation is that there’s just too much ideological fragmentation, that you just weren’t able to have some kind of stable governing majority because there were the communists and the Social Democrats and the various centrist parties and the conservative nationalists, and eventually the Nazi Party that rose. Another explanation is the humiliation of defeat in World War One and the Versailles Treaty and the pretty onerous terms of that, and so any government had to agree to things that were humiliating, and therefore any government would immediately become unpopular. Then, of course, there was the economic crisis that was partially a result of that, and then obviously aggravated after Black Friday, after the stock market crash of 1929. I’m sure I’ve missed out some explanations, but is that roughly the list? Is there something missing? Which of these do you think is more decisive than others? Are there misconceptions that people have about this?
Hoyer: That is a good list, and it already goes to show just how complex this whole thing is. We can’t just write this off and say that Germans just didn’t really know what democracy was or weren’t really used to it, because I think that’s the same fallacy that people applied to the post-Soviet system, where they were saying there was just no democratic culture and therefore people didn’t get it. I don’t think that is it. I think it’s almost the opposite. People who come to democracy as a relatively new thing have got very high expectations of it. They’re initially quite enthusiastic, but they expect what you vote for on the ballot paper to actually make a difference. When that doesn’t happen, when it seems to be the case that you get the same situation again after you just voted, be that either a completely dysfunctional result or the same kind of block of parties just putting themselves together in a slightly different coalition, but ultimately you get the same multi-party government, those kinds of things end up frustrating people, I think, and that’s a big factor in the Weimar Republic as well.
Interestingly, I think in the middle years it leads more to a sense of malaise, just a well, I won’t bother today. So you see the turnout drop, but you don’t see an increase straight away in extremist voting. This is quite interesting. In those middle years that seem relatively stable, because of American investment largely, and loans being given to Germany, you do see the turnout drop. Fewer people go out; they say I might do something else with my Sunday—elections are always on Sunday in Germany, always have been. Quite often people, I saw this in people’s diaries, they’d go, it’s a nice Sunday, I’d rather be somewhere else, and they just don’t bother. They don’t go and vote for Nazis and communists straight away. This is really important, because even in 1928, the last election before the Wall Street crash, the Nazi Party still only gets 2.6 percent of the vote. All the other factors are in place—the multi-party coalitions, the things not really moving forward, Hitler is already there and doing his election campaigning—all the other factors that people attribute to the rise of the Nazis are there.
What isn’t there is absolute economic devastation. So I always think that is a factor that is vastly underestimated in today’s political discourse, that this is often the biggest driver. People just want to have stable lives where they can have an economic future for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. The moment they stop believing that things will at least stabilize, if not get better, that’s when people turn to quite extremist options, and when they give up on ideals of democracy, I think. So out of this whole bundle of factors that you mentioned, that would be the biggest one for me.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about that economic devastation. Listeners will be familiar with the Great Depression in the context of the United States as well. That crisis is even deeper in Germany, in part because of the element of hyperinflation.
Hoyer: Most people will be familiar with those images of children playing with banknotes and the wheelbarrows being wheeled into shops and things like that. But I think, once you break it down to street level, when I looked at people’s diaries at the time and letters and things, you really begin to realize what that does psychologically to people when money is just not worth anything anymore.
The main guy in my book is a guy called Carl Weirich, who’s a bookbinder by trade and runs a little stationery shop in the town of Weimar. Initially he’s joking about it in his diary with a sense of gallows humor. He says that he buys a bicycle, a used bicycle, for two million marks, even though his wife can’t even ride a bicycle. But he says himself that if he’d waited another few months he would have been able to buy an egg or a loaf of bread for the same money. So initially there’s this gallows humor, but then very quickly—he’s running a shop, he doesn’t really know where to get the wares from, how to get things like typewriters, because he can’t pay for them. Once he’s got them in, he’s asking customers to pay millions, billions for them—pay six billion today and take it home, offers like that.
