Current German Anxiety and Political Shifts

The new statesman . Weimar conjures two very different images. On one hand, it's the city of Goethe and Schiller, a small German city associated with the arts and the ideals of European humanism. On the other hand, its name has become shorthand for political collapse, the fragile democracy born in Germany after the First World War, and the conditions that eventually gave rise to Nazism. But those two stories are not separate. The unsettling question at the heart of Weimar is how a place so closely associated with culture, intellectual life, and liberal ide als could also become part of the story of democratic breakdown. I'm Tanjil Rashid and you're listening to The New Society from The New Statesman, and today's episode we're asking how does fascism take hold of a city and a society. Historian Katjahoyer joins the new statesman's deputy editor Will Lloyd to discuss why Weimar became the unlikely home of Germany's first democracy, the birth of modernism, and the Bauhaus, how Nazism embedded itself into the life of the city, and what, if anything, Weimar could tell us about the political tensions of our own time. Weimar is often remembered as a symbol of German high culture, home to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. How did that cultural prestige shape the identity of the city going into the 20th cent ury. I'm John Bay Kachihoya the author of Weimar . Could you tell me why that city was chosen in 1919 as the as the foundational city of the Weimar Republic. Yeah, I mean as you just mentioned it had this reputation of being the cultural heart of the country in a way. So you have uh famous poets like Goethe and Schiller who are I would say maybe the equivalent to what Shakespeare means to to Britain. They are kind of the national poets really. Are they better than Shakespeare? That depends on your point of view. I'm not gonna push the boat out here. It's very controversi al . Um so they they basically lived and worked, they're they're associated with the town. Um you had because of that lots of other people attracted to this. So over the years you get composers like Liszt and Bach who lived there, um Nietzsche's dragged there by his sister after he goes mad and and has to die in Weimar so that his legacy can can kind of take hold of this this uh long term cultural thing as well. Um so it's already got a reputation and when Germany after the first world war looks to sort of relaunch and rebrand itself as a less militaristic, less Prussian thing that appeals going to Weimar to do it because it's kind of going back to this old Kultur sort of notion that Germany had of itself as a as a kind of culture that is very civilized, has a long tradition , uh, and wants to move away from the kind of more recent modernist tendencies. And so kind of using Weimar as a brand name almost by founding the republic there um appeals to a lot of people. It's also safe, it's not Berlin. It doesn't have the uh kind of revolutionary upheaval that lots of the bigger cities have. Uh and on top of that, it's right in the middle of the country, it's kind of geographically very much in the centre and the heart as well. So there were lots of reasons to go there in nineteen nineteen. So it was the perfect town, but it wasn't really the perfect time, was it, nineteen nineteen in Germany. It was can you just give us a brief sense of of the of the politics of Germany in this in this aftermath of of uh World War One? Yeah, I think chaotic is the word that springs to mind. So you have um a so called German revolution in nineteen eighteen at the end of the war where you have lots of people out on the streets, um, not necessarily all clamouring for the same thing. So you have kind of far-left workers who want to use the opportunity to have a kind of Russian-style October revolution. Uh, you have lots more people who just want peace and they want the old system gone and they want to relaunch something new , something more democratic, something more fair as a society kind of making sense of the the war as a as an opportunity to to level some of the inequalities that were there before. Mostly kind of social democrats, kind of center-left um sentiment there. And then you have the old elites who are staunchly trying to hold on to something of or whatever remnants they can of the old system. And in that chaos, the Kaiser , the Emperor abdicates, um and a new system is launched, partially also because the Americans say that there won't be peace unless a more democratic, completely different Germany emerges from that. So that accelerates all of these uh things. And so the Kaiser does abdicate and you end up with kind of a blank slate, and the decision now in nineteen nineteen at the beginning of the year is what should happen next. So this election that happens in that time frame basically at the beginning of nineteen nineteen is the first kind of free universal election including women who get the uh vote for the first time and this is supposed to set up an assembly , which then sets up a new kind of Germany, a new constitution. So it's complete kind of tabula rasa at this point and and nobody really knows what system may emerge. It could be anything from a technically a constitutional monarchy, some parties push for that all the way to like the communists saying should we even vote, you know, or should we just push for for revolution? It's it's everything hangs in the air and people very much feel that at this point in time. Well how did how did Germans refer to Germany at this time? Do they call what what what system is then established? Did they call it the Weimar Republic? No, not initially. So the system that's established is a republic, the first kind of German republic, but it's still confusingly called the German Reich or the Deutsches Reich. So the title of the actual state remains the same. There's a bit of a controversy around that in nineteen nineteen, but that seems to be the lowest common denominator that they can all agree on is that there isn't kind of a big rebrand as such. Ironically, the first person to really coin the term Weimar Republic is Adolf Hitler. Right, okay. German system. So he's sort of saying this is a Weimar system, it's a Weimar Republic, using that term to say this isn't kind of a natural thing for Germany to have. And it's ironic that we now remember it under that term when at the time it was very much