How nature around the former East-West German border changed my mind

It was the young children themselves who made me change my mind. I took them out to the landscape, they saw the fence and they stopped, and then it was like a comic strip where you see those light bulbs and exclamation signs above their heads. “Oh yeah, that's what dad or that's what Grandma told us about, that's what it looked like”. They have connections or sockets in their minds, where they can plug in later when they are about the age of 12 to 15, and then it pops up inside their mind saying "Oh yes, I heard about that, and I want to learn more." - George Baumert

Alison Goldsworthy

Welcome to change my mind. The podcast where we ask leaders what they've changed their mind on and why. I'm Ali Goldsworthy, Poles Apart co-author and president of accord, the consultancy helping organizations understand and respond to polarization. You've heard from our guest today, Georg Baumert, head of the German borderland Museum's environmental education division. And if you'd like to listen to previous episodes, you can visit openDemocracy, who host all of them on their website. Just search openDemocracy and Change My Mind for more. Before introducing my co-hosts, I want to thank our sponsors, 1014, we'll hear more from them later. So I'm joined for today's episode by my co-hosts and co-authors, Laura Osborne, MDA, UK economics, policy and data insights consultancy.

Laura Osborne

Hi, Ali. It's nice to see you again. I really enjoyed our discussion with Georg, and I can't wait for us to delve back into it.

Alison Goldsworthy

And behavioral scientist Alexandra Chesterfield.

Alexandra Chesterfield

Hey, Ali, please, as always, call me Alex. It's so long otherwise! I’m really excited to be here and dig in more into this really thought provoking podcast.

Alison Goldsworthy

We recorded this podcast with Georg earlier this year. His role at the Borderland Museum, which is located near Gottingen, means he is responsible for sharing information about the Greenbelt, the stretch of unspoiled nature that exists along the former East/West German border. Today, the Greenbelt, which looks so peaceful and beautiful, acts as a reminder of the historic division, and is part of how its impact is remembered. You'll hear in a moment just how vivid his description of it is.

Laura Osborne

Yeah, that really struck me, too, I think how he worked with the peace and the quiet of that environment to allow the young people who are visiting to really digest and process what had gone on there. That really stayed with me after the conversation. He talks about how and why he thinks that had so much of an impact than the traditional way of teaching history, which is a really important concept, I think.

Alexandra Chesterfield

Yeah, I'm so fascinated by this. So I think one thing we really find resonates when talking about division and how to bridge it is the environment or the context in which it takes place. And I'm sure many, many listeners, who maybe are behavioral scientists as well, will be familiar with the studies showing how changing the physical environment can really shift how people process information and interpret that information. So on that note, let's dive in a bit more to hear about how it's caused Georg to change his mind.

So welcome Georg to change my mind.

Well, thank you. Nice to talk to you.

We're really pleased to have you with us today, especially because you have such a fascinating role. You head up the greenbelt education team at the borderland Museum in Eichsfeld, Germany. Can you tell us a little bit about why the museum was founded, and the significance of the site and the role that you play there?

Well, the museum was founded in 1995. From 1973 until 1990 it was a border crossing checkpoint, actually. When the border was closed in 1952 until 1973 the only possibility to travel between the two Germanys was the so-called transit route checkpoints, the checkpoints which were on the transit routes connecting West Germany and West Berlin. So to many people, besides all the ramifications you had when wanting to travel into East Germany, it meant a lot of detours. In 1969 to make it short, both German governments negotiated a treaty called the Basics Treaty, which, among other things, regulated improvements and possibilities of traveling between the two Germanys.

One big part of these improvements was to open up four additional checkpoints just to cross the border into the close vicinity of the border on the East German side. We had about 5.5 million re-registrate travel links between 1973 and 1990 so it was quite an important checkpoint. But of course, when the border opened, and especially after unification, no more checkpoints were needed. The first impetus of the people living close to both sides of the border was 'we don't want to see that anymore. We want to get rid of it. just knock it all down'. But there were especially community members and politicians on both sides of the border, saying, ‘no, we can't do this, we have to conserve. We have to preserve a few parts of the border, fortifications, a few buildings of the checkpoint, just to tell the story, because if we don't do that in 10 years from now, nobody is going to believe it anymore’. And so it was a citizenship thing to erect the checkpoint.

