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Intelligence Squared
Weimar and Hitler: How did fascism take hold in Germany’s historic town? With Katja Hoyer
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Katja Hoyer
hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. Today on the podcast we explore one of the darkest and most Important questions in modern history. How did fascism take hold in Germany? Through the story of the historic town of Weimar, historian Katja Hoyer reveals how a center of culture, art and democracy became a gateway to dictatorship. From the promise of the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler and the shadow of Buchenwald, this is a conversation about politics, people and the choices that shape history. Our Host today is Dr. Sophie Scott Brown, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Let's join Sophie now with more.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Hello, welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Sophie Scott Brown and I'm talking today with Katya Hoyer. Katya is a German British historian and she's currently a visiting fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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Podcast Advertiser
She.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
She's also a regular columnist for Zeitung and a regular contributor for Bloomsburg and the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph. Now, you might be familiar with Katya from her previous books, particularly beyond the War, which was an exploration of life behind the Iron curtain in the GDR between 1949 and 1990. But today we're going to be talking about her new book, Life at the Edge of Catastrophe. So I'm really excited to meet Katya. Katya, hello. Welcome. Welcome to the. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm looking forward to chatting with you. So firstly, Weimar, I mean, wow, Weimar has a really almost of mythical status in a lot of modern history writing. And it's just, it is such a richly storied phenomenon and I think this is not just for Germans. It's actually come to stand as something, as a modern parable very much for this idea of the collapse of what is ostensibly a liberal order, which obviously has so many degrees of resonance right now. And it's also attracted a lot of really quite high profile historical attention. Right, so there's Peter Gay's famous 1968 Weimar culture outside the outsider is insider. All of these books have, as indeed does your own, quite suggestive subtitles, I'd argue. Then there was Detlev Pukurt's the Weimar Republic, which was even more on the nose. The crisis of. Crisis of classical modernity. So you entered into this really quite thickly mythologized storied space. But you do so in quite a different way because you're not just giving us Weimar the myth, Weimar the Republic, you're giving us Weimar the place. And I was wondering, first of all if I could draw you on what drew you to kind of re examine the Weimar myth via Weimar the place. And how do you feel that allowed you to illuminate some different angles for us. Katia.
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Katja Hoyer
Well, thank you for having me. First of all, I'm very pleased to be here and to get a chance to talk about my, my new book. What I was trying to do differently, I think, is to not view this interwar period as a sort of abstract, top down political or social, economic history, to just look at sort of the big developments, as it were. Because I think not only has this been done time and again in different ways, but also it's. Well, it's got its place, obviously, but I think in terms of us understanding how ordinary people responded to these big developments, and also not so ordinary people, kind of politicians and artists and so on, it helps getting down to ground level and really kind of seeing how they responded to those big developments. So I wanted a specific place and a specific group of people to follow throughout the entire interwar period. And I figured Weimar was a great place to choose for this because so much of this history actually takes place there. Many people outside of Germany don't even know that there is a town called Weimar, because the Republic has, as you say, sort of taken on this name and become this almost mythical conceptual thing that's almost detached from the place itself. But it is where the Weimar Republic was founded, hence the name, and is also a place that's associated with German high culture. And that's what makes it so attractive to so many people in the interwar period, to kind of search for meaning, to search for a new relaunch of the concept of what Germany actually is. So they go to Weimar. Lots of different groups, from the far left to the far right, really, and everybody in between choose to focus their attentions on that place. So it seemed to me that the people who lived there had a bit of a frontline view, really, or front seat to the history as it unfolded. So it seemed a good place to choose to follow people's fortunes in that time.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
So it really is the kind of ideal location to sort of Weimar itself, to examine the Weimar myth. I think that's, you know, such a. It's such a lovely juxtaposition, but just for us, kind of those of us not so familiar with Germany, can you just tell us a little, just orientate ourselves a little bit more? So whereabouts in Germany is it, you know, what are the kind of standout features, you know, sort of just help us find our way, as it were?