Aaron Powell So Hitler's derogatory term for Weimar is now the way in which we talk about this period. Yeah, you certainly launched that and then later on it was used to distinguish it from later republics. So many people refer to the West German system that is set up after the Second World War as the Bonn Republic, um because the capital moves over to the town of Bonn. And then now some people talk about the reunified Germany as the Berlin Republic. Right. So it's an interesting way of distinguishing the different democratic experiments that Germany had as well. It's interesting because um Germany if you compare it to to England, now correct me if I'm wrong, but if you c you know, London is very powerful here, isn't it? London is really the city that everything seems to revolve around. Well, Germany is quite famous for having multiple centres, multiple sort of civic centres, cities that have their own identity and their own um their own contribution to national life. And there's f somewhat of a balance between them compared to a country like England. And yet, as you say, these are um these periods of German history are defined by a city. One of the things that defines uh this period in this city, or this period in German history, is the is the culture. Um could you talk a little bit about the birth of Bauhaus and the in the Weimar period. Yeah, so it's interesting that people b so people associate this entire time really with what a modernist culture of which Bauhaus is a part as a movement, and that in itself is usually associated with Berlin. So most of the things that we perceive to be kind of that we call Weimar culture, like the avant-garde theatre, the um modernist kind of building techniques, that kind of stuff, that's largely an urban and not just urban but it's largely a Berlin phenomenon. So as you say there are different cities in in Germany and they all have different cultural traditions. Munich very much makes a point out of saying this isn't Berlin, Berlin's far away from here. We have a very kind of traditionalist Catholic um conservative kind of culture and and they're proud of that being separate from Berlin, for example. Or Cologne has a very kind of Western looking, French-oriented again Catholic duh identity that's also very far away from Berlin. So what we associate with Weimar Germany is actually quite a Berlin-centric kind of culture. And it's interesting that Walter Grupius, the sort of founder of the Bauhaus movement, quite a famous architect already at the end of the First World War, decides to go to Weimar to set up his movement and he sets up the Bauhaus movement in the town of Weimar rather than in Berlin. And he does that for the same reason that people go and set the Republic up in Weimar, namely to tap into this cultural legacy and to say this is completely new, it's separate, we want to go somewhere that's associated with German thought and um high culture and civility, and so we take this out of Prussia, out of Berlin, uh into a place that's in the centre in the heart of Germany and that's associated with German uh kultur and thought and civility and and that's why he launches it in Weimar as well. What was um what was the Zeitgeist? What was the cultural Zeimerist in this uh Zeitgeist of in this period of Weimar um of the Weimar Republic? Um I would say like politics it very much hangs in the balance at that point. There's a kind of cultural struggle going on at the time as to what should determine the the cultural future of Germany as well. And that again makes Weimar quite appealing because it's in the middle and the ideas whoever controls that can kind of create a new German culture, not just in Weimar, but across the board. And so you have modernist movements like the Bauhaus and other things who see the catastrophe of the First World War as a as a kind of good launch pad for to draw a line and to start something new and to create a new type of German culture. There's also a giddy kind of hedonism going on at the time. I mean, Weimar Germany is very much also associated with drugs, with cultural experiment ation, with expressionless types of art, with with abstract art, atoned music, jazz, that kind of thing. Um so there is that because people kind of feel do you know what we we have no certainty anymore. There's there's hyperinflation, there's all of this stuff going on, so people just go for it. And on the other hand, there are many people who are frightened by that and who feel that this is amoral, it's going too fast, too far. Uh there's an internationalist kind of element there in that there's a lot of American culture coming over. Um, lots of Jewish people involved in in art and um theatre and things like that. So that that has a tinge of being kind of un-German for lots of traditionalist and conservative-minded people. And they also rally around Weimar because they feel that this is the hub of old German high culture and it can't be in their eyes app ropriated by modernism. And so there's an immediate backlash to Gorpios coming into Weimar. They kind of push back against us and he says himself, oh I think I I poked a hornet's nest here. And he's quite relishing that and architecture as there in music. Is there sort of one piece of art that you would associate really closely with this Weimar period that you think our listeners or viewers should should seek out in order to understand it? Yeah, maybe the sort of architecture is probably the more as a field of art, of course, but um Gorbius believed that mass production should play a role in art and he's he thought that that was the future and not just in furniture and in um I don't know, crockery, cutlery, that sort of stuff. But also in building techniques. And he w he was trying to solve the housing crisis. And in that regard I think there's quite something quite modern about this. Yeah, yeah. Because they look at this after the first world war and they go, Well right, how do we build up for for the future and how can we use mass production for this? And they come up with the idea of basically using prefabricated elements and then putting them together in whatever form you want. So once you've got the blocks, you can build a bungalow with four bedrooms or um a house with eight bedrooms or a or a block of flats or whatever from the exact same kind of modules. Um and sounds very practical and very German to me. It does. And it also a lot of people thought it was