Life on the Edge of Catastrophe

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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson. And today I am delighted to be welcoming to the show Dr. Katya Hoyer. It is wonderful to have you today.

Katja Hoyer: Thank you for inviting me. I’m pleased to be here.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So, I always like to begin these conversations before we get into what you do and write about with a little bit of a grounding exercise. I ask people where they physically are in the world as they’re doing this podcast. I will begin. I usually say that I’m in my chilly East London flat, but today I am actually not. You can tell that I’m in this dark mood lighting, which is a hotel in Nottingham. So I am in Nottingham for some work and pleasure and have been enjoying the surprisingly rich history of Nottingham. Not that it shouldn’t be interesting, but I didn’t realize that it was the home to everything from Boots to D. H. Lawrence to Robin Hood. So that is where I am speaking to you from. Where are you speaking to our listeners from?

Katja Hoyer: I am in Norfolk in rural Eastern England where I live and people sometimes joke because I’m originally from East Germany that I’ve sort of made myself an Easterner again and I again live in the part of the country that is sort of looked, you know, down upon sometimes with a bit of amusement about how that’s where all the strange people live. In a way, I guess I’ve replicated my German upbringing, I suppose, now in the United Kingdom living in the rural East again.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, there you go. It’s interesting, isn’t it? The connotations that “East” have because London also has something of that feeling about East London versus West London. When I first moved to London, I was at a friend’s wedding, and I was chatting with her father and he asked me where my husband and I were planning to live. And we told him where in East London and he went, “East London, that’s where the smoke from the chimneys blows.”

So it’s interesting where we find ourselves in the world. So before I dive into asking you about your two fascinating books – you are a historian and an author, and I think we both, at least institutionally, are housed at King’s College London – tell us (other than what I have just shared) a bit about yourself and your work.

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, so I’m a historian of Germany, more modern German history, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century history. And the interest comes, I suppose, from being German myself and from having grown up in Germany. Times got quite interesting, really in the sense that big history was happening right as I grew up. I was born in East Germany in the GDR in 1985. And so I was a kid really when everything changed. And when you grow up in the aftermath of all of that, it’s odd, you know, even as a child, you’re from a different world compared to your parents and your grandparents who talk about stuff and names and acronyms and things that you’ve never heard of because they’re all part of a different Germany that they lived in. And so I guess that just fostered an interest in German history from an early age. And so I went to university, studied history, and then ended up in the United Kingdom eventually. And now I still write and think and talk about German history often for international audiences.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So you’ve published two books and your third book is coming out quite soon. I think it will have maybe just released when we release this podcast, or actually, I think it will just be releasing. I could ask you about many of them, but the one I want to ask you a bit about first before we get into your new one is Beyond the Wall, which was a Sunday Times bestseller. And you wrote this about the period of post-war East Germany, as you were just talking about: the wall coming down and the cultural changes that came about with that. Could you just tell us a bit about that book and what, perhaps, was the most striking thing to you that you found in the course of the research for that book?

Katja Hoyer: So I called it Beyond the Wall because I was trying to write a history of the GDR that wasn’t just about the things that people associate with it – the Berlin Wall first and foremost, but also the Stasi and the repression. All of that is in my book, because of course it was a dictatorship with all those features, but I think if you reduce it to that, you end up reducing the history of everyone who lived in that state.

I mean, ultimately it existed for over four decades to a grey, pale, passive existence. And I think that’s for too long, that’s exactly what happened. And so the people that I grew up with around me told me very different stories. I mean, that’s always part of it. People would say, for instance, that they weren’t allowed to study what they wanted to study or that they couldn’t visit relatives in West Germany. Those kinds of stories are part of it. But they also tell you about their work lives, going to the Baltic Sea on holiday, achieving things in their lives. And what I was trying to do with the book is to try and see if I could capture all of that. So the repression, the state apparatus, the political story, but also the day-to-day lives and the nuances in between. So that was my attempt in approaching this to try and give a full history, as much as you can do that in one book, of East Germany as a state and of the people in it.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So one aspect that you’ve written about for Plough, about East Germany and perhaps the legacy of that era, is that East Germany remains one of the most atheistic regions. I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but you wrote about this for Plough. It’s quite striking in comparison to other regions in the world.

