Oh What A Time... - #177 Katja Hoyer on the Weimar Republic and ‘have you heard of Samuel Pepys?’ (Part 1)

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

We are truly honoured this week to be joined by one of our favourite historians in the world; it’s German-British author, who penned of one of Elis’ favourite ever books (Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990), it’s Katja Hoyer!Katja is here to discuss her brand new book ‘Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe’ which details the collapse of German democracy as the Nazi’s tighten their grip on power.Elsewhere, is taking a hot air balloon to the North Pole a good idea? We’re going with no. And if you’ve ever asked a historian if they’ve heard of Samuel Pepys, please email in: [e-mail]’s new book is out now and we can’t recommend it enough, you can get it here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/459779/weimar-by-hoyer-katja/9780241681244And from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the O Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Oh, and welcome to Oh, what a time. And welcome to the first episode we've ever done, whereby there is a proper historian with us. Huge. And what does Tom Crane do on the first time we ever have a proper historian on the show? He says to her later in this episode,

Have you heard of Samuel Pepys? And dear listener, she had. Yeah. Which shot me. to my mind the words Samuel Peeps are quite funny to say I didn't say like that

It sounded like you're saying I'll recommend this I'll recommend this guy from history to this historian and she will love it So yeah Well when we get to that part of the show The listeners can decide

Whether I said it Simply to raise amusement Or because I didn't actually think a historian heard of Samuel Peeps You can decide when we get to that point I can't wait to listen back to this episode and hear that bit again Our guest this week is Katja Hoyer.

She's got a new book called Weimar, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. You may remember a few weeks ago, or it might have been months ago, we reviewed her book on East Germany, Beyond the Wall, which Ellis, you absolutely loved. I thought it was sensational. It was an episode I did, a book review for our patrons. I was recommended the book by Josh Whitaker initially, and I just couldn't get enough of it.

I think it's an incredible book. So when I got sent a copy of Weimar Life and the End of Catalystrophy by Kachahoya, I was so excited and I'm even more excited about the fact that she agreed to come on this podcast. I'm assuming she hasn't listened. I can only assume that for some reason she thought that we were genuine historians, that we knew what we were talking about. But we've just... That allusion was soon shattered.

With two words, Samuel and Pepes. But we've just finished the conversation with Katia and it was so interesting and so enlightening so I really, really think you're going to enjoy it. Absolutely. Now, before we get into the history proper with the proper historian, look at that. Look at that for wordplay.

Let's do a little bit of proper correspondence. This email is from Maria Edland who says, Hello, boys, as a Swedish full-timer. Oh, yes. I love that. I love that we have a Swedish full-timer. Thank you so much.

What tier is that? Yes, it's a very top tier. It's full-timer where you get no advert access to live show tickets. Swedish full-timer. You get to meet us in person once a day. Swedish full-timer, it says, hello boys. As a Swedish full-timer, I would really like to hear your take on the tragic Andre, I may be pronouncing that wrong.

I'm sorry if I am, Andre Expedition, which was taking an air balloon to the North Pole. It did not end well. There's a Wikipedia link here. I'll just give the top line about it because it does sound like something we should cover properly. Andre's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was a failed Swedish effort to reach the North Pole resulting in the deaths of all three expedition members.

Andre proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass with luck straight over the North Pole on the way. Don't like the phrase with luck. Yeah, that's doing a lot of heavy lifting. Already making me feel uncomfortable. with lucky yeah

you're so right the combination of hot air balloon and with luck does not inspire me with confidence no expedition to the North Pole should include the words with luck not loving that

essentially the scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole I think you're never going to catch up by hot air balloon

are you for the race for the North Pole that feels like there's a sort of inevitable that's just not going to work I'm not saying it's going to end with everyone losing their lives, but it doesn't feel like the most reliable way to get to the North Pole. If it ended in tragedy, it's yet more proof if it were needed that I don't want to be a pioneer. I want to be the guy who does something fourth. Yes.

Let another three expeditions go and prove to me that it can be done and then I might do it. If we get to a point where they lay a tarmac row between Crystal Ballets and a North Bowl, will you then finally be willing to... Yeah, with service. Are you taking the family car? How are you getting? Are you cycling? What's this superstitions every two miles? Ben, absolutely. With a Pratt. Yeah. Cost of coffee.