hideous. So you get this again this clash of, you know, the kind of modernist element there and then people going, this is very un German, we like our gabled roofs and our kind of localized building techniques. So if you go further north, people will use bricks because they were you know the clay was available in the soil. Go into the alpine regions and you'll have lots of kind of pine cladding and things like that. So people were previously very proud of having different and quite ornate types of housing. And now Bauhaus kind of comes in and says, no, we can roll out the same thing. We just kind of devise it once and then we can have the whole thing all over the board. And they again they try that out in Weimar, the very first concept house. It's still there in Weimar today. Uh this kind of bauhaus block really is just a white cube, really, of kind of what would look like a nineteen sixties type bungalow, I guess with the kind of great big windows and and this very uh sort of cubicle structure uh and flat roofs that was the big kind of culture clash at the time, should the roofs be gabled, old school or flat. Um and that I think really epitomizes this you know dualism or the the um the this cultural split, this clash over the the future of what Germany should even look like, how people should live. It goes to the really to the heart of people's lives in a way, which sounds quite an abstract argument kind of over an art movement, actually boils down to how do people live in the future, and that is something that struck really quite deep into the psyche of people at the time. And they argued even over this concept house when it was presented in in 1923. Now one of the one of the people who in this period does have an answer for how people should live is of course um Adolf Hitler, right, and the Nazi Party. And they play a role in this period of well you can describe it. What what is the trajectory of uh of the Nazi Party in this period? Um so initially they they are really small. I mean forget that today that that they're really quite an extremist splinter party and then Hitler tries to um basically putsch his way into power in nineteen twenty three in the so called Munich putsch. Uh and then people realise realise how how dangerous and extreme he is he's he's imprisoned and his party's banned. So it looks for all the world in nineteen twenty three and twenty four like, you know, that is But in the meantime, even whilst he's in prison, people rally and guess where in Weimar around uh the former war heroes really, so Hindenburg basically becomes the the figurehead initi We should say they're they're what they're famous generals from the First World War who effectively run Germany's uh the later campaigns, right? Yeah, and also the uh because the military takes over in the so called silent dictatorship during the war, they pretty much ran Germany during that time, the economy and and every aspect of life. And because they had early successes in the early years in nineteen fourteen, they fought on the Eastern Front, where Germany did make some head way into uh Eastern Europe. And so they're kind of associated with the with the with the successes of the war, as it were. So they try and utilize a feeling that Germany is humiliated and defeated and people want to rally back against that. And even whilst Hitler's in prison, you get kind of like a conservative backlash against what is perceived to be a left-leaning liberal system that doesn't seem to work because you have hyperinflation and really quite extreme economic problems in the early 1920s, and people associate that immediately with kind of the system not really working for them. So that happens even whilst Hitler's in prison. They're there neither of them are kind of outright Nazis as such, but they do try and utilize the various different right wing conservative groups and kind of extreme right wing groups as well that are there and they try and rally them again in Weimar. So there's a big kind of conservative nationalist uh rally in Weimar in nineteen twenty-four. Whilst Hitler isn't even there, he's in prison. Um that tries to do something with that um with with that discontent. That doesn't really go anywhere. It's interesting that um the repl various replacement parties and groups that exist in nineteen twenty four whilst the Nazi Party is banned, they don't really get anywhere electorally, basically. They never get into two digits. And um actually, even once Hitler comes out of prison and tries to rebuild his Nazi movement, um he grows the party in the various organizations of the party, but that doesn't lead to electoral success. So even in nineteen twenty eight they only get two point eight percent of the vote. Uh which is remarkable really he puts enormous amounts of effort and time into the local elections, into the national elections of nineteen twenty eight. And they believe because everywhere they go, people rally to them, they they come and they see kind of, you know, full beer halls full of angry people and they wonder, you know, why is this not actually translating into votes? And the answer is that there's relative stability in the mid-1920s because Americans have poured a lot of kind of loans and and money into it, investment into Germany. Um it looks for all the world like things are stabilizing. And so people have no reason really to go to extremist politics and I think that's something that we forget sometimes in hindsight because we know the way that history turned later on. Is that so that that narrative of there's the putsch inspired by Mussolini, there's the imprisonment, and then there's this abeyance where the Nazi party can't really make any headway, and then it's only the crash in twenty nine where the American money starts to dry up and then because the economic circumstances uh are no longer very good for Germany, then the Nazis are able to sort of rise up. Is that is that that's you know, that's what we know that's what I learned in school, that's what most British people um learn in school . Is that is there anything about that narrative that you think is sort of misses something or misunderstands something about this period? Well, I mean other countries are affected by the same crash, not least the United States, and they don't turn to Hitler or someone like him, but they turn to Roosevelt. Now arguably Roosevelt is also very un American in lots of ways in its politics and