And of course, this is a podcast series on “After Religion” and we’ve looked a lot at places where religion is reviving or where there’s interest in spirituality, even if there’s no interest in religion. But could you tell us a little bit about why it is you make a case for this in your article, why does East Germany have this sustained history of non-religion?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, so in Communism, I mean, Marx famously, you know, described religion as the opium of the people to say that this is something that oppressive agencies use to try and blindside people or to try and get them used to horrific conditions and then with the promise of the afterlife. So they have a tendency anyway to try and convert people to a more atheistic way of living – taking religion out of the equation. But having said that, it didn’t work the same way, say, in Poland or in the Soviet Union or in other states where we’ve either seen a resilience against those sorts of political measures or even a revival of religion afterwards, once those regimes had gone and countries reverted to a sort of free and capitalist society. So the fact that that didn’t happen in East Germany begs some big questions about why that’s different and why that’s special. And that’s what I was sort of trying to explain in the article.

I think what basically what happened and how it ended up that way in the first place is that just like in the other communist and socialist states, you get quite aggressive policies against the churches early on once East Germany was founded in 1949. And that’s accompanied by sort of replacement measures, so where they replaced religious festivities and rituals with secular versions. So to give you one example, instead of having sort of confirmation and being admitted as a young adult basically into the world of adults via a religious ceremony, they replaced that with something called Jugendweihe, it means youth consecration. So you can see even in the choice of words, you know, there’s still a very faux religious element to this. It’s a sacred act. You still have to go to a formal setting, usually a town hall or something like that. And then somebody, usually the mayor or your teacher will still give like a speech about how you’re now an adult and you get different responsibilities. And, you know, you’re supposed to think about what that means for your transition from a child to a young person.

And so, you know, this replaced it quite neatly. So lots of young people don’t really care about these things. What they care about is having a celebration of their life, of that transition, of doing that with your family, of being given money or gifts or cards or whatever. And so that replaced it quite neatly and you can do that with lots of different elements. For instance, my father died a few years ago, four years ago now. And his funeral was almost, even I noticed this, sitting there thinking this is almost like a religious thing, even though he wasn’t religious and we weren’t doing it in a church, but the room was similar, high ceilings, candles being put up everywhere, solemn music being played, somebody talking about his life. So you find this at every instance and that I think made it easier for people to transition away from that and, over two or three generations, to sort of live with the absence of religion in their lives. And people expected that to be a forceful process, the idea that when the Berlin Wall came down, people would suddenly go back to churches was almost expected by West Germans. And that didn’t happen. It’s once it’s gone, it’s gone. That’s the argument that I make in the article as well. It’s very difficult once people have learned to live without or have lived a life completely devoid of religion to then reintroduce it, I think it is quite a difficult thing.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hmm, that’s really fascinating. One of the interviews I did for this series was with a scholar of Christianity in China. And he talked about the history of – obviously it’s a very different history – but the Chinese Communist Party also had its way of managing religion. But it sounds like, and this is coming from someone who’s not a historian, so I’m making guesses I should not make, but it sounds like there was a much more conscious effort to both eradicate, but also imitate aspects of religion. Whereas I think early on in the Communist Party in China, it was more an attempt to manage and then erase, which I guess also comes to the fact that China was of course not a Christian country prior to the introduction of Communism.

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, I think that that matters what society and what religious context you start off from. One of the things, I think, that furthers what happened in East Germany is the fact that it was the Protestant part of Germany. What West Germans, I think, often didn’t quite understand in that context is that they were a much more Catholic orientated society. So West Germany ended up with a 50:50 proportion of Catholics to Protestants, therefore a very different religious landscape, whilst the East had, even prior to that, been at the very end of Protestantism anyway, whitewashed churches and, you know, plain sort of wooden pews, that sort of thing. And so it had already reached a point, I think, where the actual institution itself perhaps mattered less to people than it would have maybe done in a very Catholic environment, such as say in Poland, for example. So I think it’s quite a different environment in any case.