I need access to Brett. Every four miles. Take me through, Ellis. You pitching this idea to Izzy as a family holiday. They have laid the tarmac road now and then just talk us through how it's going and the kids are taking it. Well, you said there that it was met with patriotic fervour. I would say, listen, Izzy, for God's sake, the British government, this cost the British government $2 trillion. It's a motorway from here to the North Pole. There is no NHS anymore, unfortunately. There's a prayer every four miles.

It would be madness for us not to go. Don't you want the kids to see the world? Yeah, come on, is it? So, do you know what? That is a fantastic suggestion. It does sound like it doesn't end particularly cheerily, Maria, but we'll give that to our wonderful historian, Dr. Darrell Leeuwer, and suggest that as an episode we could cover in the future. I think in terms of all methods of transport, hot air balloon is the one that scares me most.

I think that is. And the North Pole is probably the place in the world that scares me the most as well. So there's a combination of these two things, which I'm not denoted about. What year did they attempt to go to the North Pole in that? That would have been what? The 20s, maybe 1910? No, this is 1897. 1897.

Yeah. Okay. I am scared of hot air balloon. but I'll tell you this. In 1897, I'll take a hot air balloon over an aeroplane. Yes. Or a motorbike or a car. Are you?

Basically, any motor transport. I think hot air balloon is the best motor transport in 1897. The people who were in, well, 1903 was the first flight, wasn't it? And those, the Wright brothers. And they were mad, if you ask me. The Wright brothers have come up to me and said, we've built an airplane. Do you want to watch us fly in?

And I said, boy, you lunatics. Those early ones were, he was only in the air for about eight seconds. They say, we've built an aeroplane. I go, no, you haven't. Yeah. You really haven't. At best, it's a sit-on frisbee. I've just read one further sentence of this Wikipedia article, by the way.

It says being able to steer the balloon to some extent was essential for a safe journey. To some extent. But there's much evidence that the drag rope steering technique that had been invented was ineffective. Oh, my God. So not only were they taking hot air balloon to the North Pole, it was one they could. couldn't steer. So in summation, we are going to cover that because that sounds incredible. I really hope they were religious. Yes. Because then they'd have been like, we're in the lap of the gods here. This is God's will. I can't steer this hot air balloon. I imagine that even

if they weren't at some point in that hot air balloon trip, they would have become religious. Yeah. And then it would have been empowered by prayer. I grew up in the city of Bath and Bath always has hot air balloons. It's like a really popular thing over the Skyland of Bath. And I used to have a repeated nightmare. And I'm sure I'm not alone in this, which is being one of those people who's holding the rope on the bottom of a hot air balloon. And it floats off and I'm still holding onto it. I would have that nightmare probably once a month.

Just the idea of thinking I've got it. I've got it. I haven't got it. And then it's that choice of when do you, do you let go trying to work out if you've left it too late or do you just keep going up with it? You've got a choice there. If you're going to let go, you've got a, you've got a, let go really sharpish of me.

Yeah. If you take one thing away from this episode, it's let go of a hot air balloon if it really starts to take. AASAP. Before yelling, apologies to people in the basket. I'm so sorry. I misjudged to that. Well, Maria, thank you for sending that. If anyone else has anything they want to send to us, here's how. All right, you horrible look.

Here's how you can stay in touch with the show. You can email us at hello at oldwatertime.com. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Oh What a Time pod. Now clear off. Okay, so one of the benefits of becoming an O Water Time patron, if you go on that top tier, the O Water Time All-Timmers. The Swedish tier. The Swedish tier.

We'll figure out where in history your name may have. been before gentlemen up this week we have for you Melissa Ronan Melissa Ronan actress in Midnighties Australian soap Oh that's good

Yeah Yeah And it's now I was 16 and I really fancied Yeah yeah yeah It doesn't act anymore but runs some sort of Like wellness business

And is a multi-millionaire And owns half of Melbourne Yeah I was watching Top of the Pops 2 the other night And Melissa Ronan came on That song I'd totally forgotten about that she did. Yeah, just saw six million copies. That's on six million.

One hit. That was just massive that summer. Yeah, that's good. Melissa Ronan. That is like that. It's sort of, yeah, it's neighbours, isn't it? Melissa Ronan. Yeah, Missouran.