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Katja Hoyer
So Weimar is almost literally in the heart of the country, and you find it referred to that quite often the sort of cultural heart of Germany. So it's about halfway between Munich and Hamburg. So Munich being in the sort of far south and Hamburg at the north, also east, west, it's almost exactly in the middle. So therefore it's even just logistically speaking, a place where people often meet as a kind of conference town with lots of hotels as well, because it's already, even before the first World War, got that sort of reputation as being both culturally and physically in the center of the country. It's quite a small place. So at the time that we're looking at, it sort of starts off with about 35,000 people. So it is more of a town than a city. And it certainly feels that way. It's very compact, everything is within walking distance. You know, as you arrive kind of at the, at the station, you walk down about a 20 minute walk into the town center and then you're in quite a quaint oldie worldy kind of place with cobbled streets and timber framed houses, lots of grand, elegant villas. It's really quite a pleasant place, lots of greenery, there's sort of several large parks that are all interconnected. I say in the introduction that one writer once joked that this is really not a town that has a park, but the other way around, you know, because it is such a kind of just a pleasant place to be as well. And that's also one of the reasons why many people choose it. And then lastly, I should add, it has this long standing reput as being a cultural center. That's because many famous German poets, so for example Goethe and Schiller, lived and worked there. Later on you've got composers, for example Bach and Liszt, who spend time there. Friedrich Nietzsche dies in Weimar, so leaves this kind of legacy there. So it's almost like a who is who of European thought and creativity, whose lives are all one way and another kind of interconnected with this town as well.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
So I mean, again, it's kind of like it's such a symbolically charged space as well to look at this sort of very symbolically charged myth. It sort of reminds me, I mean, I was wondering, did you have any kind of inspiration like, you know, from other historians who've sort of taken this approach? Cause what sprung to my mind, a lot less kind of high culture and glamorous, it has to be said. But Guy Otellano's sort of study of Milton Keynes is a alternative lens into Thatcherism for exactly, for similar sorts of reasons. Like you're saying you've got a space which just packs so many different things in so you can't sort of cast it like your ultimate bellwether town, if you like, like it's, it's if you know, you look at that and you get, at least in microcosm, a little taste of all the wider kind of intersection of factors that are, that are going on in wider Germany. So did you have any inspiration inspirations or was it just the draw of the place itself? I guess. What kind of inspired the concept does it learn?
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Katja Hoyer
It's a bit more personal for me in that I was a history student at Jena University, which is only about 15 minutes on the train from Weimar. So whilst I was there I used to go to Weimar quite a lot. And there's the stark contrast between what Weimar wants to be, namely the town of Guten, of Schiller and of high culture. And that's how it feels once you're in the town center. But if you walk in as a student, when you arrive there by train is that you walk past the so called Gaul Forum, which is this huge Nazi party headquarters, vast and kind of neoclassical, very stark, very oversized for what Weimar is. And there's such a big contrast to this kind of quaint oldie worldliness once you're in the old town. And you have to walk past it because the Nazis placed it there deliberately so that you would walk past it when you come from the station. That really clashed a my mind as a history student when you're already kind of hyper aware of these things. And that never really left me, that idea of this kind of juxtaposition of high culture and Nazism. And then there's also the Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the largest on German soil, just on the doorstep. So again, this is something that you visit obviously as a history student kind of studying nearby. And this closeness of really everything that marks the interwar period is quite something when you're physically in that space and when you've got a mind that's that way inclined anyway.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
So sure, these rich intersecting layers and also just, you know, as a historian, just this sort of consciousness of how these big, seemingly quite abstract ideologies, how they actually get into people's daily lives in bricks and mortar, in architecture, in the locations and spaces, as you're saying, that deliberate choice of positioning which then reorientates how you travel and move through the town. But obviously we're historians, right? So we've done space. We need to talk about time. Cassia, One of the ways, really interesting ways that you approach this kind of re examination of Weimar is by using all these different overlapping time maps. So on the one hand, you take what I think we would call an annals approach, a chronicle approach, year by year, literally 19, 20, 21, so on through to 39. But within those years, what you have is quite a lot of vignettes of really intense moments or patches of people's lives that you move around this really rich, varied cast of characters. But then contained within, you know, sort of containing all this movement are these sort of still these parts which are periodized and theme and thematic. So, and your themes, I mean, I think I'm right in saying you start with, you know, roots and how it came about, and then you move to struggle and then crisis and then decisions, and then darkness. That's actually quite a different kind of organization to how other historians have done it. They've been very much more emergence, consolidation, crisis sort of thing. So could you just tell me a little bit about how conscious you were of using these different kind of timescales and how you felt about sort of allowed you to illuminate certain ideas or themes which maybe have been a bit more marginalized?
