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Katja Hoyer is a visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and is the author of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, 1871–1918 and Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Katja Hoyer discuss life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), how it is remembered—and whether the Wall still has an impact on German politics today.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: The bulk of your recent work has been on the history of East Germany. Why did you choose that subject?
Katja Hoyer: Well, I know it has been written about extensively, but surprisingly enough, there isn't really an accessible overall history of East Germany. What I was trying to do is make this subject accessible to a very wide range of people. That's why I wrote it in English as well, so that it can be accessed by people worldwide. I did it through telling the stories of people who lived in that state, so you can access this really idiosyncratic world and understand why people acted in the way that they did.
The other thing is that it's now become so relevant again with differing political developments in former East and West Germany. In lots of ways it helped having a debate, both in Germany and more widely around the world, about what's going on with German politics.
And the third reason is a very personal one. I was born in the GDR myself, in East Germany in 1985. I've only known this place that I'm from as a child, not as an adult. This has always intrigued me personally as a subject—going back to this place that doesn't exist anymore now as an adult and as a historian.
Mounk: Just to give a little bit of context for people. When you're talking about the ongoing relevance of the division between East and West Germany politically, part of that is the differential strengths of political parties. The traditional German political parties like the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats remain much stronger in West Germany. And these newer parties, including the Alternative for Germany on the right, but also other upstart parties like Sahra Wagenknecht's new formation, or the Left Party—which is the inheritor of the East German Communist Party—have much more of a foothold in East Germany. So there's a very clear distinction in voting patterns between those parts of Germany. Let's go back to the foundation of the country for those who may not be as up on the history of the immediate aftermath of World War II as they might be. How is it that this workers’ state in East Germany comes about? How is it that Germany ends up being divided after 1944?
Hoyer: At its most basic level, it’s a direct result of the Second World War. The Allies had to decide what to do with Germany and with Europe, and the only feasible way to manage such a large country—at least temporarily—seemed to be to split it into four occupation zones. That way, each of the victorious Allies would be responsible for administering one part of Germany. This was necessary because, unlike after the First World War, Germany was now an occupied country—it had been fully invaded. It couldn’t continue to govern itself, so it was divided. On top of that, Nazism as an ideology was seen as so corrosive, so evil, that you couldn’t simply hand power—however temporarily—back to the existing political elite. So, the country was split into four zones. Eventually, the three zones controlled by the Western powers—France, Britain, and the United States—were merged into one and became West Germany. The northeastern part, administered by the Soviet Union, became East Germany. That division reflected the broader split of the Cold War.
In the book, I go back a bit further because I think it’s important to note that there’s a long tradition of German communism and socialism. Karl Marx, who essentially invented the idea, was a German philosopher, thinker, and sociologist. So this goes back quite a long way, and many of the socialists involved in building the new East German state saw this as a chance to finally realize the vision of a socialist Germany—something that had never been achieved before.
Mounk: But those communist traditions weren't notably stronger in East Germany than they were in West Germany, right? Karl Marx was from Trier, which is in West Germany. A lot of West Germany was more industrialized than East Germany, though there were obviously strong industrial bastions in East Germany as well. So, the root cause of the fact that you end up with this communist state in East Germany and not in the other three zones doesn't have anything to do, as I read it, with political choice in East Germany. It's simply a question of where Soviet troops had reached and where Allied troops had reached.
If you put that in a comparative perspective with other states in Central and Eastern Europe, all of the places where the Soviet Union was on the ground in 1945/1946 effectively became communist through a very concerted and coercive effort run from Moscow between 1945 and 1949 or so. Anne Applebaum has written about that in Iron Curtain, for example.
Hoyer: That's absolutely right. It is a direct result of the Second World War. There's a bit of haggling and negotiations over places like Thuringia, for example, which was occupied by U.S. allies and then gets given to the Soviets as part of the negotiations about where exactly the lines should run. But yes, largely it does coincide with troop movements of the Second World War. There isn't a conscious choice by the northeastern sector of Germany to become socialist or communist; they don't get given a choice. Neither does the West for that matter, and for the same reasons, really—Germans aren't trusted to make political decisions. It's entirely the Allies' decision on what to do with the four zones to start with. They then pick political leaders according to their own model for running Germany.