Melissa Ronan. Yeah. What do you think, what sort of character is she? What's her vibe? Oh, the, um, a sort of rebel. Yeah, yeah, skateboarder. Yeah. Denim jackets.

Your denim jacket. Green hair. Yeah, all of that. All of that. All of that. big like 32 islet DMs. Once graffitied Ronan rules over Lassadus. Yeah, yeah, was accused of

ticking a sort of dweeb and being a bad influence. Melissa Ronan was a bad influence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the character she played was a bad influence. Sorry, sorry, not Melissa Ronan herself. Mr. Ronan is a very good actress. Absolutely, yeah, completely. And then every now and then,

there'll be those sort of an article in the Daily Mail. You'll never guess what mid-90s home and away actress Melissa Rona looks like now, and she looks exactly the same. There you go. Thank you, Melissa. If you want to have your name postulated upon, here's how you can support the show, get bonus episodes and more. Hello again, you horrible lot.

Enjoying the show. Well, why not show the love by becoming a Patreon supported today? For a mere handful of farthings, you can get ad-free shows, two bonus subscriber episodes each month, access to all the past bonus eps, first dibs on live tickets, and even help decide what subjects the boys cover next. Your support makes everything possible,

so sign up today at patreon.com slash oh what's a time, or oh what's a time.com. What are you waiting? Stop dawdling. Our guest this week is someone the Sunday Times refers to as Britain's favourite German historian. She is also the author of Beyond the Wall, East Germany, 1949 to 1990,

which kicked Ellis James' fascination and obsession with the GDR to new heights. Her new book, Weimar, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, comes out on the 7th of May 26. What an honour to welcome to Oh What a Time, Katja Hoyer. Welcome, Katja. Thank you. I'm so pleased to be. Thanks for having me. Oh, well, we're delighted that you agree to come on. Did you notice a spike in sales off beyond the wall when I kept going on?

I was wondering where that came from. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I did the same with Killing Thatcher as well. I actually looked in my WhatsApp. I just searched Beyond the Wall in my WhatsApp and I texted so many people about that book. I just found it absolutely fascinating. One question, I've got lots of questions about it, but one question I wanted to ask just before we get cracking was it was received quite differently in the UK to how it was received in Germany.

Is that right? Could you tell us a little bit about that? Well, it's always an interesting question because it was differently received pretty much everywhere around the world from how the Germans took it. So we're on something like 18, 19 languages now and the outrage that created in Germany was quite unique, I would say, and maybe says a lot about the fact that this is still very much an open debate in Germany,

how to deal with the GDR and how that fits into the past. I mean, it's always easier, I guess, to talk about the past of a country that isn't your own. So I would imagine if in Britain you'd written a book about, I don't know, Brexit, it would have maybe created a similar sort of debate whilst Germans maybe. It's still too raw, actually. So, you know, it's, I think what I say in the introduction, you know, that this is very much still something to be negotiated, how it fits in, and whether it's something to be overcome or to be integrated into the sort of story of German history, that is clearly still the case. So in Germany,

it received a lot of criticism from particularly people who were involved in sort of dissident movements and in opposition movements within the GDR, who very much. much want this treated as a cautionary tale, this whole chapter of the GDR. And that's something to me as a historian. I'm quite uneasy about kind of using history as a pedagogical tool, almost to try and educate people in the here now. I see obviously that lessons can be learned from history. Wouldn't go as far as to say you therefore can only tell parts of that history, namely the parts that you feel are kind of a positive thing in the present, whilst I tell a much more nuanced story and I can see why people who hated the GDR and the state then

and were at the sharp end of repression and the GDR might have felt that this kind of more nuanced picture isn't quite how they want that remembered. Were you anticipating that sort of reaction? A little bit. I mean, this is why in the book I kind of hinted that even when I was writing it, I do say in the introduction in the conclusion that there's still a quite a heated tassel over how the GDR should be remembered. And if I had said that and then everybody would have just been happy with

my take on it. Maybe it disproved my point in that, but I certainly hadn't seen or foreseen. I don't think anybody could have done the, the emotionality of the response. I mean, a lot of it was the sort of criticism went quite sort of below the beltline. A lot of it was attacks on myself, on my family, on the sort of, you know, how dare she write a book when she's not from a kind of dissident family herself, that sort of thing. So it was quite personal stuff, which I hadn't really anticipated. that I just assumed that we could have talked about