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah. So I tried to stick with a kind of strictly chronological approach. And it's quite rigid in that sense, in that I move year by year. It's almost like a chronicle of the town between 1919 and 39. And that's because I wanted to see people as they responded from one crisis to the next, as they responded to these events. Because ultimately, you can't take their prior out of the question. You have to kind of know, for example, that somebody's already gone through hyperinflation, then experienced a few years of stability, and then the Wall street crash hits and the Great Depression unfolds. And if you did that just as a, say, economic history, you'd sort of forget all the other things that are happening in their lives and what difference that makes to their own personal circumstances. So, to me, it was important to keep sort of the character stable, as in, I'm following sort of the people that I've identified through their diaries and letters and other sources. But I wanted to make sure that everyone can follow their stories, you know, as you go along, kind of as they unfolded, for those people, to make it as immersive as possible. I realize that that is quite an unusual approach, but the idea was really to place readers in that space as sort of the literary equivalent or the historical equivalent to a Fly on the Wall documentary. Like, you're not making anything up. You're not adding anything. But also, I've Tried to keep my own analysis and interference with the reader's experience kind of to a minimum, so that I really place people in that space almost as much as that as possible, surrounding them by the people and the places of I'm at the time. Because I think even as readers, what I'm trying to take into account is that we all come to this story with very different backgrounds. And I can't preempt how someone is going to read that book when they are a historian themselves or if they are, I don't know, a postie or a shopkeeper or whatever. They may all have different experiences. And so the idea is that rather than placing my own perspective over the top, I'm trying to create an entire human tableau, basically, that people can see for themselves as they go in there. So my role there was in curating this entire thing in a way that makes it sort of understandable what was going on at the time.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Sure. That's such a great expression. I think that covers it really well, this sort of tableau, because when you're reading it, the experience of it, it is quite, almost disorientating because, you know, you're going through the years, yet you're so intensely in. In people's lives with them. But in some ways you sort of. Even that kind of. That year structure sort of seems to slightly melt away from you in a really interesting. And I suppose, you know, I mean, obviously it's a great way of sort of, I think, coming to, I think, some. Some issues and themes that we'll definitely kind of pick up a bit later on in our chat about, you know, about the extent to which people know or grasp sort of wider things going on around them and how those things get into the fabric and the. The actual texture of daily, daily life. But then I'm still interested that, you know. Cause I think, and obviously this is an approach we've seen used elsewhere, like, you know, these sort of verbatim, very not quite verbatim, but led very much through the eyes of the subjects and not trying to overlay or overanalyze or over determine their experience, but let that lead and speak for itself. And it's incredibly effective. And yet you still are making certain kind of structural choices with periodization. And like I said, you. You take quite a different approach to what other people, how other people had sort of characterized the Weimar Republic largely, you know, sort of as this sort of, kind of. It's a very much a rise and fall structure. So it comes into being, okay, that's A bit bumpy, but then it has this sort of glowing, sort of glorious moment and then, and then it sort of meets disaster, namely the crash. And then it's all kind of downhill after that. But do you feel like by focusing specifically on Weimar, the place that actually what you were reading compelled you to take a different kind of approach to how you characterize these periods of time and the kind of transition from emergence through to kind of Nazism. And obviously that regime, I think that
- [18:36]
Katja Hoyer
timeframe makes a difference more than the place. The fact that I don't stop in 1933, but the fact that it goes on to 1939, because I felt that this kind of idea that it's all over once the Nazis are in power, that's sort of the nadir. I think that's a bit misleading because the Nazis themselves certainly feel in 1933 that this is still all quite shaky and they need to consolidate their power. They have no idea how people are going to respond to some of their very extreme policies. And so we don't start in 1933 with the Second World War in Auschwitz. We start with anti Jewish boycotts, with the idea of the Hitler Youth being kind of, you know, expanded. But people aren't forced into it straight away because again, they have no idea how people would respond to that. So to me, opening this by kind of the second period, kind of really going through the entire interwar period from 1919-39, you come up with a slightly different arc because 1933 isn't an idea. It's 1939 when the Second World War begins. Because I'm kind of arguing in the book that even then there was still a chance, you know, this kind of idea of the subtitle Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. I think even then there was still a chance to pull Germany back from that brink. Had people respond in a different way to the Nazi regime once it's in power. I don't think basically it's all over.