Mounk: Now, there's obviously a well-documented history of the United States trying to influence democratic elections in Western Europe in that period, but you have genuinely free elections in which people in the west of Europe can make their own choices. And the communist parties allied with Moscow never won a majority in those elections. In Germany, it is true that for the very first years of the existence of a federal republic, you have significant American influence, but you also then have free and fair elections starting in the country quite quickly. You keep saying this is a result of World War II, which I think slightly erases the agency here of what happened in East Germany.
So can you tell us about how the SED, the Socialist Einheitspartei Deutschlands (the Socialist Unity Party of Germany), comes to dominate the East German political landscape and perhaps answer that question I have about whether that's really parallel to how you end up getting a CDU-run government in West Germany, or whether there's a very different kind of coercive mechanism involved there?
Hoyer: Yes, absolutely. I wasn’t trying to equate them. I was explaining historically how Germany ended up with the two different systems. And in both of these—basically East and West—the Allies decide which parties were allowed to stand for elections. That is the same in the West as in the East to start with, in the sense that Germany hasn’t got its sovereignty back at this point. That only happens later on, in the ’50s and ’60s, when Germany gets given its full and complete independence. That’s not saying anything about the people’s choice at this point. And I wasn’t trying to imply that the East and the West are equally undemocratic at all—just to put that straight.
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Basically, exactly as you say, you end up with a multi-party system in the West. The East mirrors that on paper—it kind of allows the same or similar political parties. So, for example, the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union) exists in both East and West. But in the East, very quickly, they make it clear that the SED (the Socialist Unity Party) stands above all other parties and dictates the course. And you never get free and fair elections at all in the East. They put a system in place that East Germans quickly ridiculed as “paper folding.” Basically, you just get a list of candidates on a piece of paper that you fold and put into the ballot box—and that’s it. You don’t really get a choice, or even a chance to say no to that list. In the West, a multi-party system develops. Nonetheless, even in the West, they also ban some political parties. So, you get the only two party bans that ever happened in the 1950s: the successor party to the Nazi party and the Communist KPD. Even though they’re both quite small political parties at this point, there’s just an understanding that the German people have gone through a time of dictatorship and perhaps need some time—maybe even a generation—to have limited choice within those parameters. And then it becomes clear that the economic and political success of West Germany gets people on board very quickly—and those measures perhaps wouldn’t have even been necessary.
Mounk: Tell us just technically—because that’s something that I think is quite confusing yet quite interesting—how this works. You formally have a Christian Democratic Party and a Social Democratic Party in East Germany, but it’s not a multi-party system, and you can’t really vote for them in any meaningful way. What does that mean? How do they persist without actually giving people a choice? At the technical level—say you go to vote in 1955, I don’t know which exact year there was a pro forma election, 1956, 1957, whatever—what does that look like? How is the system managed?
Hoyer: The SPD, the Social Democratic Party, ceases to exist quite early on because they merge with the KPD, with the Communist Party, into one left-wing party—and that is the SED, the Socialist Unity Party. But the other parties stay, and the idea is basically that they each get a fixed number of candidates. The other parties get fewer than the SED, and they all appear on one list of candidates. When you walk into the voting office—or however you want to call it—you get given that list with all the candidates on it. It doesn't have political parties or any choice on the paper. Then, all you do is fold that piece of paper and put it back in the ballot box to say that you agree with the set list of candidates for your particular area where you live.
The only way to register any opposition is to take that piece of paper into the voting booth behind a curtain, which you can technically do. But it is, of course, quite an intimidating thing to do because you automatically signal to everyone in the room that you’re unhappy with this. So the only way to do that is to take the piece of paper into the booth and then cross out every single name on the list, neatly, in a horizontal line. And then maybe it’ll be counted as a kind of vote against that list. So that’s why they come up with things like 98% rather than 100% agreement to that list. This is why East Germans ridiculed this process as so-called “paper folding” rather than calling it an election or voting.
Mounk: Great, thank you. Okay, so it becomes clear around 1948 or 1949 that at least for the time being, these two states are going to be separate. So East Germany has state-building to do, right? They have to set economic policies, but also cultural policies, and set up society in a new way. What does that look like?
Hoyer: A lot of these German communists had been buying into the idea of establishing communism on German soil for decades. And that never worked because the German people were never really intrigued by the idea of having that. So even when the First World War was being lost, they thought maybe this could be similar to the Russian Revolution in October 1917 and they could have something similar—but it just doesn't happen. So when they now get given this state to run, they go further than even Stalin would have liked them to go, because they think, this is our one and only chance to do what we want to do. They start very typical Soviet-style policies like the collectivization of agriculture, where rather than giving the farmers autonomy over their own lands, they create big collectivized farms. Those sorts of things were actually quite detrimental to the economic development at the time, which is why the Soviets, against their own ideology, say, can you just slow down a little bit? This isn’t working.