whether I'd gone too far in trying to balance it out or whatever. And that's the sort of debates I had in other countries. You know, I'm quite happy to say, have I picked the kind of people correctly that I interviewed or are the sources balanced enough, that kind of thing? But to wholesale call the book, grotesque, for example, as one review did, or to just say it's completely, you know,

useless or whatever. I think that showed more about the kind of rawness of that debate. than it did about where we currently are basically in terms of the professional debate around it. One of the features of our show is the idea of the one-day time machine where we invite anyone to go back in time for one day and I think the rules are you can be a bit of a ghost

so you can be invisible, you're not necessarily in any danger. You can deploy that rule if you want. But actually be fascinated to know where in history, if you had one day, where would you go and why? Well, that would have been my question. If I got to mess with time, I couldn't resist the opportunity. I'd go to the 20th of April, 1889, to Braunheim in Austria,

and I would steal a newborn child called Adolf Hitler and would probably put him in an orphanage somewhere run by a very kindly generous nuns somewhere far, far away, and hope that history takes a different turn. Oh, wow, yeah. That's a much nicer way of approaching that, by the way, a sort of rehabilitative approach to giving him a better upbringing, which is a far warmer way of approaching that.

Most people, it's always, oh, I'd go back to 1933 and I'd shoot him, but you'd take him at birth and turn Hitler into a nice guide. I've never heard this before. Yeah, if I didn't get to mess with it, if it was just an observer kind of ghosty role, I would probably go to the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, which is the sort of decisive battle. When Napoleon was defeated, to me, that's a fascinating thing

because it's the largest pre-war, pre-war one battle, really kind of without mass production, without the industrial revolution making warfare into something very different. It's the closest you ever going to come to kind of a Lord of the Rings style thing. And it would be a terrible but very fascinating battle to observe, I think, for any history. So what would that a battle have looked like? Is that that that would be much close quarter combat, that sort of thing? Yeah, I mean, obviously you do have cannons and things like that yet,

but it's still a lot of, you know, really kind of hand-to-hand combat and just the sheer troop numbers involved. way you move those around, you know, with kind of signaling, that kind of thing. I just find it utterly fascinating. And as I say, it would have been a terrible, terrible thing to see, but also fascinating and, you know, from a historical, strategic kind of point of view. Where would you position yourself from the battlefield? Are you right in the mixer or you're just going to stand on the edge? No, I'd have the classic kind of sitting on a horse somewhere on a hill observing. So in this case, I would be definitely the ghost. I wouldn't want to be in that space. physically. So your new book is

about the Weimar Republic. You write in it that the Weimar Republic is the most stark and terrifying example of a collapsed democracy in Western history. I wondered if I could begin by reading a bit of the introduction which really, I feel, paints a picture of why this book

is so timely. You're right, if we are to avoid the mistakes made by people in the past, the first step is to understand why they were made. Democracy and civilisation are maintained or destroyed by the choices we make as individuals and as societies. No amount of history to tradition and culture is sufficient to safeguard against the takeover of a ruthless totalitarian ideology. There is no better case study of this than Weimar

between the wars. So, I mean, it's such a timely book, and I guess that's why it makes it so haunting, having read it. Was it always your plan to write about Weimar after Beyond the War, or did it feel like this was the time to write this book? No, I think it felt like the time because so many people were suddenly, I mean, it's always been a reference point, I think, in the sense that people look to it for lessons or, you know, we teach children about it for a reason in the sense that we might learn from that to do things better in the future. But I think recently there's certainly been an uptick in comparisons being made in, you know, certain terms like fascist, for example, being kind of used in a, I think, quite inflationary way. And there just seems to be something in

the current day side guise that harks back to that and where we suddenly look for orientation in that time period. So it seemed to me as a historian to be a good moment to kind of open that world up to a wider audience and allowing people to sort of almost see it for themselves so that you can maybe draw a more nuanced picture from it than just the usual stereotypes in terms of pointing to that time period for moral reasons.

Because you use diaries and personal art So if I take Carl Weyrich, for instance, whose story you tell in the book, when did you find out about his personal diary and archives? Was that at the beginning of the process? No, that was absolute luck, really. I just went to Weimar,

to the town of Weimar with the idea of writing a book at sort of eye level, at street level. I really wanted to see that interval period through the eyes of some ordinary people as well as some more well-known figures. And so I just said to the town archivist there, do you have any ideas, you know, what have you got that I could use in terms of diaries, letters and so on? And he just brought out box after box. And I sat there in the archive just totally overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material that was just, you know, there was a baker, there was a teacher, there was an actress.