Well, Georg, the reason, I guess, we reached out to you and got you to come on the podcast is, in fact, I went to the site when, I was a school girl, 20 or 30 years ago and it left quite a profound impression on me. I guess it had only been open for a bit. And I wanted to ask you about how you're clearly trying to aim to have a long term impact with the stories that you tell at the museum. How do you do that? How do you actually try and achieve a long term impact from people who come and visit you?

Well, the thing is, when they come here, they have an authentic place. We are not just a museum, but we are an authentic place, we are a memorial site. What the people see here are the former buildings of the checkpoints. They see parts of the fence, and we give them - or we try to give them - the kind of feeling of what it was like to come here and what it was like to live so close to the border. What we also do is work a lot with oral history. So when you visit the museum today you find several screens where you can listen to people telling their story, how they escaped, what it was like living on the border or close to the border, especially on the East German side.

I think we have to separate two groups of people. One group would be the visitors of the museum. And I would say that the farther they lived from the border, either in East or in West Germany, the bigger the impact is. They say, 'Oh, I didn't realize that actually' from the East German side, because as long as the GDR existed, they simply were not allowed to go there.From the West German side, well, they had, they looked somewhere else, to their western neighbors, like the Netherlands, like Belgium, or like France. We also have pupils of all ages, from six years to 18 years, coming here, visiting or having classes, sort of like seminaries. And part of these seminaries, many times, will be oral history, people telling about their lives along the border. If you do this, it's authentic. It's authentic to the people, especially to young people. ‘Oh, this person has seen it’. This is also what I try to tell all the parents, teachers and grandparents especially when they come from East Germany. I tell them, if you tell your children ‘it was just our everyday life', yes, I say it was your everyday lives, but it was quite different from your children's or your grandchildren's everyday lives. And I think this has much of an impact.

I'm always very struck by that. One of the most memorable quotes I know is from Angela Merkel, which says in effect, when the current generation has passed, then we'll find out how much we have learned from history. And you know, as you're talking about the need to pass from one generation to the next, and the importance of oral history. I'm really struck by that.

I did just want to pick up on one little bit that you talked about, which was around the distance that you lived from the border and how people started to look west rather than East. Do you think that was because looking east was also uncomfortable for them?

Not uncomfortable. They were not interested. The farther they lived to the West in Germany, the less the border was part of their everyday lives. You were not confronted with it. Sometimes you may have traveled to Berlin, but you never came to realize what it meant to really live there. And in East Germany, if you didn't live at the border, you simply were not allowed to go there. It was restricted area.

And How do families who lived through that period convey to their own family in their future generations what it really was like? Because I can imagine that's quite hard to bring to life something that was so difficult for such a long period of time. How do they do it?

Well actually that's where we come in, they tell their children or their grandchildren "When I was young, it was like this". And at that point children can't imagine, but if they come here and see what is left of the border, then they suddenly do, “Oh, that was what grandpa was talking about?”. And when we're talking about children aged six to 12. That's the age where it's interesting and exciting if grandpa or grandma taught from the youth. When they're 16 years old, it's something else! So what we try to do is not really to teach things they can reproduce, but to make a connection in their mind. So when they're 16 years old, they come back to it and say, "Oh, yes, I've heard about that, and what it was like”. And now they can do abstractions, and then we can tell them, ‘Okay, this is, this is what a dictatorship looks like’, just by practical examples of everyday life.

So for example, if the subject of the day is a creek as a biotope, we have a creek here which was crossed by the border. So when I go there with 10 year old children, they can't help but stumble upon former border fortifications. And among other things, we, of course, will do a monitoring of the plants and of the landscape and of the animals in the water. I let them draw a map and when that map is ready, I tell them that some 35 years ago, drawing such a map would have been a criminal offense and you would have been brought to jail because this was prohibited territory. Then I show them GDR maps you could buy. There were the military maps which were accurate but if you bought a map in the GDR and it showed the countryside along the border, they had built in mistakes, and the map would not show what was on the other side of the border, so on the West German side, there were no villages. And then I can say ‘this is what a dictatorship does with information, It keeps information away from you’.

That's one example, of course, and you can talk about attempts to escape and things like this too, but you have to be careful not to make it an adventure story. But you have to embed it into the whole thing somehow. So when we do this with primary school children we keep it at a low level and the older the children get, we can intensify the historical part.