Later on he wrote, I don’t even know how I reported those figures to the tax authorities. I think that does something to society, because ultimately the image that it conveys is that nothing is certain. Something like this can just happen out of the blue. That does something, I think, long term, because people just don’t really trust the system, themselves, the situation that they’re in, to ever last. That’s really quite a dangerous kind of political hedonism, I would say, that sits in there, where people go, I might as well roll the dice. Then things stabilize when they get a grip on that, but that psychological experience doesn’t go away.
Mounk: It’s kind of a double whammy, where the first experience is that a lot of people’s life savings disappear. One thing about hyperinflation is that any sense that you could have stable plans for the future disappears. But perhaps some people remained in employment, and then suddenly in 1929, not always the same people, sometimes the same people, then experienced mass unemployment. So the first economic disaster teaches you that you really can’t have stable plans for your own future. You might be very materially comfortable today, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be materially comfortable tomorrow. You might think, well, as long as I have a stable ongoing source of income, that allows me to deal with that, and then suddenly you have mass unemployment to boot. That really undermines the preconditions for any trust and stability.
Hoyer: Yes, I think so. Also the fact that they came out of the First World War, and there was already that crisis to deal with in 1919. It was already bad. Even in 1919, 1920, you get inflation, just not hyperinflation, but it’s already bad, with prices for bread and things like that doubling and tripling every few months. By then this is an experience that’s lasted several years, and it’s entirely associated with this post-World War One era, because people weren’t used to that. They can remember the times before 1914 when it wasn’t like that, and a sense of nostalgia is then beginning to set in, and people think, well, actually maybe we were quite unhappy before 1914 because we wanted political change, but at the same time it was stable, you could depend on things, you trusted the government, and even the Kaiser, most people were happy enough with the system, implicitly. There weren’t extremist parties then. That really only happened during the First World War. This nostalgia is also quite dangerous, and again we’re seeing that again today. The idea that “making America great again” implies that there was once a time when it was great, and that in itself is something that political parties can always work with—the idea that it was once better than it is today. That’s also something that’s deeply associated with the way that political parties play on the current sense of uncertainty.
Mounk: Incidentally, a lot of people today say, how can I have kids? Look at how uncertain the world is and how much change there is within it. I think the argument for that is reasonable, and there have been a lot of important political events, including some genuine disasters, over the last decades. Artificial intelligence is totally changing some of the foundations of our world.
But when you think about what somebody who was born in 1890 would have experienced by the time that they’re, say, thirty-five—you have the outbreak of World War I, you have the collapse, in Germany but many other European countries as well, of a system of monarchy that had been there for centuries, or for decades depending on the context. You have the Spanish flu, which is an incredibly deadly and destabilizing event. Then in Germany you have hyperinflation, you have obviously a huge change in the territory of the country, then you have a Great Depression, and then you have something like the rise of the Nazis. The number of extreme political events that aren’t just out in the world, but that have a very direct influence on the lives of individuals within those societies, within thirty-five or forty years, is really hard to fathom.
I think that teams up my next question. There’s a historical journal whose title nicely expresses one of the key questions that historians always ask themselves, which is “continuity or change?” You have a very straightforward and brilliant idea of approaching the history of the Weimar Republic by looking at the city of Weimar and at the lives of people in that city. How much did their lives change relative to the past, in 1920, in 1930? Are all of these events we’ve talked about immediately legible in their lives in such a way that it feels to them like they live in a completely different world? Are there elements of the culture that actually have deep elements of continuity, where perhaps in the everyday life of the local Kegelverein, the local bowling association, or the local Singverein, the local choir, it actually doesn’t feel that different from a few decades before? How should we think about the actual daily life and environment?
Hoyer: That’s what I was wondering too. That’s why I thought it makes sense to pick one place and a particular group of people and follow them throughout this whole time frame, because I think we have a tendency to just look at this history top-down, looking at the big things that change. But it’s hard to tell with individual people what this actually means to them and how they actually perceive that. To go back to Carl the bookbinder, he was born in 1885. He is that person that you just described. He’s gone through a lot of the tail end of the German Empire, then the First World War happened, and then he’s suddenly finding himself in Weimar. He moved to Weimar in 1914, just before the First World War, and set up his shop there. He’s not a particularly political person, so in a way he’s a good barometer for when politics and economics become so central that he’s starting to talk about it in his diary.