The Soviets want stability in East Germany, and most of all they want reparations. They don’t really care how that comes about—they just want to make sure that this partial German state functions properly. And it doesn’t under these early policies. Even within the German socialists and communists that are running the state, and the Soviet Union—there’s some disagreement over what this entity is actually supposed to be. The Soviet Union, I argue in my book, basically wants to keep the option of East Germany as a bargaining chip as well—to potentially trade it in at some point for other advantages—whilst the East German socialists, having now been given this opportunity, are keen to keep the German nation separated into East and West so that they can keep hold of their entity.
It’s quite obvious in the early years that you don’t really get one single course, but you get this fluctuation back and forth between a very hardcore form of socialism under Walter Ulbricht, the leader, and a more reserved form of something pro-Soviet, but not entirely like the model that comes from the Soviet Union. For example, the constitution, to begin with, actually looks almost exactly like the West German one on paper. It’s never implemented in the same way, but it’s supposed to look very similar so that you can, in theory, merge the two back together very easily. Walter Ulbricht, from the beginning, wants a different flag from the West, and he’s not allowed that and is told to keep the German tricolor—black, red, and gold—even without an emblem to start with; they just have to have the blank colors so that, again, they can easily be re-merged if an opportunity arises.
Mounk: That's very interesting. At some point they keep the tricolor and then put on the hammer and sickle, right? For most of the existence of West and East Germany, it was the same flag just with that addition.
Hoyer: A ring of rye, a hammer and a circle. It's deliberately different from the Soviet Union. It doesn't have a red star, nor the classic hammer and the sickle, but it does have a hammer, a circle and a ring of rye. This was to create a different thing and to create a German thing, basically a German version of socialism.
Mounk: Very interesting. This is obviously part of the history that is very longstanding—of communists around the world being driven by their ideology and thinking that they are acting in coordination with, and on behalf of, the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union ultimately being much more interested in short and medium-term Soviet interests than in the international triumph of communism. There’s an interesting and strange echo here of some of the Spanish Republicans being betrayed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What is the state-sanctioned culture that East Germany pursued in those early years, where it still is able to attract a lot of East German intellectuals and artists? Bertolt Brecht chooses to go back from the United States to East Germany rather than to West Germany. You have musicians like Hanns Eisler. You have the East German anthem, which is actually, I think, quite a beautiful piece of music, with a kind of melancholy tone—and the lyrics: “Risen from the ruins and turned towards the future,” but with an acknowledgement of the catastrophe of World War II. Tell us a little bit about that sort of culture of the early East German state.
Hoyer: I found that quite interesting—because I interviewed lots of people for my book as well—and talking to very old people now who were there at the time, I was interested to see how they felt about it. They said one of the things that was really noticeable was just how important culture was. Towns were still in ruins, cities still bombed—sometimes you don’t even have a water supply, electricity, food, all of that is still an issue—and already you get the first theatres, concert halls reopening amidst all this rubble and destruction. Many people felt that this was a chance to start again with German culture. So there’s a momentary sense of a cultural renewal and of a new beginning—also because so much money goes into this. That’s one aspect that stays the same throughout: a disproportionate amount of money is spent on culture, libraries, and literature.
East Germany also becomes a very literate society. If you look at studies that have been done on this, people read a lot across the board. I think this is one of the things that backfires in the end—because you basically raise a very confident, well-read society, and then expect them not to have a say in things, and to just be happy with the way things are. Initially, there’s a lot that attracts many artists and intellectuals as well, because they think: here’s a state that sets itself up as a new entity—not as a continuation of what came before. That’s very different in East and West Germany. West Germany says—legally and otherwise—they are the successor state of the incarnations of Germany that have come before. Whereas East Germany says they’re starting a new thing. That’s also represented in things like writing a new national anthem from scratch, rather than going back to previous traditions. But the role model is always the Soviet Union. They do look there to start with—as the way of doing theatre, music, or the cultural traditions that come from there. That changes over time as well, as East German nationalism, if you want to call it that, becomes more of a thing. Later on, there’s investment specifically in East German culture as well.