you know the interventionalist uh nature of his politics might arguably not have appealed to Americans if the situation hadn't been as desperate as that. And so that maybe if you turn that on its head it also shows that there were other paths open potentially for Germany as well, if somebody else had come and offered a different type of politics. Um also, you know, kind of a a strong man type leader that people were yearning for, yes, but it didn't have to be Hitler necessarily who who filled that void. So I think there were all sorts of um, you know, alternative ways in which this could have gone, both for Germany as well as for other countries um at the time. Um the other thing I would say is I think from my research now, particularly looking at Weimar where lots of conservatives and kind of the middle classes really are overrepresented, and those are also the types of people who vote for the Nazis in larger numbers. People always think it's the unemployed kind of hordes after the after the Wall Street crash will do, but it's really the people who are afraid of the unemployed, who who don't know what they're gonna do, whether they're gonna go to the communists and cause some sort of revolution, it's really those people who rally around the Nazis as a as a counter means to that. And they are overrepresented in Weimar because it's a very kind of conservative middle class type town . And looking at how they respond to the early efforts of the Nazis, so there's a big the first Nazi rally, really the first formal one before they go to Nuremberg, uh later on happens in Weimar in nineteen twenty six, and it's interesting that A, it doesn't get the numbers that the Nazis were expecting, even though it's Weimar and they were they were hoping they'd get more uh people to rally there. And B people are really deeply shocked by the amount of violence that surrounds the Nazi party as a kind of revolutionary party, it's it's always surrounded by violence. I mean, a policeman gets shot in the 1926 and on the open street in the 1926 rally and nearly dies. Uh, you have lots of kind of street brawls. It's really a bloodbath that happens in Weimar. This mustn't happen again, you know, and the the town council meets up and they have a meeting and they say we'll never allow the Nazis to use our theatre and our town again in the way that they have this time. And you just wonder what happens to that sentiment once, you know the Well it's n't because by nineteen thirty or thirty-one, I mean it's the it's gone. Yeah, and it certainly erodes over time and people do because Weimar is also the seat of the first uh like state level government where they have a Nazi minister as part of the coalition. Um is Wilhelm Frick, so they don't even choose he's he's one of the most extreme Nazis, really later becomes the uh minister of the interior and is one of the war criminals in the uh Nuremberg trials after the war, so really quite an extreme person. He becomes a minister in the Thuringian state level government, which is based in Weimar, in nineteen thirty, so three years earlier bas ically, again unleashes a really aggressive type of politics, swaps over all the local elites in administration and policing, uh introduces five hate prayers that have to be delivered in school s um so that the students have to say really extremist politics and then when that government's toppled. I find a little newspaper clipping at the time um that sort of goes, well at least people have seen now what the Nazis do when they come into power. And you know, again that caution goes out of the window because people become so desperate they want change, they're looking for someone to sort things out. And Hitler says with conviction, I can do this, I'll sort it out. Um and enough people believe that to to give it a go, basically, in nineteen thirty-three and and buy into that. Um but it's interesting that people don't walk into into this kind of with their eyes shut. They know this violence surrounds the Nazis. I mean the maybe to give one a clear example of that the army says to Hitler in nineteen thirty three, we'll support you, but you need to deal with the SA, there's four million men in this now as a private army, they're completely out of control. You've got four million kind of drunken ruffians going around the streets murdering and the brown shirts, which is you know the paramilitary. Yeah, or the storm troopers as they're sometimes called. And even the army says to Hitler, yeah, we're we're with you on the conquest, on revising the outcome of the first world war and all the rest of it, but we can't really accept that you have a private army of completely rogue, you know, sort of people who who murder and torture people on the open streets, that's not happening. But because there's a sense in Germany, especially I think that discipline order is sort of what people want. And if Hitler can't guarantee that I think people wouldn't have gone with that. Um so even they, even the army say to Hitler you need to sort this violence thing out, but they believe it's a side effect rather than a part of their ideology and of their movement, and that I think is a obviously a huge mistake to assume now because it's there from the beginning the the violence that surrounds them. But people are willing to think it's something that Hitler can get under control once he's in power. Yes. Now this even this um even the word Weimar now stands for uh the descent of a of an advanced cul ture, um with you know democratic politics. Uh it stands for the disintegration of of that into violent, radical , uh nationalist, exterminatory kind of uh politics and ideology . Do you think those parallels that are made all the time say between I mean I've seen them between you know post-Trump, uh, uh Trump America , Brexit Britain, I mean, all over Europe. If you have a look, you can see people comparing the French uh you know, Fifth Republic to Weimar Germany, and you can just find it. As a historian, do you know what do you think of these analogies? Well it does make me a bit uneasy because they're often drawn because people are trying to make a point rather than because they are kind of really taking all the new. Say more about that, because that that's fascinating. Because you are the uh you know you actually know what you're talking about. So what what's going on with the bigger I mean people uh people obviously see it as the ultimate