Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while punishing dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life was in the GDR, Tyler’s dark day trip to East Berlin in 1984, books under the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whatever. Farewell, Lenin! he found the right time, why it didn’t happen coincidentally that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of Communist intrigue and the culture of German nudity, what Merkel’s East German background did and did not give him as chancellor, why East Germans are still significantly represented in leadership positions today, why Jewish culture and spiritual hearts always remain, why German Jews remain strong and remain strong. how much Weimar citizens knew about Buchenwald, what really killed the Weimar Constitution, how to rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underestimated German intellectuals, comfort after the collapse of the German economy, which side of the country. The Weißwurstäquator he can choose to go on living, and more.
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time do I have?
COWEN: Americans often think that the proportional representation system has allowed very small groups to enter government. That’s one feature, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are many factors, I think. Some of them are internal errors, like the proportional representation you just mentioned. One is often referred to as Article 48, which was a type of emergency in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and other democratic bodies during emergencies.
If you just follow this path, the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you just think that there were all these mistakes in the constitution, so it would not succeed, I don’t think so because if you look closely at this, you see all these kinds of forks in the road how things could go differently. I don’t think the plan is set up to fail. I think these things contributed to this injury. I think there was probably a certain level of ignorance in 1919 to think that you could have this very democratic system without surveillance.
If you think about how long it took the Founding Fathers of America to sit there and fix the whole place, and “What if we get a crazy president, what do we put in there to try to protect against that?” Those kinds of things. That process was so fast in 1919 that they simply installed a liberal democracy, allowing the extremists to boycott it. That’s part of the reason. I think another group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system was born. It is basically born in disaster. It comes after the First World War and goes into economic crisis very quickly. That will never go away despite the so called gilded years. All of that was supported by American money, even in the stable years of the mid-1920s. The time it falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the foundation of the economy removed again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of CrisisI’m trying to say that’s how most people felt. They were literally balancing all this time, indeed, after 1919, on the brink of their own disasters. It was always unemployment, inflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There is the Spanish flu. There is tuberculosis. It’s always something or the other. People do not see that the system gives them stability. I don’t think there’s really a sense that this can work for a really long time.
People think, half-heartedly, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually died in 1933, years before Hitler came to power, as a democracy. You are taking on a system that, I think, has already ceased to be democratic, even then. Like I said, I could talk about this for two days and cover the features. It’s complicated.
COWEN: The military intervenes in politics early and often.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the state of the Prussian system in the past, it is often said that “Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with an empire.” That self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they call the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also tend to forget that in the First World War, there was a so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically an army that runs everything completely under Hindenburg’s plan, from the economy and culture to publishing the newspaper and everything else. And, that they could just turn that off in 1919. They try to make their influence felt further.
After that the young Weimar Republic has to make a deal with the military because it successfully protects them from the communists and the right-wing Putschers. They rely on the military thus and security. They try and create new armies, but they never go the Stalin way and purge everyone who was there before. They kept the existing officers mainly in the area, so they inherited an army that was not loyal to them, but still loyal to the old system.