Mounk: When does that early experimentation start to run out of steam? When I look at other communist societies—and East Germany as well—there’s an obvious history of these regimes being imposed by the force of arms. And again, the closer you go into the details of how Poland turns communist, of how Czechoslovakia turns communist, the more you see the extent to which that is a history of assassinations, of imposition, and so on. But there was also, obviously, in all of these countries, a number of communists who were genuine believers—who did think that what they were trying to do was to build a better political future, a more just country. There was a broader consensus in the late ’40s and early ’50s around central planning. If you read something like The Open Society and Its Enemies—the famous book by Karl Popper—he’s arguing very strongly, along with people like Friedrich Hayek, against what was seen as the consensus of smart intellectuals in England at the time, and in many European countries at the time: that a planned economy is somehow superior to a market economy.
Then, when you fast-forward a couple of decades, you start to see a political regime that is much more cynical—in which there really aren’t any true believers anymore, in which you just kind of accommodate yourself to the powers that be, and that element of misplaced idealism—or real idealism—no longer exists. When does that start to set in in East Germany?
You have, as early as 1953, the workers’ uprising that leads Bertolt Brecht to write—but not to publish—the famous lines that perhaps the party wants to elect its own people, since the actual people don’t seem to be very supportive of the party. You have then, in 1956, the Hungarian reforms and the Soviet crushing of them; 1968, the Prague Spring and the crushing of that. For East Germany, when do you think the moment of genuine idealism runs out?
Hoyer: Well, I think it's not quite a linear movement. Certainly, when I was researching this—and I set my book up chronologically, because you can then see this back and forth—it seems to come and go in waves, in terms of how the regime responds to the people and how the people respond to the regime. The first break you mentioned there is 1953, and that was also the case when I spoke to people. Even those who weren’t directly involved in that uprising did say that in 1950/51, there was still a sense of, let’s go, let’s roll our sleeves up, let’s do this. They looked at West Germany, which had the so-called “economic miracle” going on at the same time; it developed a democracy, and became very successful with this huge consent suddenly behind Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany. Then they looked at their own regime, which was staggering and really trying to get going and failing to do so—for lots of reasons, not least the fact that they still had to pay a huge amount of reparations. East Germany paid nearly all of the German reparations for the Second World War, because the Western Allies decided not to take any more at some point and instead poured money in through Marshall Aid.
But basically, you end up with a struggling economy, a system that isn’t anywhere near as idealistic as it seems—because it makes really drastic choices. As I mentioned earlier, the collectivization of agriculture leads to a huge drop in agricultural production. So suddenly the shelves are empty, there’s huge disillusionment, and after three or four years of working very hard, it’s not getting better—it’s getting worse. That’s why you see this first outbreak. But after that—because the Soviets come in and quash that uprising, since East Germany doesn’t have any sort of security forces or army at this point to do that themselves—the Soviets basically say to the East German regime, sort yourselves out, this isn’t working, we’re not going to come in again. If this happens again, you’re on your own.
As a result of that, they run the second half of the 1950s in a very different way—focusing on consumer goods, on developing culture, and opening up a little bit. And you also see the running away of people to West Germany slow down as a result. Then the same waves of paranoia, as I call them in the book, kick in again towards the late 1950s, and repression starts again. That’s the cycle, I think, that you see repeated. Every time, people are trying to incentivize a change—that includes, by the way, people from within the regime. You quite often get opposition even within the SED itself—particularly in 1953, where they blame Walter Ulbricht almost entirely for this by saying, “Look, this is all your fault.” You see this come and go, sort of once or twice each decade, I think, until the 1980s, when things just seem completely calcified. There’s no way out and no way forward, and people become increasingly disillusioned with the whole thing and cynical about everything.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Obviously, part of the causation here, I imagine, is the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev’s famous secret speech at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—where that gets leaked—and there’s this moment of liberalization. After the moment of liberalization, things start to shut down again. I imagine that it’s that moment—when that liberalization starts to shut down again and the number of people leaving from East Germany to West Germany steps up—that ultimately leads to the building of a wall, which we haven’t mentioned yet.
So tell us a little bit about what drove that decision, who ultimately made that decision, why, and how that transformed life inside East Germany. Up until then, it was—within limits—possible to travel, visit relatives and friends. It’s really after 1961 that East Germany becomes this much more isolated entity.