example of of evil, of politics gone wrong, of a collapse. I mean it it remains to this day, and I write this in the book as well, the most terrifying example of a collapsed democracy that we've got in our recent history. And so, you know, it makes sense for people to draw on that, but it's often done to make a moral point to say whatever you're doing, yeah, you're f if you're if I'm saying to you you're fascist, then that means you you're as bad as it gets really. And then also I think even from people who mean well with this often comes from a from a really deep sense of fear as well, the idea that this could happen again or something like it. And it's the ultimate warning from history to say, but look, this happened before, so it's gonna happen again. And I'm I'm personally very cautious with this, and I really don't overstretch the point in the book either. I think there are lessons to be learned from it, but they are at the at the more granular level where you look at individual examples of things that happen rather than to say this whole thing is gonna repeat itself. Because I think for one thing, the big factor that is missing in our current situation is the first world war, and that I really wouldn't dismiss that as one of the biggest factors, I think, in what happened, in the sense that you have an entire generation of Europeans, particularly in Germany, who are um traumatizers the wrong word because it goes into kind of mass psychology. But it's i if you're gonna use it in yeah, if you're gonna make a mass psychological claim, traumatized Germans after World War I isn't you know it's not the worst. Yeah, but it's the it's the violence that I'm trying to get at. So this this idea that men in particular who came back from the front lines had done and seen terrible things, violence on a scale that we can't even imagine. And if you've already killed dozens of other people, um, you know, then then life has a different value and a different meaning to you. Um and you come home and you know, those street battles in the Weimar Republic, uh the fact that we could now even uh you know imagine what it's like to live in Berlin and to see a machine gun nest in front of your doorstep. Yeah. Which is what happened in the 1920s, or politicians get murdered, actual ministers, former ministers get assassinated. That that's not normal, but people at the time and people at the time don't think it's normal, but they have a higher tolerance threshold for that degree of violence, I think, than than we would even begin to imagine, certainly not in the West uh today. And I think the other element is this constant I mean the subtitle of the of my book is Life on the Edge of Catastrophe because that's what I'm getting the sense from the diaries and from the letters at the time. That people permanently felt like their lives were teetering on the edge, you know, be that because even if you weren't at the front lines, if you were, say, a a mother who stayed at home and suddenly like child mortality goes up, female mortality goes up . Um you have people know about the Spanish flu, but there's also a huge tuberculosis uh epidemic going around at the time. So people are constantly, you know, you start coughing and you're wondering whether that person is still around in a year's time. It's life's really fragile. Hyperinflation, I mean, once you've had the experience that all your savings, life savings, are that like literally wiped out within weeks. Money has no value anymore. You just, you know, you just don't know any certainties from one day to the next. None of that is compared comparable to the moment that we live in now in the scale and intensity of what people had in the 1920s. So we may say, yes, we have inflation, we have a cost of living crisis, we have wars going on again. Yes, there are similarities there, but they they just don't compare in scale and in the way that it all came together as a perfect storm really in the 1920s. So I mean, are we uh I mean to stretch analogies maybe to a ridiculous point, but I've seen more people suggest recently that our our situation is more equivalent to the pre- World War I world, where you have a kind of breakdown of um a globalized system into a world war, but you know, our actual lives are not deeply unpleasant or marked by violence in the way that, you know, Germans in the 1920s were I'd go with that as a closer comparison in the sense that people also felt that there was a degree of crisis, also a degree of stasis in that, you know, politics had become quite polarized, certainly in Germany before the first world war yeah. And in Britain as well. And in Britain as well. So you get a a kind of stalemate situation where you can't really solve the political problems of the day, even though you theoretically can, because the financial and economic means and so on are there, but the political consensus isn't and that's certainly comparable in that sense. I would say again the big difference there is that we know what came afterwards. Right. We have knowledge of you know the the first world war, the second world war, just the sheer scale of what industrialised warfare means and what we can do with our technological means now and how that I think that knowledge was lacking and that was one of the biggest reasons why people underestimated the threat of the First World W ar, I think that was looming then was because they had nineteenth century wars in mind when they went into the First World War and then they were obviously a different scale and uh in in nature very different to what came afterwards. And I think that there's value in that knowledge. I wouldn't be a historian if I didn't think it was worth sort of studying the past in that sense. So you know, neither of them are direct comparison to where we are today . Um but I wouldn't go as far as to say we can't learn from history, of course we can, but it has to be I think specific examples and patterns that we can see where we can draw meaningful comparisons there. So I think before we go to the break it',s worth going into one of those going into some of those. I mean, when you were researching and writing this book, did you see these moments where the the the terrible outcome that that did prevail in the end with the rise of of Hitler to power, were there moments where you thought, ah, that was that was preventable? There were certainly moments where I thought um where you where