Gosh, there's so much I'd love to dig into you, but I'm curious about how you said you have to be careful not to make it an adventure story for people, that's quite a natural way for people to start processing stories and information, particularly younger people who often read adventure based stories. If that's where people's minds begin to go, how do you start to course correct that? What do you find effective to say to them?

Well, one thing I can do is say ‘okay, try to climb the fence’, and then they'll find out that if they try they cut their fingers. So they can see that it was not fun, and we had this on both sides of our checkpoint. There were several attempts to escape, some with a tragic end, and this is something children understand. If something had happened in 1790 or even 1990, to a 10 year old child that seems like the dim and distant past when dinosaurs roamed the Earth! But nevertheless, what, what they remember is, okay, this was a dangerous and deadly border, and it was kept so by a dictatorship.

But the most important thing is that when they come to us and go to the creek, they have lots of fun, and this fun makes it easier for them to remember later what they saw and what they learned about the border.

That's quite an extreme length to go to where people need to reset how they're processing something. My follow up question is that you do a lot of education in terms of people who didn't know what living on the border was like, and then learn what the border was like. How often do you find you have to correct perceptions where people have things completely wrong? And is there a different approach that you have to use for that?

I think in many people, we actually do have a basic knowledge, but there are many, many misconceptions about the details. So one of the misconceptions is that the border is a strip of nature, so it can't have been that bad. And what we can show is, yes, it is a strip of nature, but it has become so not because they wanted to create a strip of nature, but because the purpose was to prevent people from hiding, to have free firing range and I think most people understand at least when they hear that people were killed here. When they hear the stories about everyday life along the border from people living on the East German side, sometimes these people were not allowed to go close to the border. When they were going for a stroll, they wouldn't even dare to look there. And if you have people telling their stories to children, this is something which would stick.

Yeah, absolutely, I imagine it's very difficult. I think all children at some age will have a sense of very nascent in-groups and out-groups, but won't be familiar with the idea, particularly I'm thinking of English kids here, of a community that actually had a physical border through it. So how do you help them understand the lessons from that period, when they are arriving so young, and certainly in some cases, from other countries, relatively inexperienced in the concepts. How do you tackle that with smaller children?

Well, the young children coming to us, they grew up in families who knew the border.

They're all quite local, are they?

Yes, absolutely. Because when you talk about 10 year old children, you can't place 10 years old children into a bus, travel two hours, then be three hours outside at our place, and then travel back another two hours. What we are talking about is older children, let's say about high school age. So what we try to do is sometimes we have two different schools, one from East one from West Germany, and they meet each other, and then, of course, they talk to each other. And this is besides what we try to teach them about our history, it's another experience to them, which makes it a little more comprehensible, I think.

I wonder if this takes us a little bit to the ecology of the site itself, because I know that's the other aspect of what you focus on with students when they're with you, because obviously it's an untouched space. So how has that division and that physical border shaped the land as it exists today?

Two ways, in the first place, there were clearings all along the border. The trees were cut down, most of it, if you go to the Harz mountains, of course they left them there. But otherwise, all bushes or trees were cut down. All vegetation was kept at knee level at most. And the second thing is the extensification of management. So if you have a normal meadow, you would fertilize it, so you can mow it three times a year to have more grass for your livestock. But on the border, this was not the purpose. The purpose was to have a free space to look and to shoot, and therefore they wouldn't fertilize it and would mow it just twice a year. So it became a biotope for plants and animals who need open biotopes with low level management so you can have lots of flowers, more flowers than grass on the meadows. More flowers than grass means more insects. Means more animals living on insects, like lizards, spiders, and of course, many birds who would feed on the insects, but also birds who would breed on the ground, like a lark, for example, or a partridge. If you have an intensively managed land, these birds would suffer from their nests being run over by mowing machinery. But if you just mow it twice a year, the first mowing would take place about in June, which is when the young have hatched and can fly, so the nest would not be destroyed. So all along the border, you would have many endangered species of birds nesting on the ground, and endangered species of insects specialized on certain plants, which need light but do not need fertilizers.