Hoyer: Yeah, people forget that sometimes—there is more than a decade between the foundation of the state in ’49 and the building of the wall in 1961. In terms of traveling freely, this long border between East and West Germany—that was blocked up in the early 1950s, notably in 1952, when Stalin suddenly panics because West Germany is beginning to rearm, becomes part of NATO, and so on. He panics and says to Walter Ulbricht in East Germany: block that border up. I don’t care how you do it. Walter Ulbricht protests and says, look, I’ve got no building materials, I can’t even build housing or anything else. I don’t have an army—how do you want me to do this? And Stalin, in this panic, just says: I don’t care how you do it, but do it. So this inner-German border does get closed—the so-called green border, between East and West Germany. But nonetheless, Berlin remains open, because it’s got a bit of a special status. Berlin remains an occupied city—it’s not really part of East or West Germany in the same way that the territorial states are—and is therefore administered still by all four Allies. Any change to that dynamic might potentially upset the very fragile Cold War dynamics.
People forget that this is at the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s the height of the Cold War, really, at which point everyone’s frightened of World War III. So Walter Ulbricht keeps saying to the Soviets that they need to block up Berlin because their people are running away—particularly very well-trained, middle-class people like doctors and nurses, people that they need, effectively. They are the ones who can have a much better life, much better salaries and so on in the West. It was a brain drain out of East Germany. Ulbricht had been saying for years to the Soviets that they needed to plug that last hole in Berlin. The Soviets are extremely reluctant to do that, for the reasons I just mentioned—they just don’t know how NATO forces on the other side are going to respond. The crisis in East Germany gets so bad that Ulbricht says to Moscow: look, either I can do this now, or our state’s going to collapse. At that point, the Soviets say: fine, do it—but just be really careful how you do it.
Erich Honecker, who’s later the second leader of the GDR, is put in charge of this process. He decides that it might be best not to use soldiers in the first line because if there’s some sort of attack, you’ve suddenly got Eastern soldiers fighting Western soldiers, and from there it could lead to World War III. So he puts civilians—who are in the GDR’s many mass organizations—on the front line, including Free German Youth, the youth organization. Kids—teenagers—are asked to provide this very first border, as a kind of human border before the Berlin Wall gets built up. That’s how he did it in August 1961—literally overnight, in more or less secret action, building this wall up very quickly. From then on, it becomes incredibly difficult to travel. Only trusted people, only people close to the regime, initially, are allowed to go. Later on, they loosen this a little bit—so, for example, if you wanted to go to a wedding or a funeral or something in West Germany, you were often allowed to go. But you had to leave, say, one of your children behind, or your partner—something that would make you come back.
So it stayed difficult right to the end, even though the regime realized that this was one of its huge problems—because it was always deeply unpopular. That was the thing people hated the most: not being able to travel. Not least because it meant the regime never trusted you. A lot of people were saying: I just want to see my family. You let me go, and I’ll come back. And they weren’t trusted by the regime—ever—no matter what they did. That was also something that I heard a lot in my interviews, where people were saying: there was this permanent distrust towards us from the government. We felt we were doing our best, working hard and they still didn’t trust us.
Mounk: One of the really important elements here is that there were a lot of people who had family on both sides of the wall. People just traveled and moved in general—because of disruptions from World War II—which meant that many family members ended up in places that were different from where they were before. To some extent, perhaps, that’s because of political choices that people made—or because one sibling took the opportunity to leave for the West in 1952 or 1957, and the other sibling didn’t. That includes some people who moved from West to East. Perhaps the most famous East German alive today is Angela Merkel. She was actually born, I believe, in Hamburg—but certainly in West Germany. Her father then took a job as a pastor in East Germany. These cross-border moves were really quite common.
Then, after 1961, the ability to remain in contact with your family became radically curtailed for people in East Germany. What was the culture like? After the wall came down, I have this impression from my family—which was also on the “wrong side” of the Iron Curtain in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s, because they were thrown out of Poland in 1968—that growing up, they always sort of looked down on East Germany a little bit. But they had the sense that even in a place like Poland—which was certainly dictatorial and certainly not a free society—they had some access to rock and roll records. They had some access to Hollywood movies that were shown at art house cinemas in Warsaw. They had some sense of communication with the Western world. But in East Germany, none of that was allowed. The society was much more repressive.