you recognize patterns that we see again today and where you think maybe there are some lessons in that. So for example, my my main guy in the book who I follow all the way through is a is a bookseller or bookbinder by trade, uh Karl Weirisch, who's just your everyday, ordinary, lower middle class guy running a shop in Weimar. And he is not particularly political. He certainly doesn't see himself as a political man. He just kind of, as most people do, lives his life, tries to set up his business. look after family and so on. And I think maybe that leads to a form of almost losing sight of what's happening around you. You kind of try and live with the politics that are happening to you rather than trying to have some sort of impact on it or an input on it. And it's in it was interesting to me that b despite the fact that he's quite apolitical and you really don't see much political commentary in his um diary . That changes once Hitler comes into power for two reasons. A is such a big thing. You can see that this is really something different to what's before, and that's part of the appeal. So he doesn't comment on the previous elections and that he goes, oh it's 1928, the elections just happened, here's the results. That just doesn't feature. It's just not important enough to him to to put it in his diary. And then in 33 you suddenly you find this entry where it just goes, oh and now this young new chancellor has come into power, a Hitler, um and we are now all hope that finally Germany is going to get a grip and everything is gonna get better and you think no Karl Where's this suddenly come from Well how do you feel when you uncover a document like that? Yeah, it was odd because his area is so detailed and obviously I read it in order. Yeah. You kind of read it and you go along and you just don't see it coming. There there's no way that it gives you kind of a an insight into what he feels up until this point. And that was clearly crisis had clearly reached a level at this stage where he suddenly becomes interested in politics because it has a direct impact on his life, what he feels it will do. Yeah indeed. And you also see he buys a radio in night like right on the cusp of this. So basically for Christmas nineteen thirty two he buys a radio and then Hitler comes into power a month later in January nineteen thirty three. And that in a way again is quite similar to what we now see with social media in lots of ways in that it brings politics into his home and suddenly he sits there he, listens to events that are happening in Berlin, he listens to the speeches that Hitler delivers, but also to cultural programs, to things that connect him to what's going on in the country. And in a way, the pattern is similar to people kind of sitting there with their phones on their sofa and suddenly you have politics and political messaging directly in front of you, uh mixed in with with entertainment and with other things. The reason why you pick up the phone may not necessarily be because you want to know what laws are being discussed in parliament right now. You may want to watch like funny cat videos. But there's Nigel Farage. Exactly. So that's not saying Nigel Farage like Hitler, just in case everyone's. But that that is pretty much what happens to Carly. He sits there, he buys the radio, he says for his son. So because they have cultural and entertainment programmes on there and he thinks it's good for his young son to listen to some of the stuff also like music. He's very much into classical music, so he wants his son to be exposed to that. But then obviously there's gonna be I don't know when Hindenburg dies in nineteen thirty four as as the German president, he listens to the to the state funeral and to the speeches delivered there because it's big news is politics. So that was something for instance that really reminded me the the kind of impact that mass media has on the way that that we perceive politics and some of the patterns. So going back to the idea that he's looking after his own family and then suddenly politics does have an impact, whether he likes it or not. And then it's at that point only that he's beginning to take kind of an interest in that. And even after the war, at no point does a diary indicate that he's taking a personal um or that that there's any personal responsibility for for what happened. He doesn't deny German responsibility at all. He actually goes to the concentration camps later on once they turn into museums and memorial sites. And he says, you know, our German downfall, how how it really kind of gets to him and how disgusted he is by what he sees there. So there is a sense that Germany is responsible for this and he's a part of that. He doesn't deny that. But when it comes to his own responsibility, he kind of just goes, you know, we're just small individuals in a big system. Like, what am I supposed to do? And if he contemplates whether something could have gone different at all, it's always in the sense that could he have saved his own family somehow from the terrible fate that enveloped them. Could he have maybe moved house or something to to a place that was safer or it's it's it's on a very small scale and that's that really is something that maybe we can take away from that is this idea that if we all just live in the moment and everyone just focuses on their own little small world, you lose sight of the bigger picture perhaps and um it allows basically politicians to go ahead with something that may not be what people want, but people don't focus enough on it to to to speak up or to do anything about it . Stay with us, we're going to take a short break, but we'll be back after this . Okay let's speak a bit about um you mentioned sort of post war Germany. Your last you've gone in a funny chronological you haven't gone in a chronological order. So your last book, um, Beyond the Wall was about life under the GDR. I mean, do you see 1945 is another year zero in German history. I mean, were there any continu ities between the period you've just written about and the last book that you see in German in German life? Yeah, I mean those continuities I think are sometimes underestimated in the German context because German history does come in these weird parcels. I mean there are very few other national stories that you can just say right, on this day one state ends and one chapter ends and then the next one starts the next day. So