This low level management also applies to woodlands. So if there were woodlands along the border, there was almost no logging going on there, because loggers would have to be guarded by two military guards to prevent them from from crossing the border into West Germany, and that means for woodlands, you have all species who react sensitively to disturbance around their nest. Of course, the other side is, it was a cut right through the landscape, so all large mammals would see the border as an obstacle. So therefore it took a long time for wolves to return. Or the European wildcat, which wouldn't cross through, over the border. And we have monitorings of European wildcat and of red deer as well. The red deer is a migrating species. Normally, it will migrate from the higher to the higher levels in spring and remigrate to the lower levels in autumn to avoid winter. So if you have a border or a highway it would prevent these animals from migrating. We have monitorings in the in the Bavarian forests, which was cut through the Czech, Bavarian Czech border, that until today, 60% of the Red Deer turn around where the former border was, because they have learned it that way.

I had wondered that if they would avoid the border, because sometimes they have a sense of a place where something bad has happened, or they just remember that there used to be a blockage in the way. It's fascinating. So animals do avoid sites?

You know, animals like Red Deer, learn everything from mom, ‘mom always turns around there’ so they'll do the same, the next generations will do the same. And it takes some time for this behavior to stop or to dwindle.

I know you obviously take students into nature, and they can hike around the sites and experience the environment. I wanted to ask, do you find that being outside shapes the way people learn about the sites and then their reflections on it. Are people more open to learning about it when they're outside?

I think so, because they have a lot of very different impressions, plus the stories or the things we can tell them about the border so they connect what we tell them with what they see, and it's easier for them to imagine what was going on, what the border looked like, what it meant to people living here. When we look, for example, at a village close to the border on the East German side, and they tell the people, okay, in 1952 let's say 60 or 70 people were resettled out of the village. They had to leave their homes because they were regarded as being politically unreliable. Or in another village in 1961, half of the village fled to West Germany to escape this forced resettlement. The way I see it, learning has to do a lot with emotions, and if you're out in nature, you have a lot of impressions. You have several emotions. And I think that things stick better to you if you can connect them with what you see.

The big question that we ask every guest that comes on the podcast is to tell us about a time that they've changed their mind on an issue, what it was, and why.

Well, when I changed my mind, it was about how to teach. Of course I am no historic teacher, so I have to be very careful about what I say, but when we started the museum, it was common sense around everybody saying children have to be at the age of 12 at least to really comprehend what was going on. When we started our ecological program, it was the young children themselves who made me change my mind, because I took them out to the landscape and they saw the fence, and they stopped, and some were a little bit stalling and startled, and then it was like a comic strip where you see those light bulbs and exclamation signs above their heads. “Oh yeah, that's what dad or that's what Grandma told us about, that's what it looked like”.

These children grew up close to the former borders, so the border is part of their family history, and it's kept alive in the families. And we have to work with that, because when we start that easy, it will always stick in their minds, not that they can write an essay about it. That's not the point at that age. The point is they have connections or sockets in their minds, where they can plug in later when they are about the age of 12 to 15, and then it pops up inside their mind saying, Oh yes, I heard about that, and I want to learn more.

So the first idea was you can teach history to young children, but you have to have the emotional connection, and this is what parents and grandparents do. So it would be a good idea to teach history backwards, to start with contemporary history, where we have parents and grandparents as witnesses. Telling them about things at an age where the children still listen to it. They stop that at the age of 14, which is quite okay. It's absolutely right to do so, but until they're 10 to 12 years old, it's always exciting when grandma or grandpa tell a story from their youth, especially if it was so different from what the children today see. So my opinion is, as long as you have witnesses or you can make use of parents or grandparents memories, it is easier to connect children with the past. Because they hear the stories, and then they come to us and see what the stories really mean. If you look at the practical way, normally, at fifth form, you start with stone age, but history goes on. If you start in the present or contemporary history, I think you may not go as far back as the stone age, but it's easier to see where things originate from. And it makes history more alive.

What you say really resonates with me. There's a real tendency in quite a few places, in the UK and in the US, to do learning by rote. So people learn facts, and that's how they pick things up. I suppose what you're saying runs completely counter to that. We should really focus on getting the stories and creating an emotional connection first, and then come back to the facts. Is that a fair representation of what you've just said, and where the facts kind of fit into your model as how people learn?

We have to do both at the same time. So when you start with a story, the next thing you will have to do is to confront them with facts. Now it's just what I'll focus on is not to teach children 'Okay, this happened that year', but 'this happened because...' 'and your parents were witnesses of what was going on, and what was going on is what you see here'. A common question when I'm outside with young children, most of them know that they have the connection between the border and Second World War. This still exists, it's something common in Germany. And many times I hear questions like, Wait, were you already here during the war? I mean, I look old, but I'm not that old.