To give you an example, in 1924 there were two elections. I wanted to know how Carl had voted, so I went to look. Instead of the election results, I found that he’d gone up a local hill on a Sunday for a hike. I’m sure he voted anyway, because most people did, but it’s just not important enough for him to mention. If you think about even the situation today, most people think of family reunions, events in their own life, graduation—those are the big events in people’s lives. When politics becomes so big, however, that it has an impact on what you do, whether you want it to or not, that’s when he starts mentioning it.
So suddenly, in 1933, you find for the first time really an outright commentary on politics, when he writes in his diary, “And now we’re putting all of our hopes in this new young chancellor called A. Hitler.” I was completely taken aback by that. There was absolutely no sign up until then that he was politically active or that he was even mentally engaged with all of that stuff, because he’s a fairly ordinary, quite likable, ordinary guy who just gets on with his life. But the situation does get so desperate. He can’t pay his mortgage anymore. There’s a point after the Great Depression hits when he’s about to lose everything, his house, where the shop is and where he also lives above with his small family. Previously, in the First World War, the poverty and everything had gotten so bad that he’d basically lost his first family. His child and wife both die of disease, because there’s malnutrition, and, as you said, there’s the Spanish flu, there’s also a huge tuberculosis crisis going on. To him all of that is so uncertain, and all that the government has got to offer is basically an austerity program under Heinrich Brüning in 1930. Brüning actually goes on the radio and says to them, this is kind of your own fault—if anybody expected that life would get better after this war that we fought, think again.
When actually Hitler then comes in and says, give me four years, I’ll sort out unemployment, I’ll make sure the economy gets going again, nobody needs to worry about their livelihood, that’s tempting to people like Carl, and he starts mentioning that. As for the continuity, that’s interesting too, because Carl is very much, as I say, born in 1885. He comes from that old world, pre-1914 world, when he spent his youth. He’s, for instance, still extremely religious. He’s a Protestant, and that’s very important to him. This is also a continuity factor that stays with him throughout his entire life, where you see him refer to the Bible, or certain phrases that people used at the time, which are rooted in religion, and that remains his main reference point for his morals as well. For example, despite the fact that he early on puts his hope in Hitler, he’s shocked by the antisemitism and by the violence that ensues afterward. He actually writes in his diary in 1938, when Kristallnacht, the November pogroms against the Jews happen, that he feels that this is blasphemy. It’s kind of the strongest moral condemnation that he can reach for, in his religious vocabulary, if you will, to say that he thinks that this is deeply wrong, and this is going to come back on Germany and the Germans themselves, because it’s not right. So in many ways there is this constant strand of identity, of a backdrop of what Germany was beforehand and what it stayed to some extent as well.
Mounk: The other thing that’s just striking about that phrase that you cited from the diary is “a young chancellor called A. Hitler.”
Hoyer: It’s almost like he just looked it up right in the newspaper again, because it’s so formal still. It’s clearly not a name that he’s used very often at this point.
Mounk: Exactly. It shows how hard it is to inhabit the mind of people who don’t yet understand the significance of some event that’s about to come. In his mind, Hitler might be there and deliver on his hopes, or he might prove a dud, and it might be that a year from now you never hear of him again. Whereas obviously to us, we understand that he goes on to be this disastrous and central figure in world history that, until today, probably has worldwide name recognition above, I don’t know, eighty percent. Probably a child in India today is more likely to be able to produce that name at the tip of their tongue than this person who apparently voted for him and helped him take power. So that’s really striking. What about the culture of Weimar? Weimar itself is obviously a storied town in Germany, because it is associated with a lot of the historic thinkers and philosophers who were based there. But we also have these images of the Weimar Republic that come from things like the movie Cabaret and so on, as this kind of place of extreme experimentation and artistic freedom to create. In the everyday culture of somebody like this bookbinder, does it feel totally different from the time of the Kaiser? When he goes to his church, does it feel like there’s a lot of continuity with the time before World War One? How should we think about the cultural moment in Weimar?