in you know in German history you got the German Empire, then the Kaiser abdicates in nineteen eighteen, you get the Weimar Republic, then Hitler comes into power. It's almost kind of a specific date each time when one part ends and the next part part starts. To me with this book, it was particularly important to me to go beyond 1933 because I don't think that story ends there. Yeah. In nineteen thirty three you don't have the Second World War. There isn't Auschwitz, there isn't the Holocaust. You know, that there were moments there where things could still have changed and and gone very differently. And the same I think in a way applies to you know German division and in nineteen eighty nine and nineteen ninety when people assumed oh this is the end now, the end of history that is proclaimed for the entire world. Germany takes that incredibly seriously because it hopes that reunification is the end of its own terrible twentieth century and kind of the end of punishment really for the Second World War division, but also the end of German dictatorships and you know a bright future lies ahead and people just assume that that was it. And I say in at the end of my East Germany book or at the end of Beyond the Wall in in my so conclusion, this is more like 1871, the first kind of unification of Germany in the sense that the first German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck didn't assume that you suddenly, you know, that that people suddenly go into this new Germany, you know, there's a tabula rasa moment, and you start again and suddenly you wake up and feel not Bavarian but German. That doesn't happen like that. And neither will East Germans suddenly feel Konrad Adenauer's their their, you know, founding father or something because he isn't. And so that, you know, is is perhaps the bigger lesson now of the German history is that yes, you do have these extreme um moments of complete change, but people live through them, they adapt to them, they do things with them, they take that on board for their own lives and the traces of the history that came before they don't just suddenly go away because you know there's a there's a change in in the political history of the country. Is it fair to characterize the reaction to to that book, Beyond the Wall, in Germany a as um controversial in some way? I don't you know. I don't see myself as I just see you as a controversial. I don't think listen viewers just see you as a controversialist. But it it generates a it generated a huge debate in Germany, didn't it? It did, yeah, and I could see why, certainly in hindsight. Um I mean I'm what I was trying to do with the book is treat East Germany as a serious chapter of of German history. I'm sort of saying it's not just a cautionary tale or something that you can break down to a history lesson to say, Okay, this has happened now, now it's gone, let's forget about it and let's just kind of study it under glass sort of thing. It's it's away from us. But it's actually part of people's biography, it's part of their lives. Yeah. Hence why I I start the book with Angela Merkel, the arguably the most famous East German. I'm working on it, but because she said in in one of her speeches and offers, you know, you can't just dismiss People often do that meaning well, so they say to her, Oh, you've done so well politically despite from being from East Germany or despite the ballast of this past, as as one publication put it. And she was just saying it's not ballast, it's not like a heavy weight that's on my shoulder. She wasn't in nineteen eighty nine, was she? Precisely, that was her point. She said it's half my life you just described as a heavy load I'm supposed to shrug off. Um so that you know, feel she feels like that that was my approach there. Then clearly something hasn't gone right in the way that we tell the story because it needs to be part of German history for better or worse, better and worse, as it were. So that was what I was trying to do with this. But that's that's a controversial thing in itself because it breaks up the post-war consensus that Germany had. Story of 1949 as a as a zero-hour moment is an entire success story and the positive continuity story. And East Germany becomes like a footnote or a dark kind of subchapter to that. And I'm sort of lifting it up then. I'm saying no, they're both part of the German story, and they're both more complex than the traditional um narrative has it. And that was the controversial, but I'm basically uh putting No. But it the one certainty that Ger mans have is to believe that what is currently there is good and that started in 1949. And doing anything to question that or to say it's actually more complicated than that, I can see why that creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of um aggravation. Do you think that the that book in a way played into some of the anxieties in Germany right now? Because you know the latter part of Merkel's period in in power and the subsequent years. You know, it hasn't Germany like Britain, you you wouldn't say is having a particularly happy time as a country. Um did did you somehow fall into the c kind of current anxiety within Germany about Germany itself? I think so. I mean it's certainly a time period where Germany and I think that in that respect it's a bit different from Britain and and France and other countries in that it's had a success story since nineteen forty nine and it looked as though the system it had set up, terms of its economy, its social contract, its politics, was stable and it worked. So it may have gone through small periods of uncertainty. So say for example, unemployment under under Helmwood Call in the nineteen eighties was seen as the first time maybe where the there's a little kind of deviation from the economic miracle that that was there before. But even the 1970s oil crises, West Germany got through those better than a lot of other states . And so now I think we've reached a point where the very economic model itself, the export economy , the mechantillism of the whole system, the idea that you just buy cheap raw materials from Russia, China and other places, make expensive things like cars and washing machines out of it and sell them to the rest of the world. Where that in itself isn't working the same way anymore. And so, you know, you could do the same with politics. There was kind of an ironcast rule that no political party