But this is the problem for children up to the age of 10. You don't really know how long ago 1945 was. This is just a figure, but many of them know how old their parents or their grandparents are, and then they can do a little calculation, and this is and then they can sort of put things together or places or insert them in the right time slot.

That rings so true for me. My youngest daughter scrolls back so far on the iPhone calendar that she'll ask what she's doing in 1810 and then forward as far as 2100 and ask what's the plan on Saturday? She's got absolutely no sense of time in that way you've just expressed it. So I think that absolutely makes a lot of sense. But one thing she does all the time is ask ‘why?’ So what you're saying makes complete sense to me, she's very curious and younger children will always have that. I think keeping that alive as children get older, and for us as adults is so important and that's definitely an emotional thing, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

And the question, ‘why did that happen?’ is where we can turn to the difference between dictatorship and democracy. Even young children come to realize, oh, this happened because the GDR government made it happen that way. And this is a reason why people didn't want to live here and took the risk of escaping to West Germany, even to get killed. We can bring children to understand. So when people took all the risks they had, being shot, walking on a mine, being arrested, to escape to freedom, to escape to West Germany. And of course today we have people who will take the risk of drowning in the Mediterranean to escape to what they think is their freedom or their better life. This is a very important thing to me, to all of us, not just to teach the past, but to connect the past with today, with the present, because then all young people, children and and people about high school age, see, ‘oh, this is actually this has got something to do with me. It is my past, and I can learn from that past to the values I stand for’.

Is there anything about how you learn history when you were younger that you wish had happened differently? So did you learn it initially through facts and you wish that there's some stories that you'd heard from grandparents or elders around you that might have resonated differently. How does what changed your mind relate to your upbringing and childhood?

Well, I grew up in West Berlin, therefore I was always confronted with contemporary history, and my parents, of course, told me a lot about it, so I think I'm quite content with the way I learned history, because first, I'm interested in history. I'm a forester, but nevertheless, history interests me a lot. When it came to the Second World War, we were lucky enough to have a teacher who had been an officer in Hitler's army and he told us everything and brought every record, every video, everything you could imagine about the Third Reich, and taught us about it. So by this man, we could make a connection and could say, ‘oh yes, that was what went wrong and it led to what we see here in Berlin today, with Berlin being divided with this awful wall put up right through Berlin’. I had to travel through the GDR on the transit route on a regular basis. When you did that, you saw the difference of what it was like to live in a place like West Berlin or West Germany, and what it was like to live in a place like the GDR, even if I closed my eyes just by smelling the air, I could know where I was, because the air was so polluted over there.

What I always felt was just, how can a government treat their own people that way the GDR government treats their people? I was lucky enough to travel to the United States in the 1970s after I graduated from high school, and go to several places which were not normal to see at that time, and not as normal as it would be today. I would talk to people everywhere, I was trying to connect with people of my age, and if I would have done this on the transit routes, you know, driving to some rest place and talking to GDR citizens that would have caused me a lot of trouble, and would have caused them even more trouble. This is something my parents also told me, you don't do these people a favor. This is how I learned what a dictatorship is like.

Thank you for sharing that. Let’s go from looking backwards to looking more forwards and internationally. You talked a minute ago about how important it is to connect events from the past to the present, and you've obviously spent countless years at the museum, building up your approach and your understanding. Are there other museums like yours around the world, and how do you connect and share your learnings with them, and vice versa? How do you learn from each other?

Of course, we have several museums like ours and several Memorial sites along the border too, the biggest one actually is Marienborn, where there was also a former border crossing checkpoint, but a really big one. We have smaller ones, we have a village in the southeast of Germany called Little Berlin, or Mödlareuth, and it was called that because it was a divided village, they had a wall cutting right through. In the north, we have lake Glienicke which was a divided lake. Also in the Rhoen mountains, we have Point Alpha which was an outpost of the US Army. Perhaps you have heard about the Fulda gap concept of an attack of the Soviet forces south of the Rhoen to the Frankfurt area, and it was the first outpost. Additionally, we have the memorial sites of the Third Reich too. We try to learn from each other. How do you do things? But we are very different, actually. So sometimes we can do the same thing, but many times, because the surroundings are so different. All Memorial sites have their own concepts. Talking around the world we have contacts in South Korea, and they are very, very eager to learn. ‘How can you do things? How can we deal with things? For when the Korean border opens one day?’