Hoyer: What makes Weimar intriguing is, as you say, it’s got this kind of almost fabled status in the German imagination as a culture capital. It’s where important poets like Goethe and Schiller lived and worked, who, if people aren’t familiar with them, have got the sort of status of, I would say, Shakespeare in the English-speaking world—that’s what they are to the German language. You can’t go to school in Germany and not recite some Goethe at some point. He’s very deeply associated with that town. So are composers like Liszt and Bach, who spent years there. Nietzsche died there. It’s really a who’s who of German culture. Yet when we think of the Weimar Republic, as you say, we think of cultural experimentation, cabaret, film, that kind of stuff, which is very, very Berlin. Not even other big German cities like Munich or Hamburg or Cologne have got that sort of very experimental nature of modern art, and Weimar is actually establishing itself as a bit of a counterpole to that. It’s where a lot of conservatives are drawn, because they believe that this new culture is a threat to their way of life and to Germanness itself. Increasingly they intertwine that with racial or racist ideas of what it means to be German.
They’re saying that this new form of art is internationalist, is Jewish, is left-leaning, is not German. Those people quite often rally in Weimar, because they see it as the hub of old German high culture. So interestingly enough, what we associate with Weimar when we hear that term today is actually very un-Weimar in lots of ways. The one exception to that is the Bauhaus movement, which became hugely influential, especially after it was driven out of Germany by Hitler in 1933. But that was set up in Weimar, in 1919, in the town. I think deliberately, because the architect Walter Gropius, who’s behind it, is a Berliner. He could have stayed in Berlin, where he’s got all of his connections, but I think he deliberately wanted to set the cat amongst the pigeons a bit with that. The way he phrased it was that he wants to poke the hornet’s nest of German conservatism, and it’s probably not a coincidence that he moves to Weimar with his merry band of proto-hippies. They’re walking around with these long coats that they call Russenkittel, or Russian coats, and sandals and long hair, and they go skinny-dipping in the river Ilm in Weimar. The conservatives are not exactly happy with this bunch of students living in communes, and I think that was deliberate.
But it just goes to show that Weimar is very much not what we associate with Weimar culture. In fact, the term “Weimar Republic” itself was coined by Hitler, in 1928, who uses it almost sneeringly, to say this isn’t a German thing, this is a Weimar Republic. It’s actually still called the Deutsches Reich, or the German Empire, as it was beforehand, and Hitler uses that term first. It’s interesting how that’s morphed over time.
Mounk: It’s interesting that that has just become the standard neutral term, given its provenance, and I bet that most people don’t know that. A certain young chancellor by the name of A. Hitler took over in 1933. How do the characters in your book then perceive the changes that ensue in Germany over the next six years, and in Weimar itself, which is right next to one of the most important concentration camps, Buchenwald?
Hoyer: Weimar itself became what was called a Gau capital at the time. Gaue are the sort of districts that the Nazis divide Germany into, like administrative districts, and Weimar is basically a local district capital and therefore it’s supposed to become a Nazi model town. That’s how the local Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel terms it. If the name rings a bell with people, that’s because he’s one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials after the war, because he’s later on in charge of forced labor during the Second World War. But at the time he’s the Gauleiter of Thuringia. His seat is in Weimar, and he wants that city to become Nazified, to look like a Nazi model town. Weimar, for example, is the only Gau capital out of all of them that actually gets what they call a Gauforum. This is a big Nazi party complex, a U-shaped set of buildings with a great big people’s hall, which is supposed to have room for sixty thousand people in it, to listen to speeches and parades and things. There’s a parade square in the middle. It’s a really giant building. When you think Weimar is a town of just thirty-five thousand people, it’s tiny, a sort of nice cobbled streets, timber-framed houses kind of place. Then suddenly you put this giant set of Nazi buildings, neoclassical, straight lines, this huge thing, into the middle of it. A lot of Weimarians hated it, despite the fact that Nazi support was actually higher in Weimar than average across the country. At the same time, they don’t want their town to be radically altered in the way that it was.
Mounk: NIMBYism is the only political force that can win even against Nazism.