And you have, you get their lives basically in boxes, you know, in documents that you then have to sort of piece together into a coherent story. And eventually, just, you know, not at the beginning, a bit sort of into the process, the archivist contacted me again and said, you might want to have a look at this new diary that I've just acquired by a man called Carl Weir. He's a bookbinder and he ran a shop in Weimar. You might want to have a look at this. And it turned out to be absolute gold dust as far as the story is I concerned. Because he kept a diary throughout his entire life.

So he started as a teenager, basically. and even then beforehand, he kind of writes a little summary of his upbringing as well once he starts sort of writing about it. And then he keeps it keeps it going until he's an old man. It's absolutely amazing. It is kind of like a four-sized, it's huge, just very neatly kept in between. You have photographs. He keeps a diary for his child as well, like a sort of baby book kind of thing

where he collects kind of photographs of his child and writes about like, you know, the first day of school and that kind of stuff. And it's an absolute gold mine for a historian. It's just so detailed. But he is just an ordinary guy, basically. But in the middle of fire mine, so he sees history unfold virtually on his doorstep. I kept a diary for about three days when I was about 15 and then gave up.

I'm exactly the same as you. Yeah. I remember I got given a diary for Christmas. I thought, okay, this is my new year's resolution. I'll keep a diary. And then I remember on January 2nd, I remember writing down, didn't do much today in thinking, I'm not sure who this is benefiting.

Future historians. The one historian is not being your deal with a boring diary ever. I do find the personal stories in history so much more impactful than anything else, really, the stories of the individual. Are you naturally, as a historian, drawn to that? Is that what you like to source far more than, you know, stats and things? What's your feeling towards it? because personally it's what I like to read and it's what I find far more impactful.

Yeah, no, they are. The only problem with them is that they are just that. They are just personal stories and it's hard sometimes to extract the sort of bigger picture as in, you know, if Carl did something in 19202, it doesn't mean that that's representative in any shape or form of wider society or even of a particular group. Yeah. So that approach means you have to do this over and over and over

to get a sense of kind of what's going on overall. I guess I try and, zoom in and out as much as I can. So if, you know, you look at my previous two books, they're both about an entire incarnation of the German states. The first one was entirely about the German Empire, 1871 to 1918, really long time period. And the second one about East Germany, again, the whole thing from 1949 to 1990. And so what I've done this time is again, quite a large time frame between the two World Wars

from 1990 to 39. But I've tried to collect almost like a mosaic. of stories in one place and just focus just on the town of Weimar so that you know this kind of idea of zooming in really works so the idea that you can kind of as a reader hang out in Weimar for those 20 years kind of mentally and see what people are doing in that space that was what I was trying to do with this so it's quite a different approach rather than those kind of bird's eye perspective that we often adopt as historians I try to place people within the action if you will and so that they can kind of have a look around. So the idea really was to create like the

literary equivalent of a fly on the wall documentary, very commentary from me. And it's just people being in that space. Because going back to beyond the wall for a second, it's described as a revisionist piece of history of, you know, about East Germany and I'd studied East Germany at university. And it was a perspective I'd, I'd never seen before, which is why I found it so powerful. Obviously, There's many personal perspectives in it. As someone who was born in the old German Democratic Republic, did you see that the way East Germany was written about and think to yourself, I think we're getting this wrong.

Is that something that drives you? Yeah, it is a bit in the sense that the official narrative didn't really chime entirely with what, you know, people around me were saying and their personal recollections. And that certainly, I think, from an early point onwards gives you a perspective maybe that says that the overarching narrative is really not necessarily representative of what individual people may have felt or how complex their lives were, especially in Germany, I think where, you know, as I mentioned earlier,

the idea is quite often to learn from history. And so then that means that you have to, you have to kind of simplify the narrative so that you can tell it in school and say to children, and look, this is what it was like, and this is what you should take away from that. And that means kind of creating one strand. So the word revisionist is actually interesting because in Germany it's a very negative term. If you say somebody is a revisionist,

what you mean is they question the kind of safe. Challenging. Yeah, exactly. But because people have already come up with a narrative that everyone's supposed to use, the idea of revising that and going back and questioning it is often seen as a disturbing or deliberately disruptive thing.

