Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Katja Hoyer
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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Katja Hoyer opened her recent history of East Germany, “Beyond the Wall,” with an anecdote about former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose East German background, Hoyer said, was “only a political asset as long as it remained in the background.”
With Merkel having just published a major new memoir, Hoyer came on The Lede to discuss Merkel’s remarkable career and Germany’s turbulent recent history with New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai.
“Whatever experiences people have had, whether they were positive, negative, in most cases a combination of the two, they are part of people’s lives.”
Merkel, notes Hoyer, spent the first 35 of her 70 years in the German Democratic Republic, the formal name for East Germany, and “is willing to talk about it in much more detail than she was before. During her 16 years as Chancellor, she barely spoke about it at all.”
Like many former East Germans, Hoyer says, “she felt she was belittled or looked down upon for being East German.”
A prejudice certainly exists against East Germans, notes Hoyer. “When you grow up in East Germany, you’re being judged on what you did. The idea is, if you weren’t a dissident or an opponent, you were playing along with the regime and that makes you a part of that dictatorship,” she says.
This was an issue Merkel had to contend with throughout her career, says Hoyer. “She had to make a point to the West German establishment to say that she did live her life in the GDR, but she was also a pastor’s daughter, growing up in a very religious environment, which was unusual. Therefore she was able to say, ‘I lived in a sheltered world where I was able to carve out my niche and my life without being tarnished by the experience in any shape or form.’”
Regarding her own book, “I was trying to take the [GDR] seriously, put it into its historical context, look at how it evolved in the first place as a product of the Second World War and then look at the experiences of the people that lived in that state,” says Hoyer.
While the book found plenty of praise abroad, “a small group of GDR historians found it to be too positive about the East and accused me of nostalgia, or ‘Ostalgie,’” notes Hoyer.
This experience, Hoyer notes, was shared with Lea Ypi, whose book about growing up in communist Albania “was very positively reviewed in the U.K., and then in Albania itself it was seen very critically by people accusing her of nostalgia,” says Hoyer.
Nonetheless, argues Hoyer, a study of Germany’s east is as important today as ever. The region is now a locus for right-wing activism. The far-right AfD party won a state election in the eastern province of Thuringia earlier this year. “East Germany is like the canary in the coal mine,” says Hoyer. “They respond more sensitively to economic crises and political stagnation than people do in the west because they are socially in a far more precarious position than people in the west are.”