Hoyer: Well, in terms of music and other things, that’s not quite the case. East Germany did have a 40-60 ratio, according to which you were allowed to play Western music. The Amiga record label even produced Beatles albums and other things in East Germany. You had the biggest rock concert ever played by Bruce Springsteen—it was in East Berlin in the late ’80s. He says in his autobiography that he’s never seen so many people in one place, because the whole area in East Berlin was flooded with people. Some estimates go up to sort of 200-250,000 people attending. So there was access to Western music. It was just that there was technically a ratio that official radio stations had to stick to. People were telling me in interviews that this was sometimes so absurd. Imagine a village disco somewhere and then the policeman coming around at midnight and asking drunken teenagers whether they’d stuck to the 40-60 ratio playing their music. This was always a thing that people did.
But where there is a kernel of truth is that Germans—being Germans—are much more prone to actually sticking to the rules, whatever they are, than people are in Eastern Europe, where there’s a much wider culture of living underneath the state and not abiding by the rules. So I believe in Poland, there’s this conspiracist sort of culture, where you do your own thing as a community, independent of what the state wants. People are quite good at forming networks and evading state authority, whereas that doesn’t really happen in Germany. So in East Germany, you had the Stasi, and also in general, a system that was very controlling. Germans, being quite law-abiding by their culture, I think were more prone to stick to that. In Hungary, they did have a lot more freedom, in the sense that people didn’t really stick to the rules. Their immediate superiors didn’t often expect them to do that either. People lived their own lives underneath a layer of the state, whereas in Germany I think there’s always this feeling that you should do things by the book. Dictatorships don’t seem to suspend that.
Mounk: Well, and part of it, I assume, is that the division of Germany always poses a greater existential threat to East Germany—because there is this literal alternative across the wall, right? Even in the ’50s, I’m sure there were many people in Poland and other socialist states who did emigrate to Western Europe or to America—but that would entail learning a new language, probably not having your qualifications recognized easily, really having to set out in a completely new society. Obviously, if it’s your own country that is divided in this way, the prospect of emigration is much less daunting. You get to speak the same language.
Hoyer: Even citizenship wasn’t an issue. West Germany would just grant people citizenship immediately—you didn’t have to go through any visa processes or anything like that. One aspect in terms of media that I haven’t mentioned is that you were able to watch West German television in almost all parts of East Germany. You were able to listen to the radio. So that was a means of communicating back to East Germany as well. If you were a dissident and were oppressed by the state, one option was that you found a West German media station interested in the story, gave them the story, and they would then amplify it. You could then watch the report again in East Germany, and it would spiral out of control. That’s something that people were able to use quite effectively.
And then of course, as you say, there’s always this looking across the border. The regime does that as well. Even the East German socialists are very conscious that no matter how well they’re able to create living conditions that are acceptable, they’re never going to match the West German version. Even though East Germany, for instance, had the highest living standards in the communist world, that didn’t mean much if East Germans are still looking at West Germany as the comparative state. There isn’t much point in saying to East Germans that they don’t have the rationing problems that they have in Poland, when what East Germans do is look at their West German relatives and ask, why am I not driving a Mercedes? So that is always a problem for the regime—the reference point is very different compared to the other Eastern European socialist states.
Mounk: Since you mentioned West German TV and radio, I want to ask you about a really interesting political science paper by Jens Heinmüller and, I believe, some co-authors. He exploits a strange quirk of East German geography. For the most part, people across East Germany were able to listen to West German radio and television. It was just transmitted through airwaves. They would have antennas to receive them. But there’s a famous Tal der Ahnungslosen—the Valley of the Clueless—which was a valley, and so it was harder for West German radio and television stations to ensure that people there would be able to get those airwaves, so they didn’t have access to West German TV. Now, you might expect that this would make people in that geographic area more loyal to the East German state, because they wouldn’t get that West German propaganda—the things that praise West Germany, and so on. What Heinmüller and his co-authors argue—using very sophisticated techniques, looking at differences between villages that are otherwise similar, that are quite close to each other, and so on—is that actually the opposite was true.
It turns out that people who were able to access West German TV actually became more loyal to East Germany. Everybody knew that West Germany was much richer. Everybody knew the failings of their own society. But if you had access to West German TV, you also saw German television news about how political parties were fighting each other, and you saw reports about crime and all kinds of social problems—and you trusted those, because you knew they weren’t East German propaganda telling you that West Germany is terrible. You saw it from West Germany’s own sources. So ironically, having access to West German TV might have been one of the stabilizing factors for the East German state. Tell us about the role of access to West German media. Technically it was illegal to consume it at some level, but to what extent was it tolerated?