You add Nazism to that, you know, in twelve years of another radical change to the way that people were supposed to think and do things and also an attempt to eradicate religion, if in a very different way, but it also mattered less to the regime than it did to previous ones. And then also just the sheer catastrophe of the Holocaust, the war, and everything else, many people started to question their beliefs anyway. So right at that point when you come in basically and people are already in that transition phase where they’re not entirely sure how to make sense of the world you get a new system coming in and approaching that in that way. So I think it’s quite a unique setting in that regard.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I hope you don’t mind me sitting with this just a little bit longer. I think in the article you talk about, and this was also a history that I did not know, I believe it was Angela Merkel’s history. Is that right? And it sounds like her father was in fact religious. Is that correct?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, she’s a pastor’s daughter basically, and he actually came over, they lived in Hamburg, and he decided to take up a post in East Germany to become a priest, a pastor in a socialist setting. There were, I mean, I would put him into that category, there were socialist Christians who believed that sort of the idea of socialism as a political version of sort of the “love thy neighbor” principles of kindness, of charity, of spreading that out across society, and of not placing great importance on personal and private wealth and property, that sort of thing. So there was a whole group of Christians who actually not only tolerated socialism, but actually embraced it as a political version of their beliefs.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So that did persist, but as an extreme minority in East Germany?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, it did, but you also had sort of more mainstream religion still going on. So people did, you know, carry on going to churches, but not in the same numbers. They started to dwindle, but you do still have religious communities as well that carry on. They’re largely, they are oppressed by the state in the sense that if you were in, say, a Protestant or Catholic youth organization, you were automatically regarded with a bit of suspicion by the state. It makes it more difficult to get a place at university or the career that you want because you were automatically regarded as perhaps dubious and not quite in line with what the state wanted. Sometimes they’d offer people really nice positions or jobs and then say “you can only have that if you leave the church and if you stop going to church and being part of that community.” So that was another way of doing it.

But nonetheless, mainstream religion still existed. And contrary to public belief, I mean, they did not rebuild some of the churches that were destroyed during the war, but they did rebuild some of them, including (actually there were plans), for example, the very famous church in Dresden that was rebuilt after reunification. There were plans to get there by the GDR as well, but they started with the opera because when you have a socialist regime that was the priority.

And previously that was left as a war memorial, but nonetheless, there were also attempts even in the GDR to restore some of the churches that were deemed to be valuable as historical monuments. They also celebrated the Luther anniversary in the 1980s, which is an interesting thing to contemplate that they made such a big deal out of that and invited West German politicians over for that as well. It became a bit of a pan-German celebration of Luther and his role in history. It’s complex. It’s a complex part of that legacy.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s interesting. So obviously most of your childhood memories would have been after the reunification. What was your experience of religion or non-religion in East Germany growing up?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, I mean, the point I was trying to make in the article is that I think in most of the rest of the Western world, if you’re an atheist, at some point in your life, you make a conscious, deliberate decision to be one. I mean, even if you grow up, say, in the United Kingdom in a relatively secular environment, you still, by and large, at some point, go to church, be that at Christmas or Easter, you get baptized, you go to a Church of England school or whatever.

But there is religion somehow in your life and if you decide actively not just to lead a secular life but to not believe in God, it tends to be a deliberate conscious intellectual decision and that’s very different if you’re East German. The way that I grew up even after the Berlin Wall came down, people just weren’t religious, it just wasn’t there. I mean we obviously celebrate Christmas and Easter but in very very secularized versions.

And the first time I ever attended a church service was I think when I was about maybe twenty or so. It was somebody’s wedding and I found the whole experience just odd. Like you’d seen it on TV or something but I didn’t know what to do, what to say, when to stand up, when to sit down. And I felt like a total outsider and an awkward sort of alien in that church. Clearly the only one who had no clue what to do and what to say.