Hoyer: I guess that is what it is. Carl himself is interesting in this, because at one point Nazi officials turn up at his house, where his shop is and he lives in a flat above the shop, and they just turn up and tell him, well, sorry, we need to tear your house down, because this is supposed to become part of a kind of Nazi arcade, and we’ll just need to rebuild all of this, and they give him just a token amount of money to say this is your compensation, deal with it. At that moment he’s shocked by the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is the late 1930s.
At that point there have been concentration camps, not obviously off the scale of Auschwitz, that comes later, but there have been concentration camps. Everybody knows that they sit outside the law, because they’re run by the SS, and the SS is explicitly not a state institution, it’s an arm of the Nazi Party. So people know all of that. All of a sudden Carl sits there and writes in his diary, can this be? This is Germany, it’s an ordered state, it’s got laws. He actually goes to a lawyer to try and see if he can get this stopped. Just this utter disbelief, when it suddenly hits him—when it’s already hit all of the political opponents, racial enemies of the state—he becomes personally affected by it. He’s beginning to question the lawlessness of the whole thing. This is one of the things that really struck me, because he’s not, as I say, a bad person inherently, but he’s clearly able to push all of the injustices away out of his mind, to carry on with his life.
Mounk: He’s sort of aware of these injustices going on around him, but he doesn’t have a stake in them. The moment that it comes home to roost, he’s outraged by the thing for which he made excuses when it affected others.
Hoyer: That’s exactly right. Even later on, when you look at the story, after the war, he does look back on this. I start the book actually in Buchenwald—you mentioned this concentration camp, which is built right on the outskirts of Weimar, in 1937, and becomes actually the largest on German soil. Never a death camp, so there’s never an industrial attempt to kill people, but many people, over fifty thousand people, do die there of the terrible conditions in it. Carl is actually one of the people whom the Americans, once they liberate Buchenwald, take up there—they take a group of civilians up there, and Carl is among them, to show them what they’d lived next to. Carl doesn’t push that responsibility away from himself. He doesn’t sit and write in his diary that this is outrageous and he bets they made it all up. He does actually write that he’s “ashamed and disgusted by our German downfall.” That’s the phrase that he uses, including himself in that. But he never goes a step further and says, what was my personal responsibility here, could I have done something differently. The moment he goes there, even slightly, in his diary, on occasion you see him tempted, but he immediately draws that door down again and says, no, what could I have done, I’m just an individual, it’s the system that did this, I was helpless, I was powerless as an individual. That, I think, is the same feeling in the 1930s: when he sees stuff that he doesn’t like, he tends to choose to look away or to withdraw himself from that situation rather than confront it. To give you one extreme example: when they do the laying of the foundation stone for that Gauforum, it’s a huge ceremony. Forty thousand Nazi supporters are being taken into Weimar to celebrate the whole thing. What does Carl do on that day? He gets on a train early in the morning and leaves the town to go on a hike with his family, and only comes back once the whole circus is gone.
Mounk: This is not a form of political rebellion or skepticism, it’s just that he likes hikes.
Hoyer : He wants to get away from this. He wants to be able to not see it, to be able to tell himself—or at least that’s my interpretation of it—to be able to tell himself that this isn’t actually happening, or to shut it out psychologically. He knows it’s going on, and he knows he should be there, because all the Weimarians have been asked to go there, but he doesn’t want to see it, because he hates the way that the town is transformed by what he calls “monstrous”—I think he uses the term “hubris” as well—in terms of the way that these building projects are totally oversized and ridiculous for the small market town that Weimar is, even at the time. There’s an interesting psychological dimension here. He still carries on walking and hiking on the hill where the concentration camp is, knowing it’s there. You still find him in his diary saying he’s been up there with his son in January, hiking and sledging, and two kilometers away from there is the camp.
Mounk: There are dark jokes about the concentration camp going around the town quite early on. People are aware, not necessarily of the details of what’s happening there, but certainly that something very nefarious is happening.