- [19:59]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Yeah, the most striking bit of it, the fact that we tend to sort of think, you know, there tends to be that kind of knee jerk assumption, like, oh, well, from 1933, the writing's on the wall, as it were. But I think that's actually such an important theme in the book. But actually, no, nothing's for certain at any of these points. And it's not just a case of how, you know, Nazis are able to gain a foothold into power, but actually maybe the biggest story is just as much how they're able to actually hold onto it and consolidate it. So I think that's a sort of really kind of fascinating way of kind of extending, enlarging and kind of reconstructing this sort of idea of that interwar Weimar period. But, you know, we have to move on, I think, to a bit, to look, to talk a bit more, in a bit more detail about some of these incredible characters that you have got appearing in the book. And again, I'm a big fan of the historian Robert Darnton and his book the Great Massacre had this brilliant chapter about this anonymous bourgeois bourgeoisie. A bourgeoisie sort of examines his city or something like that, and he manages. Darnton stumbled across this incredible diary of this very ordinary person who just happened to write in wonderful, excruciating detail about life in his city. And Darnton's larger point is that when you take this sort of immersive worm's eye view of a place from someone participating in its sort of daily life, it's such a powerful and transformative impact. It's sort of challenging to you as a historian as much as to the kind of histories you want to, to tell. So sitting at the center of this fantastic story that you're telling is Npeta. You're going to have to correct my pronunciation here. Carl Weyrich.
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Katja Hoyer
Perfect. Yep.
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Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Yeah, Carl. And this incredible diarist who just, we follow him and he really is sort of very much at the heart of this story and he is doing an amazing work, bang up job as our kind of every man or every person who isn't sort of strongly ideologically positioned. He's quite ambiguous. He's trying to make kind of strategic, tactical decisions based upon his own life. The events in his own life are not just absorbing the larger processes going around him, they're also intensely personal. We follow him through some incredibly heartbreaking tragedy, particularly at the end. I won't give anything away, but he's really quite, you know, we get very involved in the fortunes of his family. So tell us a bit about how you discovered Karl and how he came to play such a kind of vital, driving role in this story.
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah, that was really sheer luck. As you said earlier, historians sometimes just sort of stumble upon diaries that are just kind of pure gold dust, as it were. And that was certainly the case here. So I basically, yeah, I mean, yeah, I went to Weimar once. I had the idea of going through a sort of, you know, different range of people and I wanted some ordinary ones and some extraordinary ones. And so I went to Weimar, to the town archive and just said to the Archivist, you know, this is what I want to do. Have you got any ideas? And any historian will know that the archivists are really. You have to have them on your side. They. They know what they've got far better than you'll ever be able to find anything directly. And so he came out with B.O. box after box of people's lives. There were sort of, you know, as a baker, a registrar, actresses. It was really quite, quite fascinated. Teachers, students. And so I started researching. I got to a point where I was almost kind of despaired because you have so much there. And then, you know, it's kind of just birth certificates, business documents. It's a mess. I mean, you don't get given somebody's story as such. You get. You get the. The documentary remains of what's left of their lives. So I was sitting there trying to piece different stories together and really being quite overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it, because Weimar in particular attracts a lot of people who think of themselves as important and so they leave a lot of stuff as well. Yeah. And then, so one, one day, and I was really quite lucky with that, I'd already started researching, he sort of contacted me and said, I've just acquired this diary. You might want to have a look at this because it's brilliant. Not only is it incredibly detailed, kind of a line. Line record over many, many years, but also it's typed, which again, as anyone will know, basically, you don't have to decipher the. The ins and outs of what they are trying to say, because basically Carl is a book binder and he sold typewriters and he's fascinated with all of this kind of stuff, sort of the idea of books, of letters, of fonts, of that sort of stuff. So he basically typed his entire diary of. On his own paper and bound his. Bound this book together as one book. But it's very obviously. And this is also where it's great. It's very obviously not written with the perspective of ever being published. Even when he has moments of where he becomes quite infatuated with the Nazi regime. And later on, after the war, he lives in East Germany, because that's where Weimar ends up. It would have really been quite beneficial to take some of that stuff out or change it, and he doesn't. It's very obviously written under the impression of the time and not really trying to justify anything or putting a different spin on it. It just sort of says, in 1933, for example, oh, and now a new young chancellor has come in and his name is a Hitler, you know. And I sat there and thought, no, Carl, because as you say, there's no sign really of him being particularly ideological or politically interested. And I suppose that makes him quite typical of many people at the time. But yeah, this combination of being quite frank, not overly self analytical, of just wanting to have a record for his own sake really off of the things he did and saw in his lifetime makes this quite a good source I think of the time. And he's right in the middle of Weimizer's shop. Sets up a stationery shop in 1914 and it's literally right in the center. So history does happen literally on his doorstep.
