Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

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I would have loved to have read a deeper analysis of the East German alcohol industry, and what role it played. The unspeakable sin that this book commits is that the author interviewed a broad cross section of people who lived in the GDR. And while they complain about repression, surveillance, and shortages, they also point out that some elements of life in Ostdeutschland were nicer than today in late capitalism. To name a few: there were no restrictions on abortion, there was free childcare, and everyone got housing, education, health care, and jobs.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review - The Guardian

Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall.

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In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Baillie Gifford Prize

Based on first-hand accounts and extensive new research, Hoyer presents the history of the GDR as never before -- as a kaleidoscope of perspectives, experiences and stories. From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the USSR, this is the definitive story of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall. Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron. A visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the podcast The New Germany together with Oliver Moody. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK. Beyond the Wall" adds depth to caricatures of East Germany". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613 . Retrieved 2023-06-03. Hoyer was born in Guben, East Germany, [4] [5] where her mother was a teacher and her father an East German military officer. [6] She received a Master's degree from the University of Jena [2] and moved to the United Kingdom in about 2010. [7]

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This book has enlightened me to a lot of what happened in the country and why. I did feel, however, that the really dark stuff was rather glossed over. Yes, the word "dictator" was used a time or two. The number of people Stalin made disappear in horrific circumstances was stated. It is accepted that the Stasi was feared. Mielke was mentioned many times, but not in any real depth. Also, no light was shone on the ordinary citizens who spied on their families, friends, neighbors, colleagues. I discovered Beyond the Wall (2023) in the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction long list. I’m very interested in the GDR so was keen to read it. Hoyer herself is East German, born in 1985, and four years old when it collapsed. She matured into a successful journalist and historian now living in England. Hoyer has no illusions about the fanatical politics and continual deprivations endured by the Easterners, but seems to want to put on record the authenticity and humanity of the people who lived in East Germany. Yet the process of dismissing the GDR as a footnote in German history is, for Hoyer, “ahistorical”. Like her, millions of Germans alive today “neither can nor want to deny that they had once lived in the GDR”. The system was far from perfect, but along with the “tears and anger”, “oppression and brutality”, there was “laughter and pride”, “opportunity and belonging”. Hence her decision to write a new “warts and all” history of the GDR that places it firmly in the wider German narrative.

Beyond the Wall (book) - Wikipedia

But, in “Beyond the Wall,” the German historian Katja Hoyer claims that when it comes to the former East German state this characterisation is not the whole story. Ever since German reunification in 1990, inhabitants of the former West German Federal Republic have exhibited a patronising (at best) attitude towards ‘the Osties’, sneering at their obsolete Marxist state, and dismissing their experiences under that state in such a way that the GDR - and the lives of those who grew up under it - have been “written out of the national narrative”. In writing this book about the origins and history of the East German state, Katja Hoyer says her intention is to show that the GDR was “never a passive Soviet satellite” but was instead a distinct political entity with its own “economic, social, and cultural idiosyncrasies”. Hoyer maintains that the GDR “deserves a history that treats it as more than a walled ‘Stasiland’ and gives it its proper place in German history”.Leeder, Karen (31 March 2023). "The good, the bad and the ugly in the other Germany". TLS . Retrieved 2023-06-03. The definitive new history of East Germany by a highly acclaimed young historian. In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. In 1990, a country disappeared. For the previous forty-one years, East Germany had existed in Western minds as more of a metaphor than a place, more of a grey communist blur than a land of real people with friends and families, workplaces and homes. As Germany once again became a single state, the history of the GDR was simplified and politicised. It was nothing but Stasi spies and central planning, nothing but a wall in Berlin. Die Zeit, "'Das Interesse an deutscher Geschichte ist groß'" (in German), 8 May 2023. Retrieved 30 June 2023. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form,’ goes the narrative of the protagonist Alex Kerner at the end of the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! which describes the German reunification process. Notwithstanding the exaggerated fictional premise of the film, the longing for a country that suddenly disappeared overnight and the need to reassess the German reunification process and discuss it again is emphasised throughout this book, a process that Katja Hoyer describes would entail involving ‘accepting that East and West Germans lived very different realities in the formative postwar decades, and that these are all part of the national story’.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

Forget everything you thought you knew about life in the GDR. This terrifically colourful, surprising and enjoyable history of the socialist state is full of surprises Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times Why did the East Germans drink so much more beer than the West Germans? In 1988, they drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. Was it to forget their worries, which came with living in the German Democratic Republic? It wasn't all bad: East Germany became the most economically successful of the Soviet satellite states (albeit a low pass mark), and the lives and struggles of its people had by the 1970s moments of material success and relative happiness. Their achievements become over time emblematic of the human capacity to survive and even flourish to some extent when circumstances and fate seem to be acting against rational development and humane progress. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

Forget everything you thought you knew about life in the GDR. This terrifically colorful, surprising, and enjoyable history of the socialist state is full of surprises. Enormously refreshing.” Two other factors regarding alcohol might merit discussion. First, self-medication of trauma. Hoyer rightfully highlights the uniquely traumatic lives of East Germans. Two world wars, multiple financial collapses, the high proportion of refugees from east Prussia and the Baltic, and the ravages of the Red Army assembled a uniquely scarred population that may have sought solace in the bottle. The other, is state control. Both the USSR and the Russian Empire before it owed a lot of their power (and money) to the state monopoly on alcohol, and finally collapsed in part due to changes in alcohol policy. A rich, counterintuitive history of a country all too often dismissed as a freak or accident of the Cold War.” A fantastic, sparkling book, filled with insights not only about East Germany but about the Cold War, Europe, and the forging of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” But such a view is condescending towards readers keen to explore a country that no longer exists. They are very much capable of entering the world described to them by former East Germans, and deciding for themselves what they make of the things they find there, as the responses to Beyond the Wall readily demonstrate. Where Jacob Mikanowski, a historian of Eastern Europe, found the “human face of the socialist state” in my book, as he wrote in the Guardian, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday decided it was a “fascinating” insight into “a filthy, malevolent little state”.