Are there other places in the world that you wish you could connect to that you are not currently connected to?

The Finnish Russian border would be quite interesting. We have remnants of the former iron curtain on the Turkish-Bulgarian border, because Bulgaria also was a Warsaw Pact country and they fortified their border. It was a common way, or it was perhaps not common, but many GDR citizens traveled to Bulgaria, which they were allowed to do, and then tried to escape from Bulgaria to Turkey. And there are remnants of border fortifications on the Turkish-Bulgarian and also the Bulgarian-Greek border, which I would dearly have liked to see but didn't get there.

I hope you do one day, for their sake, because I think the stories that you tell and the way you help people connect to them are so important, and you make it sound effortless, even though I am very certain it is not effortless to have arrived where you've got to and a lot of people could do with hearing more of it.

Thank you very much. Well, you know if you're outside with young children, yeah, sure, it is, it is work, but you become addicted to it. It's lots of fun, and every day is new. Everything is different, so it's always lots of fun.

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us before we let you go though final question, which is we're always interested in who guests on change my mind would like to hear from who also might have changed their mind on something interesting. Is there anyone you think we should interview?

I rather prefer interviews with people who should have changed their minds but somehow failed to, but this would be a very long list of people!

I would be very interested in what made our Chancellor Scholz change his mind about giving the Ukrainian army tanks. If you ask him, I don't think he'll tell the real truth. I don't think he can do that, but perhaps in 20 years from now. But I think that, to me, that would be a very interesting, a very interesting question.

Yeah, it would be. Thank you. Hopefully in 5-10 years we'll see if we can come back to that one again and get an honest answer! But thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. We really appreciate having you on Changed My Mind.

It was my pleasure, thank you.

Alison Goldsworthy

Before Alex, Laura and I digest this interview, we wanted to bring you a brief word from our partners for this new series. This podcast mini series is presented by 1014

Laura Osborne

1014 is a space for ideas, with talks, performances, exhibitions, and in the future, a residency program. 1014 encourages debates on today's global topics by offering transatlantic perspectives and using interdisciplinary approaches. 1014 spans continents, fields of knowledge and individual backgrounds, located in a historic townhouse on Fifth Avenue in New York, provided by the German government. 1014 harnesses the entrepreneurial atmosphere of this metropolitan hub and reaches beyond the city boroughs with its online programs. Check out 1014 online.

Alison Goldsworthy

So now we've heard the full interview. Was there anything you wanted to reflect on?

Laura Osborne

Yeah, I think the profound sense of importance of discussing your country's history, you know, and especially, actually the uncomfortable bits, and how that can be passed down from generation to generation - or not. You know, as Georg said, the museum's been running for 25 years, and it's grown, and he's learned to hone his technique and realize that reflection is often best done outside the classroom. As Alex said at the outset.

Alexandra Chesterfield

I think there were probably three things that I was struck by. So first of all, I was really struck by how he talked about that in relation to his own family, and that despite his job, people hadn't been able to discuss it easily. The second thing for me is what an experience it must be to visit the museum. So clearly for you. Ali, it stands out in your memory, you know, 25 years on, but there are very few other museums like them in the world, despite a clear need for it. The third thing is just the, I guess, the effect and the power of changing context and having that explicit permission and time to focus on things that you wouldn't normally do day to day. What really struck me was the importance of focusing less on tasks, on our day to day to do lists, but actually a bit more on the people and the relationships that we have with others.

Laura Osborne

Yeah, Alex, I really wanted to pick up on that point about the absence of storytelling and how desperate Georg clearly was for other places to learn from what they have done at the museum and how on so many borders they really hadn't. In fact, it was unique what he was talking about. I know some of our listeners will have been, as I have to Northern Ireland and done the black capitals there, which I highly advise. But it does strike me that the world's missing an opportunity to learn from its history. By not copying what's happening at the borderland Museum and taking those ideas elsewhere, it just seems a real shame, and I worry what that could mean down the line. Has Georg inspired you to think of a time you changed your mind and why? Do share your thoughts with us and tell us about what you've changed your mind on the best response. Thank you to 1014 for their support of the show. To Eve Streeter, who's joined as our new producer, and to Kevin MacLeod whose Dreams Become Real is our theme music.