- [26:21]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Well, I mean he's such a compelling and really sort of great person to be able to follow. But also he is surrounded by some other. You've got an incredible cast of characters and they're all doing some quite heavy lifting to illuminate different elements of the kind of changes and the histories going on around them. So we've got the Schmidts, obviously, Rosa and Arthur Schmidt. Maybe if I hand over to you, if you want to sort of pick out a few of your particular favorites and what you feel that they. Why you wanted to include their stories too, maybe starting with the Schmidt.
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Katja Hoyer
Yeah, no, they're quite an interesting couple. So she is from a Jewish, German speaking Jewish background from Eastern Europe. And he is an old. Comes from an old Weimar Protestant family and they meet interestingly enough abroad. So they're both kind of working on a cruise ship before the First World War which is quite unusual but that's I think part of the Zeitgeist of what we now call the Belle Epoch as well, this idea of traveling. And basically they meet on a cruise ship and set up a hotel together in Alexandria. And that's. That obviously becomes quite difficult when the First World War begins and the neighbour blockade sets in. So they sort of both retreat to Arthur's hometown in Weimar and set up there after the First World War again running a hotel together right by the station. And the reason why that story is so interesting is that their hotel is where Hitler stays during his early visits to Weimar. So it's a nice neat but not particularly fancy hotel right by the train station, therefore quite useful. So whenever Hitler comes to town in the early, he visits in the mid-1920s, he basically initially stays there before he moves to the more illustrious and more famous Hotel Elephant in the town center. So here you have a Jewish woman who's basically serving drinks and food and accommodation to the Nazis as They consolidate. And if she hadn't been Jewish, you would have sort of thought, you know, she's at the very least a bystander to that history, if not even a facilitator, because they had events, not just. He didn't just sleep in the hotel, he also gave sort of talks there. And it's very obvious early on in terms of what the ideology entails. And he wouldn't have known that she was Jewish because she was very assimilated, very secular, and lived sort of what her granddaughter would later describe as a sort of patriotic, nationalist almost life. Actually, one of her sons, so half Jewish man, later on joins the Wehrmacht as a pilot, which is quite, quite stark when you think about that. So, you know, stories like that that really complicate and blur our lines of the roles that people took at the time. Does that make her a victim, a perpetrator, a bystander? Probably a little bit of everything. And that's one of the stories where that really starkly, I think, highlights that maybe taking the simplistic view that many people have of the time period, taking that and breaking it out is a very useful exercise if we are indeed to take anything from that period.
- [29:45]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
And it's not just people as well. I mean, there are the sort of. There are sort of institutions that play sort of quite key symbolic roles in this landscape that you're building. And one of those, obviously, perhaps in some ways it's the absolute symbol of everything that's modern and experimental and progressive. But then, as you mentioned earlier, the other sort of institution lurking on Weimar's doorstep is Buchenwald, the concentration camp. And again, the epitome of everything that's reactionary and repressive and ultimately very sinister about the Nazi regime. So again, maybe, I mean, sort of, if you could. Could talk a little about some of the. How these institutions play in and reshape this landscape.