And that, I think, applying that to the Nazi era or even to the Vimal Republic as well is quite an uncomfortable thing to do. You're kind of saying it's not clear who the perpetrators are, who the victims are, who the bystanders are. Quite often people adopt all of these roles within their lives and quite often even at the same time.

And that there's a very blurry line between explaining the behavior of people and being seen to justify their behavior and that becomes even more uncomfortable the darker the history gets. So if you're explaining how somebody ended up being a Nazi, for example, it might be misinterpreted as you trying to justify

why they ended up there or trying to find kind of reasons why when I think it's just as important to understand how the perpetrators ended up in their position as the case with the victims and everybody in between. But I can see how that makes people uncomfortable, especially in the German context where people think it's so important to learn from history

that quite often a simplified narrative is the preference. In terms of learning from history, you make a very interesting point about how it takes time for people to learn from their experiences. You reference people immediately after World War II. Their concerns really are really about the impacts of the consequences of war and their own lives and how are they going to put their lives together. And actually learning from it is not something that can happen for a period. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's sort of said that it takes about a generation, so about 30 years or so for history really to become history so that we have enough distance there, we can look at it in a slightly more detached way.

And I found, I mean, I start the book with Karl Weirich being one of the people who, when the Americans occupy Weimar, they basically decide that people should see what their regime has done. And they take them up at the hill outside of Weimar, the Edtersberg, where the concentration camp of Buchenberg, one of the largest on German soil was still operative and they wanted people to see that so they couldn't turn around afterwards and say it's all nonsense, it's just allied propaganda, this never happened.

And so I've got sort of Carl walking around there's this absolute horror of Buchenwald like there's bodies piled up, it stinks, it's full of kind of half-living people who are still there but really, you know, almost dead and emaciated and he sees the sheer horror of the whole thing and reflects on it in his diary

in that he says this is this is our German downfall so he stands in and sort of says this collective way kind of you know he doesn't he doesn't say he's not a part of it but at the same time he doesn't reflect on his personal responsibility at all

as you say he's focused with his own survival with what's going on with his family and he does reflect on could I have somehow saved myself and my family from what happened but he doesn't sit there or walk through Buchenwald and thinks

what have I done to further the situation or to accept the situation that has led to this? And that's what I'm saying. I don't think people can do that in that moment. They just close their own minds to the very possibility that they even have a chance, perhaps, to affect history or these bigger developments. And so it really falls to the next generations. That was quite a violent process, intellectually violent process in Germany, and that this 68er generations of the same. same generation that kind of went on student protests in the US or in the UK or in France, that generation in Germany was very, very critical of their own parents and grandparents and

said, you know, what did you do? Why, you know, whatever role you played, it caused a huge generational rift, which I'm not entirely sure was that helpful either. It wasn't breaking up the narrative of Germans feeling themselves that they were victims, but it kind of went too far, I think, the other way in that people just assumed that they would never have done what their parents and grandparents did. And perhaps now we've reached a point where we can look at this in a more nuanced way and really try and rather than just point the finger,

which I'm not sure leads to much genuine understanding as to why these things happened. Perhaps we can now also, like I did with the GDR, perhaps one can approach this now in a more kind of distanced and nuanced and calm way and understanding kind of what happened without necessarily drawing quick conclusions from that. One of the things I found fascinating was that I got so invested in the character of Carl and he's got a young son called Wilhelm. And the way you structure the book is every year just ticks on and on. And obviously knowing what happens, I felt the tension rising and rising as you kind of, you can continue on. But looking at it through Carl's eyes, you get the sense he's just concerned about his own family and having money in his pocket.

And when you've got the treaty of Versailles happening in hyperinflation, incredible stories, it really put yourself. in Carl's shoes. And when the Nazis come in and Hitler takes a role in government, there is a sense that there is an initial excitement because suddenly things are calming down a little bit. And this is a part of the story of Weimar that I think often gets forgotten. Like maybe at the start, at the start of the Nazis taken over, there is an element of excitement in society that maybe they're going to have some calm after quite a few years of disruption. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, that's why I wanted to continue the story and not finish in 1933 as so many other history books do, because I think it's important to see how people respond to those changes and what they do.