Hoyer: That’s an important distinction, I think. People do know that there’s a camp. The Nazis don’t make a secret out of that at all. It’s part of their terror apparatus. They basically say, we have concentration camps—they even use the term “concentration camp.” I found, for example, a mention in the local newspaper where there was a German-American group that came over from, I want to say, Michigan or somewhere. They came over on a Germany tour in the 1930s. I saw their tour program, and they basically had tea at the Hotel Elephant in Weimar and then were taken on a bus up the hill to tour the concentration camp itself.
In the Nazi jargon, the report on it said that now they can see for themselves that these are camps used for order and discipline, and not, as the “Jewish lying world press” would have it, kind of really bad hygiene and so on. So they’re even showing people these camps. This is not something that is a secret, but I think, equally, I certainly find this for Carl in his diary: when he goes there, and when he’s taken there in 1945, and they’re confronted with the piles of bodies, the evidence of torture, the medical experimentation, the sheer horror of the whole thing, people are genuinely horrified by that. I think this is, once again, because they’re able to draw that line in their heads and just say, I’m not going there mentally. I know this is bad, I know lots of people die there.
They see the coffins come down, because initially the SS isn’t allowed to run its own crematorium up there, so they’re using the town crematorium. People can see the transports of bodies up and down, they can see the black plumes coming out of the crematorium, they know this is bad. There’s even a rumor going round at the time that one of the lorries is supposed to have tipped over on the street and the bodies all came tumbling out. Whether that’s true or not, the fact that people were telling themselves these stories tells us that they had a good awareness of what’s going on. I found evidence of children taunting each other, saying if you don’t behave you’ll end up in Buchenwald. It’s that commonly known that this camp exists, and that nothing good is happening there.
Mounk: You interpret this similarly, that he is aware of this, perhaps queasy about it, but chooses to look the other way.
Hoyer: That’s the case for him, but you find very different responses from all sorts of people. There are people who wholeheartedly agree, who say that it’s the right people who get imprisoned there—this is for communists and for Jews—and the idea that you extract, for instance, Jewish money and value from them that they wouldn’t give up otherwise. There are people who agree with that and who come down to the train station—the people arrive at Weimar train station, right in the town, and then they’re taken up, so people can always see Jews being rounded up and being beaten onto transport buses and things like that. Some people go there to gawp, because they think, finally somebody’s doing something about this. A lot of people are very uneasy, choose to look away, and say, what were we supposed to have done about this?
Then yet other people actually try to resist. I have got somebody in the book called Kurt Nehrling, who’s a worker and joins the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, as a very young man after the First World War, and he fights to the bitter end, because he thinks this is so wrong that it’s even worth risking his own life and his own family. He’s got two small kids, and he carries on fighting. So you get the whole range. But I think, to explain why the majority of ordinary people—I mean, you can’t really argue that an entire society is evil, I don’t think it was—but when the middle tips over and allows the extremists to do what they do, I think you’ve got to ask the question of how that’s possible. I think it is a mixture of fear, consent, and people just allowing these things to happen because they feel helpless and don’t know what else to do, and so they decide to look away. I think that critical bit in the middle is the bit that we can perhaps draw some lessons from.
Mounk: Your book goes year by year from 1914 to 1939. Bridge the gap to the present day for us, very briefly—it’s not mostly what the book is about—but just for listeners who are not aware of where Weimar is exactly geographically: which side of the Iron Curtain does it end up on, what happens after 1989, and how do we get to the present day? Give us eighty years of history in three minutes or less.
Hoyer: Weimar is right in the center of Germany—that’s part of its appeal, and also part of the reason why everybody gets drawn to it, because it’s almost exactly in the center, halfway between Munich and Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. It ends up being first bombed and then liberated by the Americans, hence they’re dragging the people up there to show them Buchenwald. Then, as part of the renegotiations over Berlin—mostly because they want to divide Berlin into four occupation zones, even though the Soviets get there first—the Americans agree to hand Thuringia—this is the state around Weimar, Weimar is the capital of Thuringia, and Saxony, those two states—over to the Soviets, as part of the postwar deal, to have in their zone of occupation.