And so to us, you know, this is an interesting experiment in that respect. Life was just devoid of religion naturally. There wasn’t at any point a choice involved in that. I didn’t grow up as a kid and think, I’m just going to decide that God doesn’t… and you just don’t do that. And therefore it’s not a political thing. It’s not an ideological thing. It’s just the way that the majority of East Germans still grow up and in that respect, it’s also I would say different from say China, for example, or the United Kingdom or other quite secular societies and that there’s still a degree of a residue, if you will, a religious residue of the cultural environment that you grow up in. For us, that’s entirely secularized. So it exists, but it’s there. So as I said, with funerals, for example, there’s an imitation, a secular version of what the original would have been, but it’s completely devoid of the religious elements.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So being religious is something you opt into, not something you opt out of.

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, that’s right. That’s a good way of seeing that. I mean, again, those communities exist, but to give you some numbers, for example, when I grew up in my entire cohort – there were four classes of about thirty or so kids in my school year – when we had this sort of moment of either confirmation or youth consecration thing, I remember we were all quite surprised that four kids didn’t turn up to the youth consecration thing. We were like, where are they? You know, because they’re like your friends.

And it turned out that they’d had their actual confirmation because they were part of, you know, sort of religious communities that still did that. But to us, this was so odd because, you know, the mainstream would just go and do the secular version. And that’s, you know, the sort of numbers that you’re looking at in some parts of East Germany. Others are still really devoutly religious, it depends where you are geographically, particularly in Saxony and Thuringia and the more mountainous areas you do get little pockets of mainstream religions still holding the fort as it were, but then it’s really very much part of the local tradition and culture as well.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s really fascinating. And would you say that that stayed fairly consistent, those levels of whatever you would call atheism, secularity, non-religious practice since the ’90s? It stayed fairly…

Katja Hoyer: It went further actually, so where people were expecting the churches to fill, and this is again a sort of point I was trying to make there in the article, is that people were thinking, oh this must all be state oppression, so surely now that people can freely go back to church they will do. But actually when you think about it, people like my generation having kids, if you grew up that way you’re gonna pass it on to them. You add to that the natural sort of – well, when I say natural, the wider secularization that is going on anyway, you add that on top of it and it basically has gone on since. So the levels have increased even further. That’s again, something I would say is just worth observing for wider society as well, because anywhere you do have secularization, it’s difficult to see how that will be undone.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It has accelerated, yeah. Interesting. And it’s also fascinating to think about that, as you said, as also being situated in the more Protestant parts of Germany and ways you could, whether or not one should, you could read that as a almost progressive movement towards secularization over time, though obviously, as you said, there were …

Katja Hoyer: Certainly I would say in Germany the trend seems to suggest that. So when you go to areas like Bavaria or the Rhineland that are very Catholic, you tend to find that the numbers are much higher. I want to say actually there are now more Catholics even than Protestants, whereas in Germany, whilst I haven’t got the exact numbers in my mind, certainly it used to be one-third Catholics and two-thirds Protestants. And since the borders have changed as well, that’s difficult to compare, but there’s certainly, I would say, more resilience in the Catholic communities than there is in the Protestant ones towards that.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So now I want to ask you about your new book, which is leaping forward in your life and leaping backwards in time. tell us about the book. What is its time range and what are you hoping people will enjoy about this book?

Katja Hoyer: So the book’s called Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe and that dramatic title already tells you a little bit about where the focus is. So the idea is that I’m looking at not just the Weimar Republic, but basically the town of Weimar which the Republic was named after. I use that as a focal point and place the readers in it because the idea is that I think at the moment we make a lot of comparisons to the German interwar period in that, you know, people use words like “fascist” or they say things like Trump is literally like Hitler and the historian in me wants to say no, he’s not literally Hitler, whatever he is, but that is certainly not the case. So really what I’m offering there, I suppose, is to allow readers to be almost mentally, intellectually transported into that time, into one specific place and follow a specific group of people all the way from 1919 to 1939 in the town of Weimar.

