Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

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New angles on post-war Germany and Austria: Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Adam Scovell and Tom Smith https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx Rating this book was a bit of a headache, for reasons I will get into shortly. Ultimately, I decided on a 3/5 since any more would be tacit approval of the current state of historiographical discourse regarding East Germany. The acclaim for this in Britain astounds me. It is, at best, a competent popular history – but groundbreaking scholarship this emphatically is not. Boyes, Roger (2023-06-03). "Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review — why East Germany was doomed from the start". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2023-06-03. 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.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Goodreads Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Goodreads

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. A bold, deft history of the forty-one years of the German Democratic Republic. Hoyer is a historian with skin in the game.” Katja Hoyer has done a magnificent job, providing a rounded insight into what life was like in the GDR. The more controlling aspects of the regime are not given much coverage which is fine by me, as I feel I have a solid grounding of the Stasi and their methods. A reader less aware of this aspect of the regime might conclude the GDR was a wonderful place for its citizens especially as great efforts were made to cater to the needs of the people who enjoyed the highest standard of living of any socialist state.The book covers the history of East Germany in the period between 1949 and 1990, including the sudden and unexpected collapse of the state with the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as many other points in the state's history. It includes both large historical events and anecdotal stories of ordinary people living within the state. [4] Reception [ edit ] Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world. Social Media You can find other conversations about German culture and history available on BBC Sounds and as the Arts & Ideas podcast For all that, West Germany defies comparison to the brutal sham in the east. Cheap Soviet energy mitigated the gdr’s economic failures. Snooping and bullying by the secret policemen of the Stasi cowed its people. So did the presence of some 350,000 Soviet troops. For most of its existence it murdered people caught escaping. No says Katja Hoyer, the high beer consumption can be attributed to the fact that East Germans simply had fewer worries. In her book "Beyond The Wall," East German-born historian Katja Hoyer challenges the prevailing narrative that portrays life in the GDR as overwhelmingly negative and oppressive. Instead, she argues that many East Germans enjoyed a relatively stable and comfortable life with fewer concerns compared to Westerners. Her book offers a new perspective by delving into the lives of ordinary people, aiming to depoliticize the past and provide a more balanced view of history.

Katja Hoyer: we need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany Katja Hoyer: we need to hear ‘the whole story’ about East Germany

That said, I'm willing to forgive any personal bias of the author because, on top of this being both an excellent and well-researched book, it is also highly entertaining and well-written. In particular, the book is littered throughout with personal stories and personal experiences which are included to illustrate bigger themes. By way of example, the author describes how she, as a four year old child, together with her father and pregnant mother, observed street protests from the Berlin Television Tower in the last days of the republic. Many German critics seem to resent any account of the GDR that is not unremittingly negative. This seems to be rooted in a political context that fears persistent attempts at rehabilitating the memory of the GDR, connected with post-unification resentment and a lurch to the right in the former GDR states. It seems to be a truism in Germany that you can’t separate the good (or merely neutral) of East Germany from the bad - everything was rooted in the same inhumane dictatorship. To me as an outsider that is obviously reductive and certainly does not deserve to crowd out other interpretations. Hoyer’s explicit intention is to dignify East Germany - for good or bad the cradle of many Germans’ formative years, including Angela Merkel’s - with a history that recognises it as a state and society that cannot be simply dismissed as an abomination. She does this not by sugar-coating but by giving a cohesive account of the political and social history that leaves one in no doubt that this is not a country that should be mourned. The reunification of Germany on October 3 1990 ended 41 years of division between the democratic West (FRG) and the communist East (GDR). But while West German lives “continued as before,” writes Katja Hoyer, for East Germans reunification “triggered a wave of change whose force, direction and pace were uncontrollable. It was sink or swim.” Hoyer records the reaction of one young East Berliner who walked over to the West on that remarkable night: 'It looks just like our Berlin, only the shop windows are more colorful. I will never forget their glaring neon lights.' Brilliant. Hoyer is a historian of immense ability. Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed, and beautifully written, this much-needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland. Five stars.”

