Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe – Katja Hoyer in conversation with Julia Boyd

The Goethe-Institut, in collaboration with the British-German Association, is delighted to invite you to an evening with historian and author Katja Hoyer, who will be in conversation with Julia Boyd about Katja’s new book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe. In this timely discussion, Katja and Julia will explore the promise and tragedy of Germany between the two World Wars. Katja's book offers a fresh perspective on this tumultuous period by examining it through the eyes of the people of Weimar. Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. Home to Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche, the town gave its name to the ambitious republic born after the First World War. Yet it was also a place where Bauhaus architects reimagined modern life while, not far away, Buchenwald was carved out of a beech forest. Drawing on rich new archival research, Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939, following the men and women who lived through the republic and Hitler’s regime. Through their choices and compromises, hopes and failures, Weimar leads us into the heart of a town that dreamt of a better world and woke to tyranny. Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her last book Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 was a Sunday Times and Spiegel bestseller and long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Katja is a columnist for Berliner Zeitung and a regular contributor to British and American news outlets such as the BBC, Bloomberg, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. Her new book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe will be published in May 2026. Julia Boyd worked at the Victoria & Albert Museum before marriage to a diplomat took her on various foreign postings. After ten years in Cambridge, where her late husband was Master of Churchill College, they returned to live in London. She is a former trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, and a former governor of the ESU. She is currently a trustee of Wigmore Hall and has just finished writing a history of the Hall for its 125th anniversary. She is also the author of Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People.