I chose that town because I think it really had a frontline seat to history during that time. So it’s not representative of German society in the sense that it’s very middle-class, very relatively well-to-do compared to the wider society. So it’s not, from a sociological point of view, not representative as such, but everything that happens in the interval period happens there. So you have the Republic that gets founded in Weimar itself, which is why the name is still there. You have the Bauhaus movement, so big modernist art movement also founded in Weimar. So it represents all this early ambition, but then also becomes an early Nazi stronghold.

Hitler is quite obsessed with Weimar and sees it as one of his strongholds and the means of consolidating his movement. So you get, for instance, the first Nazi party rally, the first formal one is actually in Weimar in 1926, before they move on to Nuremberg to the more famous ones later. So it’s really where the Nazi movement finds a bit of a foothold in its early years.

And then later on, this culminates in the Buchenwald concentration camp being set up just outside of Weimar, which becomes the largest on German soil. So it really encapsulates in one town, it’s quite a small place, only about 35,000 people, but it encapsulates in one place, I think, the idea of both the promise and the tragedy of that entire time period. And you get a bit of a kind street-level view of what’s going on at the time without … I think there’s this risk of oversimplifying things.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I feel sort of guilty saying this because it’s obviously quite a morally serious and tragic period, but it sounds riveting. It sounds like a really fascinating read.

Katja Hoyer: I hope it will be. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it? If you can get readers immersed in this time period and you get them to a point where they want to know what happens, where almost like they’re reading basically for the sake of finding out what happens next to those people that I introduced – who are all sort of real people – obviously, I’m not a novelist, I’m a historian. But the more invested you are, think the more you will think about this or talk to others about it. And then that’s the process where you can really perhaps, actually make a difference in the way that people think about that time period and about their own lives. If you don’t care about it because it’s too abstract or too far away, then I don’t think you’ll achieve very much as an author.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah. One of the things I enjoy about these conversations is that I come with my own ignorance, my own curiosity. So you can just correct anything I say if it’s incorrect and I will not be offended. My impression of Weimar is that for many years, it was a center of, as you said, sort of middle-class intelligentsia. I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about George Eliot and like, you know, when she goes off and marries, not Marius, but sort of pseudo-Marius, Lewes, who’s her partner for many years – they set off to Weimar, you know, and, and she has these very intellectually rich times.

And there’s lots of stories about that, like from folk going from England or Scotland, or even one of my other obscure intellectual interests – a figure named George MacLeod. And he was this Presbyterian, and he’s very marked by these years in the 1860s when he went to Weimar. So Weimar is, if I’m not entirely wrong, this place that you would go to do, something like salons and to learn and to write. And so my question is, was it sort of picked? Did Hitler become obsessed with it because he wanted that vibe – to be associated with this movement? Or was there something about that social intellectual environment that was also conducive to the Nazi Party? That may be an ignorant question.

Katja Hoyer: No, no, you’re spot on there. I think the appeal of Weimar is exactly what you say. It’s always appealed to people who were in search of meaning – of thought, of intellectuality. I mean, it’s mostly associated with Goethe and Schiller, those two sort of national poets of Germany who worked and lived there, especially Goethe, who I would say perhaps has this sort of status of almost Shakespeare in the English-speaking world to most Germans.