- [30:29]
Katja Hoyer
Yeah, I think they, you know, those two examples are the most stark examples of how Weimar really encapsulates this struggle for the German soul almost that happens between the interval period. So, you know, apart from. We often think of the Republic as chaos and as something that never really took flight as such, but really there was a huge amount of optimism also in the early 1920s. There was a feeling that the First World War had, as catastrophic as it was, sort of wiped the slate clean. The Kaiser abdicated, you have a new German state that's completely open, what that will look like. First ever completely free elections, including women being able to vote. In 1919, people get very excited about that. And you see all these kind of political education evenings and women in particular really wanting, taking this extremely seriously and wanting to inform themselves before they go voting. And I think Bauhaus taps into that. The idea that you could create, you know, not just a new form of art, but they really had grand ambitions about reforming the entire way that people lived. They wanted to design, for instance, modular housing that you can prefabricate in factories and then kind of take out and put together in different modules. So whether you want, say a two bedroom bungalow or a six bedroom mansion, it can all be prefabricated from the same elements. They designed furniture. Many, yeah, many things that we now take for granted. So things like continuous kitchen worktops, you know, really useful things so that you can move about the kitchen and use it in different ways. And also cutting down the sort of, you know, ways that you walk around in the kitchen to the bare minimum so that women had more time to do other things as they did in the 1920s. All of these are really progressive ideas we now take for granted, but that were quite revolutionary at the time. And the fact that Gorpio is the, the Bauhaus founder also thinks Weimar is a great place to launch that revolution is quite telling, I think. And then just a few years later, really you get people like Hindenburg and Ludendorff and later on Hitler also imprinting on Weimar to launch a kind of counter revolution, a conservative and an even far right revolution to change Germany. And again, they saw Weimar as the cultural heart of the nation. So in a way, later, Buchenwald, that's not a coincidence either. And there had already been concentration camps, one Dachau outside of Munich, and then the next one was Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin. And so again, Weimar lies right on that axis, that north, south axis through Germany. And to have another middle point there, the decision was made to place it on the outskirts of Weimar. And then interestingly, the only opposition you get from that is from the local Nazi group in Weimar that isn't opposed to the idea of a concentration camp, but they really do not want it named after Weimar or even the Ettersberg, which is the hill that it's on. And that's what it was supposed to be called concentration camp Ettersberg. And that's very closely associated with Goethe because he went sort of picnicking up there and worked up there and took inspiration up there. And people really didn't want those two things associated. So it's the Nazi, the local Nazi culture group that writes a letter of complaint and says, well, fine, put a concentration camp there, but can you call it something that is completely disassociated from Weimar? So they call it Buchenwald, which simply means beech forest, and is kind of the most neutral, common, lowest common denominator that they could come up with. But that tells you a lot about the morals of Nazism as well. When people sometimes say, well, it was just the Zeitgeist, it was what it was like. No, even the Nazis had a very strong idea that what they were doing wasn't morally right and they didn't want that associated with the high culture of kind of Germanness. And so that trying to draw a line there between the two, even if it's physically close together, was clearly important to them.
- [34:21]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
Actually, that's. I mean, that point's perfect. What I'd like to sort of move on with and that some of the kind of underlying themes of the book, as I read them to be. And one of them is exactly what you're describing, this question of knowledge. Because obviously that's one of the main things that comes up again and again, like Nazi Germany, not just Weimar Revolution, but Nazi Germany in general, has become almost a cipher for that question with, you know, how much do people know? What can you reasonably say that people knew or understood of what was going on? And then it's a tendon to question, which is of course then about responsibility. I mean, what did you feel writing this book that, you know, well, how did you understand what people knew about what was going on? And then, you know, kind of. And then in conjunction with that, you know, sort of what can we say about the responsibility of different groups? Particularly the responsibility. And that's how you sort of start the book with that kind of. Of when, you know, with the sort of American response like the German people are now asking us for help when they sort of facilitated, et cetera, this. This terrible atrocity. Did someone like, you know, can you say that for someone like Carl, you know, what do you feel now having gone through this process, gone through this, you know, sort of history with your. With your subjects rather than on top of them?