It wasn’t really supposed to matter, because Germany wasn’t supposed to be divided into two states—the idea was just that everybody gets to run their zone to start with. So this ends up being taken over by the Soviets, with grave consequences for Carl, by the way. He’s still wondering later on whether, if he’d maybe moved to Nuremberg, where his wife was from, maybe he could have avoided being occupied by the Soviets, but he ends up basically in that zone. They actually reuse Buchenwald as a so-called special camp, where they imprison political opponents—again with grave consequences, about a third or so of them die in Buchenwald, in that special camp, after it had been liberated and then reused.
Then it ends up in East Germany, Weimar, with Buchenwald actually becoming its national memorial and museum, and then it stays in the East up until reunification. Interestingly, this whole history was raked through a little bit in, I think it was 1999, when Weimar was named Culture City of the Year, and it became a focal point of its own history, but also of it as German history too, because so much of it happened there. If you go to Weimar today, it’s still a touristy place. If you stopped any tourist on the street and asked them why they’re here, most people will still tell you what they would have told you in 1914, namely that they’re here for Goethe and Schiller and the other cultural dignitaries. Only second, sometimes—there’s a really stark moment when you’re standing in the middle of Weimar, on the central square, looking at the loveliness of Weimar, its cobbled streets and everything, and then this bus comes down and it just says “Buchenwald concentration camp and memorial” on it, and it takes you up the hill once an hour, and it takes tourists up there too. So it’s still part of that legacy, I would say, but Weimar itself still sees itself as a cultural place rather than a place of the twentieth century.
Mounk: A couple of reflections and then a question. It’s interesting that Germany goes through these very different phases in the twentieth century. You have the old Kaiserreich, then World War I, what we now call the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, then you have the divided Germany, which takes one form of the Communist East, which Weimar ends up being situated in because of the deal you’re talking about. There’s also a very distinctive period of West Germany, which you could call the Bonn Republic. As it happens, I just came back late last night from a trip to Bonn, for a rather strange conference that happened to take place in the old parliament building in Bonn. I was actually standing at the lectern that Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer and all of the most influential people of German politics, from the late 1940s until the mid-1990s, made their home. That’s a very strange kind of Germany as well, because, in a way, like Weimar—which was obviously not where the parliament was located in the same way at the time—it’s even more than Weimar, a provincial town, not a huge capital. There’s something quite odd about that period of West Germany, but I think it’s afraid of its own shadow in all kinds of ways. When you’re in Bonn, it’s really very strange to think that this used to be the center of a major nation. Then you enter the Berlin Republic. The Berlin Republic is after reunification, when East Germany and West Germany come together again—East Germany gets in some ways subsumed into West Germany, and we talked a little bit about that in our last conversation as well.
Let’s think through the reasons why people might disagree with you and say perhaps there is something to the metaphor that today Germany has certain similarities to the Weimar Republic—we started to evoke them at the beginning. One of the huge problems in the Weimar Republic was that it was incredibly difficult to cobble together a stable governing majority, because so many different political parties simply would not go into government with each other. The communists wouldn’t even go into government with the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats and the conservative nationalists had huge distrust between them. Then, of course, after the rise of the Nazis, quite rightly the parties at least left of center were not willing to go into coalition with them. Are we very similar to that situation again in Germany today? Already, each of the last two governments were kind of ideologically incoherent, because you had a mix of left-leaning and right-leaning parties who have a whole bunch of points of agreement, but also a lot of important points of disagreement. Even though the leaders of the last government and the leaders of the current government are quite different, even though the last government became quite unpopular and people changed their voting behavior to vote it out, in terms of the policies pursued, the government led by Social Democrats, with the Green Party as a major coalition partner and the more center-right so-called Liberal Party in Germany as a third member, is not so different from the policies that the government now pursues, when you have Christian democrats in the lead with Social Democrats as the minor coalition partner. There’s not a lot of overlap in terms of personnel, but because it’s this kind of cross-ideological coalition, it doesn’t end up having such a big change, and most likely that’s going to be the case from now on.
