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

AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERCHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES

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 Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion.

From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.

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.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2023: THE TIMES

The instant Sunday Times bestseller, April 2023

'Utterly brilliant . . . Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-World War II Europe' Julia Boyd

'One of the best young historians writing in English today. . . Well-researched, well-written and profoundly insightful, Beyond the Wall explodes many of the lazy Western clichés about East Germany' Andrew Roberts

Hardback

Language: English
Extent: 496
Publication Date: 6 April 2023
ISBN13: 9780241553787

Paperback

Language: English
Extent: 496
Publication Date: 7 March 2024
ISBN13: 9780141999340
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Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint: Allen Lane