I think all the way up to the Second World War, people still had a lot of agency. They could have responded in different ways to what was going on. The Nazis escalate things bit by bit. And as you say, initially, that euphoria of 1933 is pretty widespread. It's not universal, so there are plenty of people in Germany, war. even at that point about what it all means and watching the torch marches, you know, feels a lot of people with fear as well that accompany the rise of Hitler. But at the same time, I would say there is amongst the majority of the population,

there's a sense that finally something different is happening. They've gone through plenty of chancellors, and certainly this feels like something different. Hitler's become the chancellor, and there's a new kind of era that starts, and this is pretty obvious from the beginning. And that was also a point where Carl, who's normally very apolitical, he's not particularly, you know, he's not somebody who comments on like election results or whatever. Quite often you'll find a kind of grilled sausage in his diary where there should be election results or whatever because he was more, you know, because he was more concerned with his Sunday outing than the political developments. But suddenly, 1933 happens. And then there's just this line

in this diary that says, and now we're putting all of our hopes in this new young chancellor called a Hitler and I thought, no, car, no. Exactly at that moment, it becomes clear to you that most ordinary Germans did feel that way in 1933. And so, you know, to sort of sit there and condemn that, I'm not sure it's entirely helpful. I think we should try and work out why that was, what made people feel that way. At what point do they begin to realize that perhaps they got more than they bargained for with the Nazi regime and that things were going in a very, in a direction that would end up badly

for almost all of them. And, you know, was there a point of no return or, you know, where does that sliding scale go? And so, again, I try and approach this as with a sort of taking a step back as a historian and really allowing the story to unfold so that people can follow it, readers can follow it for themselves, not at least because we're all today in different positions. I mean, you may feel more kind of interested, say, in Carl because maybe there are aspects of his life that are similar and that you can kind of understand because they're parallels to your own life.

Other people might feel I can empathize with, say, a politician or with an artist or with, I don't know, the little girl that is just trying to do well at school or whatever it may be. So I also can't speak for all readers because we're all in different positions today, just like people were in the 1920s and 30s and their kind of room to maneuver is very different

depending on where they are in society. You make the point in beyond the war They're in the 1950s A lot of East Germans' acceptance of communism was that they'd been through monarchy and then democracy and then Nazism and then Second World War only 30s after the First World War

and they were just sick to death of politics and that's something I get the feeling of in the Weimar book as well that even in the 1930s Germans were just overwhelmed by everything and had been for such a long time Yeah, and many certainly were looking for political stability in the form of like a strong man kind of character. That comes across a lot in people's diaries and letters and newspaper articles.

They're not necessarily initially looking for Hitler. In fact, many people find them too extreme. They don't like the violence that surrounds the Nazi party right from the beginning. Everywhere they turn up, they leave a bloodbath behind like street brawls. And there's a Nazi party rally, for example, in Weimar in 1926, before they, later on moved to Nuremberg, where a policeman is just shot on the street, you know, just like that. He nearly dies. And that really shocks people. But nonetheless, it doesn't mean that people kind of sat there and were thinking the current system works. So you get people looking to Mussolini,

for example, who, you know, from 1922 onwards, from the point of view of many kind of more autocratic minded Germans, seems to restore order in Italy. Then people look towards perhaps restoring the monarchy. there's still a small segment of German society that looks to that, to the pre-1914 world with some nostalgia. It didn't have to be Hitler, basically. I think there was a sense all across Europe. It was kind of the time where people were looking for the strong man, as it were. You know, you have Stalin, obviously not in a democratic country,

but even in the Soviet Union, somebody like Stalin is able to create a personality cult. And I would say even if you look to the US, I mean, FDR, who gets elected at the same, the same time as Hitler, really. So he comes into power in 1933 as the American president. He does some very un-American things as well in that it's a much more kind of strong-handed approach to the economy, to work creation measures, to almost kind of socialist-like policies

that seem quite extreme in the American context as well. So, you know, there are different responses to the same crisis, but it's, I think, quite a universal pattern there that people are looking towards more political stability in the form of somebody taking the reins and doing something that is quite unusual for even democratic societies. That's the end of part one of Kachahoy, but if you want part two, you can get it right now on Patreon. Go to patreon.com forward slash oh watertime.

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