And then later on you get sort of composers like Liszt and Bach and philosophers like Nietzsche. It’s sort of a who’s who of European thought. They all have touch points in Weimar because it’s got this reputation as being the cultural heart of the country. So that’s not a coincidence when they go there in 1919 to found the new German Republic in Weimar and not Berlin. It’s partially because it’s safer and they don’t really feel safe in Berlin to meet and to draft the constitution. But also because of this intellectual history to rebrand the entire republic. So when Hitler later on comes in, it’s exactly the same thing that draws him to Weimar. It’s this idea of whoever controls Weimar controls German thought and intellectuality; and rebranding the space with his own thought was a very, very conscious decision. So you see him, for example, in the theatre in Weimar, which is where the republic was founded. It’s still called the German National Theatre for that reason. Hitler goes directly into that space, stands on the very same stage in 1926 and tries to override that bit of German political history with his own ideology. And then you have his cronies writing things like, “on the stage where once Friedrich Ebert stood” (he was the first president of the German Republic) “now Adolf Hitler Speaks.” You know, it’s a deliberate attempt to try and capture that brand of Weimar, if you will, or as you say, that vibe, that idea of Weimar and make it their own. That also appeals to the Nazis. So that’s why it also becomes a regional Nazi capital. They really changed the town quite radically in the sense that they put Nazi buildings in the middle of it. They tear down Hitler’s favorite hotel in Weimar, the Hotel Elephant, and rebuild it entirely to his specifications.

And one of his local Nazi cronies, Fritz [?], calls it “the Fuhrer headquarters in the middle of Germany.” And that’s quite telling about the position that it had both on Hitler’s mind, but also within sort of this interval era. But for the exact same reason, you find the Bauhaus there as well. And that’s what I find so intriguing about this place is that everyone obsessed over it and everybody tried to make it theirs and use the so-called spirit of Weimar – that was the sort of phrase that people used at the time – use it for their own purposes from the far left to the far right.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s fascinating. And without drawing too many precise, like, things, I think you see things like that, you know, whether it’s in the United Kingdom or in the United States as well, where there are centers of cultural or intellectual history, there’s a desire for whatever party wants to be in charge to say, this is our center, this is our place, because we are the most intellectual and the most, yeah. And I think it’s also interesting, this is just a comment … well, this is a question actually, I have a question out of this.

Sometimes in circles that I grew up in, there was this sort of idea that if you just read enough literature and listened to enough good music, that you would just be a good person. But of course, there were lots of very cultured and very intelligent, very well-read Nazis. And, and in fact, that sometimes I think accelerated their own passion, because it’s a sense of this “very important culture that we’re maintaining” and stuff. But I was curious, like, in the more intelligentsia world how was the desire to hold on to Weimar as the center of Nazism? Were there undercurrents of resistance? Was it taken on easily?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, it does make sense. I mean, within that idea of being part of the German intellectual circle, it’s a very conservative space within that. this is where people … Bauhaus is going there as a form of provocation. They’re sort of saying that we need to like blow this whole thing up. And Walter Gropius, the famous architect who founded the Bauhaus goes in there and he says, “Ha-ha, I poked a hornet’s nest.” And, you know, he does it deliberately because he knows this is the hub of German high culture, of conservative elites. And they also feel it’s a bit of a counterpoint to Weimar. So everyone who has a problem with this very experimental modernist, some said at the time, quite soulless, quite internationalist movement, everybody who’s angsty about that goes to Weimar to try and bolster German conservatism, old-fashioned literature and that sort of thing.

So I think that’s why it becomes quite susceptible to Nazism, is that the Nazis offer the conservatives a radical version of a pushback against this modernist and internationalist culture that they see in this experimentalism. So things like atonal music, abstract art, you know, Bauhaus, it’s all seen as not German and as not coming out of a deep internal German-ness. So the obvious counterpoint to that to Hitler is, for instance, Richard Wagner, where he says, you know, as a composer, he drew his music directly out of the German soil and the German sort of blood. And that’s really quite internally connected for the Nazis – race and art. And so they feel that what modernism has done is undo that and Weimar becomes a natural hub for those who want to push back against that.

So initially there are a lot of conservatives. Nietzsche’s sister is a classic example. She’s one of the core characters in my book, who sort of is an arch conservative. She’s not a Nazi to start with and actually finds Hitler quite uncouth and you know, this whole Nazi movement very sort of brutish and violent. And she isn’t initially very impressed. She says this man is more of a cult leader, more of a sort of zealot than he is a politician.