- [35:44]
Katja Hoyer
Yeah, that's a key question I kept asking myself as well, you know, especially as the. The concentration campus is a particularly stark example, since it's there on the. Literally on the doorstep in walking distance. Carl is actually a keen hiker as well. So every time he's got any sort of life crisis, I found that quite remarkable. We think of these big events, you know, like hyperinflation and whatever as all encompassing things. And then you just see Karstari going, oh, I just went out for a long hike today and felt much better for it sort of thing. And the Ettersberg, where the concentration camp is, is a common sort of just a Sunday outing kind of destination where people walk up there. Weimar itself, the area around it is actually quite flat and you have the one hill on the outskirts. So people go there for the views, for hiking in the summer, sledging in the winter. And Karl does this often even before the camp is there. So I was reading through his diary thinking, how is this going to change once you got a concentration camp on there? And the answer is, it doesn't. He still goes up there. Many of the sort of footpaths and things are closed off because they didn't want people to get too close to the camp. Particularly as later on you get sort of outbreaks of diseases and, you know, typhus and things like that. So they. They close the immediate vicinity off. But everyone knows that that camp is there. So at one point, for example, when there's a cholera outbreak and the entire area around it is kind of shut off, Carl goes up there. He's quite frustrated with various things that are happening in the town and he just wants to clear his head and he goes up. And then I found this line in the diary that just said, oh, and because of the stupid concentration camp, I can't even now properly go for a walk anymore kind of thing. But it's such a throwaway remark that it gives you the idea really that what he thinks is happening there is like an open air prison sort of thing. So people still have the idea that concentration camp, the term comes from kind of the British policy in the Boer Wars. That's what people associate with the idea of an internment camp for political opponents. And when the communists get taken there in the sort of early period, particularly in 1933, in these big first waves of arrest, you find many people cheering for that and saying, this is great. Somebody deals with these troublemakers and it's not me. So they just see it as an extension of the prison system. So they do know. You find children in Weimar taunting each other and saying, you know, if you don't behave, you'll end up in Buchenwald. And, you know, that's very much a common knowledge thing. To go a step further, even there was a rumor because the concentration camp didn't have its own crematorium to start with, so it had to burn the bodies in Weimar. And the Weimar town council agrees to that. So they have a direct knowledge of how many bodies are being produced, for lack of a better word, how many people are dying in Buchenwald. Because they constantly have to sort of charge the concentration camp for the cremations. There's a kind of fixed fee per body. And you see people kind of ordinary civil servants, the mayor, everybody else kind of being in the know of what's going on there, because the body count racks up. And so there's this rumor that goes around Weimar that when one of the carts comes down from Buchenwald with the bodies on the back, that apparently it tipped over on the cobbled streets and bodies tumbled out of the back. We don't know whether that's actually true. But the fact that those rumors were going around tells you that people knew that something was amiss up there and that people were dying en masse and that those bodies were taken down to the crematorium also. Just the sheer number of people that were being burned. The cemetery is quite close to the town center. So people complained about the thick black plumes coming out of the crematorium, kind of. Of the whole. For the whole day. And you can really tell that people had an inkling that this wasn't good, what's going on there. And then thirdly, the train station was used Weimar, the ordinary Weimar train station was used for the prisoners to arrive because Buchenwald didn't have its own. So you have scenes, particularly after the pogroms, the November pogroms of 1938. You have scenes where suddenly 10,000 Jewish men are taken up, up to Buchenwald. They all arrive at the Weimar train station, incidentally, right out of. Outside of Rosa Schmidt's hotel. So she would have seen that from her window, how people were lined up, beaten, shouted at, bullied onto lorries and then taken up to the. To the concentration camp. So, you know, that tells you that there was a knowledge of what was going on there. Do they know the abject horror that took place there? I don't think so, because you get genuine shocks, shock when people are being dragged up there by the Americans in 1945 to see the piled up bodies. The horror, the. The evidence of torture. And you do get genuine kind of a repulsion, shock, realization what was going on there. I think people just didn't want to visualize it. I think that's probably the only explanation I can find for that, to sort of know that people are incarcerated there, that they're dying there. But that doesn't mean that you can kind of psychologically visualize really what exactly is going on there and what this actually means for fellow human beings, because people push that away from them. And that's not a justification, that is just an explanation, I think, of how people were able to reconcile their ordinary day to day lives with this sort of stuff happening on their doorstep.
- [41:09]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
So it's almost a question of there is a knowledge and in some ways getting into these forensics, these really kind of like these sort of almost of, as you're saying, almost of casual, trivial kind of bureaucratic statements or sort of the complaints that are being made about smoke. And actually they're telling you, they speak so loudly, they're telling you so much. And yet there's this question of the extent to which we choose to maybe understand what we know. And I mean, E.P. thompson has this sort of famous quote when he's sort of trying to kind of rally people's sort of political commitment, as it were. And he sort of says it's so easy to get lost in the bric a brac of everyday life and to dimly know something, but never to fully appreciate what it means. And I think that's sort of, I mean, that's such an interesting thought experiment for a historian to have to kind of try and grapple with the fact that there is knowledge out there. You can't disguise or, or hide that. But it is interesting how in the flow of everyday life we are able to kind of almost disassociate ourselves from what we do actually know. And that sort of leads me to my final, my final question, if I, if I may. And that's obviously Weimar's been doing this amazing, really good work for, as a, as like I said at the beginning, a kind of parable for how, you know, sort of, of liberal, ostensibly liberal orders with all the kind of best aspirations and progressive optimism, how they collapse and how we kind of almost sleepwalk through that process. And obviously what your book does is really interestingly challenge and renew kind of ideas of what was happening in Biomar, what processes were actually taking place, this collision, this sort of really ideologically kind of of pluralistic space and all the things that are going on in it. So is there anything that sort of looking at kind of your reimagining of that viama space, is there anything that we can be taking away from that for our present moment? I mean, obviously no historian loves this because we all just say, well look, history doesn't repeat. That's not what, you know, this is not a forecast, whatever. But would you think is There anything that useful that we can use to think with our current kind of moment, moments of crises with, from this much more layered and textured and nuanced account that maybe the original rise and form myth doesn't quite give us.
