KATJA HOYER has built a niche as the explainer of all things East German to British audiences. Her latest book, Weimar: Life on the edge of catastrophe, has received rave reviews. The second week of its ten-part serialisation on Book of the Week (Radio 4, 18 to 23 May) did the written work justice, especially with Siân Thomas as reader. Combining gravitas with an understated delivery style, she was a real asset.
Weimar, Goethe’s adopted home, had long been a beautiful backwater. Yet it assumed a surprising prominence in Germany’s turbulent interwar decades: the place where the country’s first republican constitution was drafted, home to the ultra-modern Bauhaus school of design, and an early centre of Nazi aggression as they challenged both those progressive totems, long before they came to power. A still more grotesque Nazi legacy was the Buchenwald concentration camp in the beech forests just beyond the city’s limits.
Hoyer’s story focuses on the experiences of Carl Weirich, a stationery shop-owner and meticulous diarist, and the hoteliers Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, a mixed Jewish-Christian couple.
The second week’s programmes took us from the Nazis entering the regional government in 1930 through to war and Holocaust, where there are no happy endings. Like all good radio adaptations, this satisfied in its own right while leaving one keen to read the book.
Less well-known is the story of nuns during the Troubles. Sunday Sequence (Radio Ulster) interviewed Brigid Rafferty at length about her new book, Catholic Sisters: Conflict and peace in Northern Ireland 1968–2008.
A religious commitment to humility made her subjects initially reticent, but, as they warmed to the project, they shared stories of exercising significant leadership in nursing, education, and NGOs. The Troubles arrived just as Vatican II was encouraging religious to leave the cloister to engage in more outward-facing forms of ministry. That included working closely with Protestants, including ordained women, in a context where the new openness to ecumenism met an urgent societal need.
Many nuns were themselves from communities badly affected by the Troubles, and had to deal with their own trauma. Teaching and running charities in areas of high deprivation turned many leftwards, on economics at least.
That combination of devout Catholicism and political radicalism also formed Adi Roche, the subject of Heart and Soul (BBC World Service, Friday), little known in Britain but a household name in the Republic as a former head of CND Ireland and founder of the international Chernobyl Children’s Project.
The presenter Colm Flynn had an interesting exchange with her about theodicy, but I would have liked more about her evidently serious Christian faith, especially her thoughts on why the Catholic radicalism that formed both her and the Northern nuns has retreated so dramatically in recent decades.