Hoyer: I would say the best way to describe it is that the regime tacitly accepted it because they couldn’t do much about it. Quite often, the Stasi would use that against people. They would say that so-and-so watches West German television in order to arouse suspicion. Some people told me that their bins were searched for TV guides that would indicate that you’re watching West German television. But it was such a widespread thing—as you say, almost everybody did it—that the regime just had to take that on board and acknowledge the fact that that’s just happening, whether they want it or not. For instance, one way in which you can see that is the fact that they scheduled their own television programs accordingly. So when there was something on—so, for example, there’s a famous German crime series called “Tatort,” which is on Sunday night, which lots of people watch—they just knew there wasn’t much point scheduling anything that you wanted people in East Germany to watch at the same time—because they just knew they wouldn’t be able to compete with that.
But at the same time, it also had the effect that the East German regime put a lot of money and effort into its own programming, because it was directly competing. In the same way that Berlin has got two amazing zoos—one in the East and one in the West—because they were competing with one another, in the same way that it’s got two amazing universities, there was also now a Cold War clash of TV programs. For instance, they had this show called Ein Kessel Buntes—like “a pot of colour,” I guess—which was a variety show where they had Western musicians on. They had bands like Smokie and ABBA on the television, which was hugely expensive, given that the state had struggled with currency and things. But they were trying to offer enough in return because they knew they were competing with quite expensive and highly produced West German television. So it’s a mix between the two. Most people that I spoke to said that they watched both, but they also did watch a lot of West German television.
Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the popular culture of the state. One of the themes of your book is that you feel that East Germany is caricatured as being completely gray, as just being authoritarian, and so on. How do we balance an appreciation of 40 years of culture in a state with many millions of people trying to create art, trying to lead their lives, trying to do something meaningful in their communities—with the repression, and with the word that we haven’t yet mentioned, which is the Stasi—with the extremely strong presence of the secret police and the kind of mistrust that it bred? That not just some agent of the state might go and rummage through your bin—but that the person claiming to be your best friend might, and in many cases did, report on your activities to a state that had the power to lock you up.
Hoyer: This is one of the problems I had with the reception of my book in Germany, which was hugely controversial precisely for that reason—I don’t think that these are competing narratives. I think they’re all part of the same picture, often within the same person’s life story. They tell you, on the one hand, that they had a life. So the same person might tell you a story of oppression, but also a story of happiness. And both of these things happened in their lives, and they existed side by side. It’s often actually the people who were dissidents in the ’80s—who I spoke to a lot afterwards—who said that they were quite often disappointed with losing everything: their culture and their way of life that they had in East Germany. Despite the fact that they were anti-regime, they didn’t want to give up all the memories, all the cultural aspects that had developed.
This metaphor that I use in the book is that of a mosaic—and as clichéd as that may be, I think that is what it is. It is a complex history that’s not just the 16 million lives that were in it, but also—even within those lives—has got so much complexity that you can’t say just because the Stasi happened, a culture exhibition that was suddenly accessible to everyone didn’t happen at the same time. Or just because you had oppression and a dictatorship, it didn’t mean that women, for the first time, weren’t enabled to go to university en masse, to be able to lead their own lives outside of the home—that kind of thing. I’ve tried to put some of that complexity in the book without saying that these stories contradict each other, or that one can’t be true because the other one is.
Mounk: I have two instincts about that. One is that I agree with you—that people lead meaningful lives and are able to do things of value in deeply unjust regimes. There are many people who led meaningful, and perhaps happy lives in Franco’s Spain or in the Soviet Union itself. I’m sure even in a worse dictatorship like North Korea, people do their best and struggle to have stable marriages and to have friendships and to raise children and to find meaning in their lives. It’s not obvious to me that that is unique about East Germany—but perhaps it doesn’t have to be.
The other thought I have—perhaps I’m a little bit more skeptical—is to ascribe some of the broader cultural and economic changes that happened just about everywhere in the second half of the 20th century to an achievement of the East German regime. So it’s true, for example, that art became a lot more accessible than it was in the early 20th century—but so it does in West Germany, so it does in most societies, where the level of education goes up, people’s income goes up, and so it becomes much easier to access all of that. You talk specifically about women participating in universities en masse for the first time—that happens in West Germany and all of these other societies as well.