But eventually she reckons, as many conservatives do, that that’s their best bet to try and avert sort of Communism and chaos and all the rest of it and they eventually go with it. And that’s why you see in Weimar, Nazi voting figures going up quite early-on, much higher than on average across Germany so it becomes a sort of bit of an elite Nazi sort of cultural conservative mélange that all works to further Hitler’s rise to power.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So you’ve touched on this already a little bit, but there is this mood that you’ll hear people, like, compare current events in America, which is such a different place in such a different time that it’s ridiculous to say like, it’s exactly like Germany. But could you share maybe some ways in which you think it’s clearly different, but also if there are any similarities that you think are helpful as we think about the present time that we’re living through?

Katja Hoyer: Yeah, maybe I’ll start with the biggest difference. I always feel people underestimate the amount of political violence that was around in the 1920s and that comes out of the First World War. You have just an entire generation of young men, mainly, who come back from the front lines. They’ve done and seen terrible things. And, you know, if you’ve already murdered tens of, or, dozens of people on the battlefield, hundreds, maybe even, and you come back and your political opponents are there, then killing one of them is along the same lines really. It makes people more likely to commit acts of violence and that’s exactly what you see in the 1920s.

I mean, even the SPD, the social democratic party, center left party, they also have a paramilitary organization, it’s actually the largest of them, it got over two million members. So there are people out there in uniform, armed, fighting a violent battle for democracy and that’s something I think that we can’t even begin to understand – what that does to politics and that’s why you see all of these political assassinations in the 1920s as well. And that’s a big part of Hitler coming to power, apart from the legal aspects of the legal veneer that people always point out that he was elected in. But he also had four million SA men there, stood ready and intimidating political opponents too. So that’s a key difference.

And I think we should take heart from that, that even today when you have sort of right-wing populists and other extremist movements that by and large they don’t turn up with, you know, millions of men in tow who are all armed to the hilt and will sort of murder their political opponents. I think we live in quite a different world today. Where there are similarities, I think, are in many of the underlying patterns that we see. So they may not turn out exactly the same in terms of the realization of those patterns, but the patterns are similar.

So for example, this political fragmentation that we’re seeing today into smaller and smaller chunks, particularly in Europe, where there’s proportional representation causing the same problems as it did. Then you have more and more parties in parliament. The fact that people feel that they belong to their bubble or their group and they’re not talking to the other side is something that people also bemoaned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that lack of empathy for the other side, and trying to understand why they see things the way they do.

Economically, I think we have things like inflation being a problem, cost of living, not really knowing whether the economic model will carry on. So I think there are many trends that are not dissimilar to the time and therefore it’s worth looking at them and trying to see what lessons we can draw from them. But I think we should always be incredibly careful to do it in a way that’s measured and that actually applies the principle of the matter more than, literally saying this person is this person or this event is this event, because I think there’s not much point in that – we do live in a very different world today. I think, luckily, without the First World War, as the sort of terrible traumatic backdrop to our lives.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think even where there are these outbreaks of political violence, as you say, like in the United States, it’s so different, you know, having one person or even a group of people who maybe think that political violence is hypothetically an option. It’s very different from basically a whole society that is already used to it being the option and has already engaged in significant violence in their own time and that really makes a huge difference. I come from America and everyone I know in my hometown owns a gun, but they’ve never used it, right? They’re not coming from the same place and that’s not to say that guns in America are not a problem because they are, but it’s just a totally different mentality and cultural backdrop.

I think one of things that is also interesting to me and is maybe underestimated, and again, this is probably just from the worlds that I’m in as someone who’s teaching undergrads and also in the writing space, is the reaction against something like modernism or the need to save Western civilization or I think there are similar insecurities about progress and secularism and all those things.