- [43:45]
Katja Hoyer
I think what you just said about this idea of being kind of so immersed in your day to day life of trying to just grapple with different crises. They may be personal, they may be kind of big, economic, political, whatever. I think that is the key takeaway that I took from studying this is that Karl is a classic example of that. He worries about his shop, worries about his, his child. He just wants to get through this. He's not a political person at all. And then basically once you do that and you withdraw yourself every time something bad happens, he goes hiking, as I say, that's like his retreat. And, and that, that's what keeps him sane. But on the flip side, it also allows a regime like the Nazis and bad actors basically to, to use the void that that absence of mind creates to do things that Kyle would never have have agreed with had he been put there and asked like, do you want people to be treated that way? And the most obvious example I could find was that he's genuinely quite shocked when the November pogroms happen. And because he's quite religious, he takes this as a very, very bad sign of things to come. So he looks at the persecution of Jews and he writes in his diary that this is Goethe's Lesterung, as he puts it. So blasphemy against God himself. That's how he puts it it. And he says basically nothing good will come off that if you treat fellow humans like that. Does he do anything about it? No, he doesn't. He kind of withdraws once again into his own sphere. And it isn't just fear. There's, you know, this is often what people think. You know, what, what were they supposed to do? They would have just ended up in a concentration camp themselves. But the Nazis were very acutely aware, each time they broke another boundary, how people responded. They had, you know, agents feeding back details about the public mood. Obviously you don't do opinion surveys in a, in a dictatorship, but they try and work out how people feel about things and where there are signs of resistance or upheaval, they actually take policies back again as well. So when you take for example, the idea that initially they allowed so called privileged marriages, so marriages between Jews and non Jews to basically be less severely affected by anti Jewish legislation because they knew perfectly well that if you take somebody's spouse away from them or maltreat them, that causes problems. These are the most assimilated Jews. They have often converted to Christianity. They are part of society. You take them out and people will be far more aggrieved about that because it's their own family member or their friend or their neighbor. Then they will be about Jewish communities that are further removed. So they start with them and that's again something. When they find out that actually not much happens, there's not much resistance, they take it further and further and further. That's why I think it's so important to follow this line last sort of pre war period as well, up to 1939. So my biggest takeaway for our own times from that would be that we still, I think, have a tendency to just say, I can't watch the news tonight. I'm just going to watch some like, throwaway television or whatever, or go out with my friends and get away from it all. And that I think puts the voids out there for people to use because they see that there's no pushback, no outrage, no, no discontent or dissent against what you're doing. And it's not the grand gesture so much. It's the fact that if you're genuinely appalled by something, you're not going to comply with it in the same way you are going to grumble about it. And this is basically, even in a space such as a dictatorship, there's still a degree of public space still left where that is being picked up by dictators who even dictators even are, are aware of the fact that they can only push things so far. So that would be my main sort of takeaway is to stay engaged with what was going on, have opinions on and form opinions on it, talk about them and try and act accordingly within your own means that are available to you, which are different from the next
- [47:43]
Dr. Sophie Scott Brown
person's and know quite clearly you know, how far you know where the lines are, how you know sort of as you're saying, this was an incremental process of boundary crossing, boundary crossing, boundary crossing. Maybe we ought to be a little more defensive of some boundaries and a little less defensive of others, maybe. Kasia Hoyer, it's been an absolute pleasure and a joy to talk to you. Life at the Edge of Catastrophe is out now, available online and in, of course, all the very best bookshops I've been. Sophie Scott Brown, this is Intelligence Squared. Thank you very much.
- [48:20]
Katja Hoyer
Thank you. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and edited by Mark Roberts. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.