to the right of the Conservatives will ever exist again in Germany. And now we have it not just existing in the AFD, but as you know, the largest party then they can make now with the with the ruling conservatives. And so that all of these uncertainties have suddenly come in, and they're not just temporary kind of blips, but they put the entire system as was into question. And I think writing something that now begins to shake the very foundations of the postwar narrative at a time when that's already up in the air. Um I can see how that um creates you know kind of controversy and people aren't entirely happy with all these things that they were once firm believers of to be um kind of up for negotiation again. Now followers of your um Twitter slash X.com uh profile will know that you're back in Germany quite a lot, and you often um delight us with your pictures of German food. Everyone likes the sausage. Everyone likes the sausage, everyone likes the white asparagus. I'm always I'm always made hungry when I see this. But you know, you're going back to Germany quite a lot, you do a lot of work, research, lecture in German y and so on. Just your sense of going there regularly. How do Germans feel about their country and where do you think Germany is going politically at the moment? I mean, I'm finding it quite disturbing also going back in regular But living in Britain because it gives this kind of stroublight effect when you go to Germany, you sort of go there, you see a snapshot of it, you go away again and then you come back and you see the next snapshot and you're not immersed in the bit that happens in between. So you don't get kind of the boiling frog sort of scenario. Yeah. But you go in there, you realize how hot it is to stay in the metaphor and how it's getting hotter and hotter and how uh anger and disaffection is um escalating over time. So that is that is disturbing. And because I'm from the East, you sort of end up you know visiting family, friends in the East more often as well, which is perhaps comparable to the north of England um or to to other areas that are, you know, kind of more disaffected as it were with the political mainstream than than others. So in the past when I've done this and when I've pointed this out in the British media or on social media, people would say, Oh, it's because you're from the East, you're always reporting come the from the from the most angry part of Germany, as it were, it's it's not normal, it's not it's not how the rest of the country feels. And now we can see that actually it was kind of the canary in the coal mine really in in the sense that we can now see the same trends going into West Germany as well and into becoming mainstream kind of across the country. So that is something that I've I've noticed over time is that uh those things that were seen as Eastern anomalies are now really very much part of the national story. Um and I think the other thing is that people feel that unlike the 1920s, perhaps to go back to that comparison , these problems are fixable. That's how people feel. They get frustrated with politicians, not because they see that there's this giant crisis that is just there and nobody can do anything about it. I think that was, for instance, the difference with COVID at the time, where suddenly you saw support for the government going up during COVID. People suddenly Angelo America, who was still in power then, had suddenly had like amazing popularity ratings because people rallied together and they saw this as an external threat that they had to sort of deal with. Whilst now things like energy problem s, um things like you know cultural policies and so on, the eco- the economy even, people feel that politicians should be doing things about people expect reform and other um, you know, kind of just political change on a on a level that is quite drastic, quite bold, and what they're seeing is tinkering and that's that's annoying to people and that's why I think this anger is very much focused on kind of centrist politicians at the moment, because they happen to be in charge of it looks like they're not doing very much. And that seems to be escalating where people were frustrated and grumbling for a while. Now there's outright anger and it's boiling over. Do you think that um last ly, do you do you think that there's any comparison that could be made between the the period you've just written a new book about and the contemporary German experience or is is the contemporary something else? No, I think the comparisons are in the patterns rather than in the specifics, if that makes sense. So for example, the idea that boundaries are pushed on say a political level and people are outraged for moments. So say for instance when the AFD first got into double digits in the East, it was seen as a a kind of breakthrough moment and people were saying, but it's okay because it's just in the East. And then they got used to that. And now suddenly we have figures in West Germany. We we just had um regional elections in two West German states and the AFD got around twenty percent there. Those were figures that would have been shocking in the East just a few years ago. Yes. And people would have then said, okay, this is bad but it,'s at least happening just in the East and we can sort of live with that now. The big story wasn't actually so much EAFD. People were saying, oh, it could have been worse, you know, they could have got even more. And the focus was actually on the mainstream parties and why they hadn't done so well. Um so I think there's getting used to the idea of you know something quite drastic happens and then people look at that and are shocked for a moment but then the next thing happened and the next thing happened and that escalation, I think, is something that is not dissimilar to what people saw in the twenties. So when we look at things now and we study this in history, we think, oh my god, that's extreme. But people who lived there at the time didn't necessarily feel that way because they just got used to something else, something else. More incremental isn't. Yeah. Yeah. I I mean certainly feel like that in Britain as well. Um, Katya, thank you so much for coming to the to the New Statesman, to the new the new society podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. You've been listening to the new society with Will Lloyd and Katja Hoyer. The podcast will be back next week.