Hoyer: Not in the same way at all, especially with West Germany. Today still, Germany’s education system is one of the most socially skewed education systems in the world. In the last international PISA study, it came out among the lower ranks in terms of how easy it is for somebody from a lower social background to rise through the ranks. Again, this is complicated in East Germany, because they were so focused on getting working-class people into university that they often pushed middle-class people out—who deserved those places just as much in terms of their academic achievements or their ability. They just said, you don’t fit in socially, or you don’t fit in politically because your father is a dissident or you’re involved in the church. So that’s unfair. At the same time, they did manage to get a much broader social basis—both in the academic ranks and in the army. These aspects I wouldn’t take away from them.
Take women in the workplace: by the end of the GDR, you’ve got over 90% of women working full time. In the West, it’s a third—and most of them work part time. There’s still an understanding that, ideally, you have one breadwinner and one person staying at home. That’s still the ideal family model, which is why you’ve got splitting of taxes, for example, that way in West Germany under the conservative CDU party. That was the idea. I’m not saying one is better than the other. But you do get very distinctive and separate pathways there for how to lead a society.
Mounk: I accept that when you talk about, for example, women’s participation in the workforce, I think there is a distinction. But when it comes to social mobility, I think that’s a little bit less clear in the data. Part of that, as you’re saying, is because there are also significant segments of the East German population that are discriminated against. I think more broadly, there’s a question of where you get a real moment of social mobility as societies industrialize and become much more affluent. In the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, you had strong social mobility across the West and in many socialist societies as well. When you think of some of the famous politicians of the West—whether it’s Bill Clinton, who grew up famously in Hope, Arkansas, in very poor circumstances, or Gerhard Schröder in West Germany, who is the son, I believe, of a single mother who’s a cleaning lady—you get those kinds of stories of social mobility. Then, in part because you have a much bigger middle class, I think for various reasons, social mobility becomes less likely later on. You get a decline in social mobility in the ’90s and 2000s. But I don’t know to what extent that is a unique East German story.
Perhaps we can situate this a little bit more broadly in this German debate about Ostalgie. You have movies like Goodbye Lenin! that come out and indulge in a little bit of that. How do you see that? There’s an obvious way in which people are nostalgic for the food, the cultural products, and so on of their youth. There’s something very natural about that. Again, there’s a question about whether that then soft-pedals some of the injustices of the regime. How can we reconcile the natural nostalgia that people might have for a particular chocolate they ate when they were 10 years old, or a particular TV show that they grew up watching—with a due recognition of the fundamentally unjust character of that regime?
Hoyer: I think it is a really tricky balance to strike. For too long in Germany, there was a fear that associating those products with the state—or with private lives under the state—would lead to a kind of whitewashing or rose-tinted view of the past. So anything like that was treated with complete suspicion. To give one extreme example, the German supermarket chain Rewe—the second-largest in the country—brought back East German–themed soups. You could buy cans of NVA-Suppe, which was the soup the East German army made in its field kitchens. It was just a pea soup, but because it was cooked in field kitchens, it had a really distinct, thick, stew-like taste. People are quite nostalgic about it because it would usually show up at local festivities—say, your town’s 750th anniversary—and it was part of the experience, part of the memory. So when Rewe brought this back a few years ago, including extremely nostalgic labeling, the Stiftung Aufarbeitung—the official organization responsible for dealing with the GDR legacy—filed a complaint and asked the supermarket to remove it from the shelves, arguing that it was glorifying a dictatorship. That’s the kind of moment where people respond quite emotionally. They say: this is part of my youth. If I want to experience that taste again, it doesn’t mean I want a dictatorship back. There’s a real sense of mistrust that people push back against: just trust me—what I want here is to remember my childhood, not to bring back the Berlin Wall or the Stasi. Basically, people need to be able to remember their own lives. Angela Merkel expressed this powerfully in her last major speech in office in 2021, which is also where I begin the book. She said, “I’m not just speaking as Chancellor here, but as one of 16 million East Germans, when I say: our experience—both positive and negative—must count for something.” We can’t all pretend our lives started in 1990. And I think that’s the key. Finding that balance. It can’t be up to the state—or state institutions—to tell people how to remember their own past. Because that’s when you run into resistance, and people will respond very sensitively to it.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Katja discuss the fall of the Berlin Wall and its impact on German politics today. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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