That says it all. The dull, grey, managed economy of the East could never compete with the free market liberalism of the West. But, amazingly, the communists who governed East Germany from 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990 remained convinced that a socialist state could succeed. Their stubborn commitment to the communist fantasy persisted until the end, despite by the late 1980s only being able to keep the State financial by borrowing heavily from Western financiers. Consummately fair-minded as she is as a historian, Katja Hoyer tells the stories of both those GDR citizens who experienced the desperation of those needing to escape across the wall, but also those residents who built ordinary lives under the regime and came to appreciate its unchallenging stability. Aside from the state’s inherent paranoia (understandable given its “precarious position on the faultlines of the Cold War divide”), what ultimately did for the GDR was that it was a system utterly incapable of renewing itself. Once the supply of cheap Soviet oil was choked off, the regime crumbled. East Germany never managed to renew its ideology and instead remained dominated by ‘the old men’ (and their intransigent mindsets) who had founded it over 40 years earlier.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Waterstones Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Waterstones

The author was born in East Germany and was aged around 5 when reunification occurred, before then moving to the UK - the book was actually written in English. It's clear that her parents had good experiences of their lives in East Germany and that their positivity rubbed off on the author, because the book is overwhelmingly positive. Whilst she doesn't exactly sweep the negativity of the Stasi and the repressive regime under the carpet, I did get the feeling that she placed less emphasis on them than they perhaps deserved. A case in point is that the section dealing with Stalin's purges of German communists who had fled Hitler to the Soviet Union features at least as prominently in the book as does the behaviour of the Stasi. Some might argue that the cost of these state enforced developments were in retrospect prohibitive, and that the social effects of state rather than familial nannying prevent the realisation of the benefits of allowing individuals the freedom to determine their preferred way of raising their children. Having the state set the role of women ought not to be a better alternative to self determination. It seems more like the dystopian 1984, than a symbol of social progress. a b Peter, Conradi (2023-06-29). "Katja Hoyer tried to tell a different story about East Germany. Now Germans are furious". ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2023-06-29. Where “Beyond the Wall” slips a little is that Hoyer does not give as detailed an analysis as elsewhere as to how the Stasi developed to become one of the most notorious and all-consuming secret police apparatuses the world has ever seen. And the events leading up to the collapse of the regime in November 1989 are also skipped over in a surprisingly cursory manner. This book is an excellent, very readable history of the German Democratic Republic, written with that view towards style and readability that is so characteristic of British historians (I was reminded of David Priestland's The Red Flag).A beyond-brilliant new picture of the rise and fall of the East German state. Hoyer gives us not only pin-sharp historical analysis, but an up-close and personal view of both key characters and ordinary citizens whose lives charted some of the darkest hours of the Cold War. If you thought you knew the history of East Germany, think again. An utterly riveting read.” It is here where one occasionally wishes that Hoyer broadened her vision from East Germany to the eastern bloc as a whole. A comparative viewpoint might have made clearer the peculiarity of East Germany’s achievement and its tragedy. Both were rooted in the same geographic fact. As part of a larger, pre-war Germany, East Germany was faced with the constant counter-example of the neighbouring Federal Republic. Its proximity just over the Wall encouraged its leadership to make their version of socialism as effective as humanly possible. It also pushed them to create one of the most extensive systems of control the world has ever seen.

BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking, East Germany BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking, East Germany

a b Mikanowski, Jacob (2023-04-02). "Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review – the human face of the socialist state". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved 2023-06-29. Rather than focusing on what East Germans lost by its Soviet occupation, Hoyer’s book shines a light on what the East gained that the West never had – in particular around women’s rights.

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. 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. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai Historian and journalist Hoyer ( Blood and Iron) captivates with this compassionate narrative of a lost nation."