Katja Hoyer: And the other way around, you know, to not acknowledge thatpeople who want to preserve their way of life don’t feel genuinely threatened by the changes that are happening and by the fact that they feel that they have less agency about it. And there’s a strong urban rural dimension to this, I think, that we also see today. And that was certainly the case in Interwar Germany as well, which is why Weimar is an interesting case study as a small town that’s surrounded by quite a rural area far away from any big city. You’re three hours away from Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt. I think it’s a very different place from Berlin, which is often associated with our time period, even though it’s very atypical. It’s sort of looking at London or New York as examples for the entire country when actually they tend to be the exception.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Even though so much of our media and stuff centers around those exceptional places. Since this is in our series on “After Religion,” what role did religion play in Weimar in these years?

Katja Hoyer: So Weimar itself is quite a Protestant place, and it’s very dominated by that. You, for instance, see on a national level, there’s a political Catholic party, the center party, which has pretty stable numbers all the way through because they correlate with the Catholic population, which by and large sticks with it. And for instance, you find that in Weimar they get like 1 percent or something of the vote because there’s just not the Catholic population there.

My main protagonist, if you will, in the book is a man called Carl Weirich, who’s a bookbinder, whose diary I had, and that’s why he’s sort of the center point of the book. He is a Protestant as well and quite religious, and you find that he quite often responds to things by thinking about them in religious terms. So for example, he, despite the fact that he’s initially relatively hopeful that Hitler’s government will change things, he’s not overtly political as such, but when he’s so desperate in the early 1930s, Hitler comes in, he suddenly goes, well, maybe this new young chancellor, Hitler, can do something about that. But when the outright violence against Jews is obvious, particularly in so-called Kristallnacht or Night of the Broken Glass and the November pogroms of 1938, he writes in his diary, he thinks that this is an act of blasphemy against God himself. He really uses that language and he says this is not good, this is clearly amoral, and it’ll come back to haunt us. And he sort of says that this may well be our downfall one day. So you realize that morality there comes from a religious place for people like him.

And that was quite usual, I would say, at the time still, that people drew still a lot of their morality and their sort of orientation for life from religion. He’s a book binder by trade as well, and he’s involved in a lot of Bible printing and that sort of stuff as well. So that’s part of the community. The church has also organized a lot of events still. So for example, when there’s the one awkward anniversary of the First World War and they don’t really know … so Britain already has developed this remembrance culture, it’s already becoming a thing to remember the First World War in those terms. Germany, having lost it, doesn’t really know what to do with this. So they have one in 1924 at the ten-year anniversary of the outbreak. They have this one commemoration that’s also organized by the churches and suddenly the entire Protestant main church in Weimar is full of people that reach all the way from sort social democrats to far-right, pro-monarchy, quite arch-conservative, quite anti-Semitic people. They all sit in the same church and commemorate the same event because the church still provides that umbrella for these things.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s fascinating. Well, this makes me very excited to get a copy of your book. It really sounds very engaging and interesting and illuminating. I could steal much more of your time, but I’ve already gone fifteen minutes longer than I said that I would go. And so I will end with the question that I always end with our guests, which is what is one thing? And it can be a practice, a painting, an experience, a person that reminds you that another life is possible, that helps you think creatively about how we might live differently in the world.

Katja Hoyer: It’s maybe a bit of a lame answer for a historian, but I think it is the fact that I study history. You know, have all of these events or times when you feel history is just hanging in the balance for a moment and you can see when you switch your hindsight brain off for a moment, all the different directions in which things could have gone if people had done this or that or if this and that person had lived longer or had died earlier and you just see all these different strands of history unfold for a moment and then you remind yourself that actually it went a particular way and that’s what we are studying today. But when you do that as a historian, I think it makes you very aware of the fact that we are living now at a moment that will soon be history and there are all these different opportunities and different lives possible depending on what I choose to do today.

I will have a different life tomorrow if I choose that. I think that’s quite a good way of thinking about this, that you carry on actively shaping your life, I think, in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise if you don’t think about these things, if you just go with the flow every day.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It makes you more conscious of your status and agency and in what is unfolding. Well, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us today. And I hope everyone who listens will go and grab a copy of Katja’s new book. Thank you so much and have a lovely afternoon.

Katja Hoyer: So do I. Thank you. Cheers.