The next Bundestag election, if you look at the polls, you’re probably going to have to have even more moderate parties from the left and the right governing together to cobble together any kind of majority. When I look particularly at the state of Thuringia, the situation is especially dramatic. When you look at the state of Thuringia, that Weimar is obviously located in, according to the latest poll, the AfD is at 39% of the vote, the Left Party is at 14% of the vote. Between them they have a majority, but they’re very unlikely to rule with each other. This basically means that, because the Christian Democrats don’t really want to be in a coalition with the Left, and the Left doesn’t want to be in a coalition with the Christian Democrats, there’s no real governing majority. Possibly the AfD might somehow get a majority. Perhaps they’re going to go together with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, which is a party that comes from the left but is very friendly to Russia, and it is imaginable that they might go into a coalition with the AfD. It’s really totally unclear how they’re going to govern together. You have a deep fragmentation, because you have so many different party families that simply do not accept each other as legitimate. The prospect for effecting political change is very low because of this coalitional math, unless you vote for the extremists. I’m not comparing the AfD to the Nazis—I think that’s a facile comparison—but in terms of the level of fragmentation, you might say, well, this does look like Weimar.
Hoyer: I agree. What I’m objecting to isn’t the idea that there aren’t similarities. As I say, I wouldn’t be a historian if I didn’t think that there was something to be taken from the past. What I disagree with is just throwing that word in there as a scare word and then leaving it there, because I don’t think that is particularly helpful. My point is exactly what you just said: we can look at the details and then try to draw some individual lessons from this, rather than just saying this is like Weimar, therefore we must all be frightened now, because I don’t think that’s helpful. That was my point, not to say that there aren’t any similarities—there are loads.
This is why I wrote the book in the first place, because I do think, sitting here basically writing, as I often do, about Germany today, and then suddenly in the afternoon you’re writing in your book about 1926, something that may actually look quite similar to 2026, a hundred years later. So that’s certainly the case, and I do think we can learn from that history. It’s just about being constructive about it. If you look at the political fragmentation, for example, and you just mentioned the idea that people compare the AfD to the Nazis, to just say to voters, look, we did this before in 1933, therefore you mustn’t vote for the AfD now, isn’t going to get a single voter back from the AfD. This is my bone of contention here, this is what I’m saying. It’s identifying the issues, why people vote the way that they do, and they aren’t exactly the same today as they were in the 1920s, just as the Nazis aren’t the same as the AfD. So it’s worth looking at why this stuff happens, to identify the reasons why people are discontented with the status quo and with the moderate politicians. That, I would say, is more helpful in a constructive way than just to say to people—you see these placards in Germany when people walk around, and they say, “Voting AfD is so 1933”—that’s not going to make a single person sit there and think, maybe I need to go back to the SPD or to the CDU.
Mounk: That’s a way to signal that you’re one of the good guys and get some kind of points in an internal moral status economy. It’s not an attempt to persuade anybody on the other side who might be tempted by the other side. So what are the reasons? In a sense, I understand the extent of discontent in Germany at the moment, and in a way I don’t understand the extent of discontent. Let me steel-man each of those arguments. On the surface of it, there’s just no analogy at all.
We’ve gone through some of the things that some of the characters in your book had experienced by 1933: World War One, the collapse of an old regime, the terrible pandemic, huge loss of territory, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, constant political dysfunction. That’s a lot. You can understand why that would delegitimize a system. What’s happened in Germany for the last sixty, seventy years? Well, the country has become one of the most affluent in the world, with one of the highest standards of living. East Germany specifically has gone from being very poor in 1989—certainly by today’s standards—to being much more affluent, much more vibrant. It’s really striking to look at videos of Leipzig, for example, from 1989, taken just after the fall of the wall, and you still see parts of a city basically in ruins from World War II that had never been built up. You see other big parts of a city that are just completely run down because nobody’s renovating these quite beautiful buildings in the center of town and so on. Today you go to Leipzig and it looks like a very pleasant modern city with a high standard—yeah, exactly. Leipzig is a particular example in that sense, but you go to a small town anywhere in East Germany, and it just looks a lot better.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Katja discuss why voters are turning to the AfD and how Germany can respond. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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