Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

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Drawing a line under both German states in 1990 was never going to happen. West Germans were too wedded to the idea of 1945 as their “zero hour”, the point at which the tender shoots of democracy grew from the ashes of the Second World War. Proud of West Germany’s prosperity and political stability, they saw it as the continuity state and East Germany as the anomaly.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review - The Guardian

The main problem, of course, was the leaders's fanatical communism. That fanaticism may be explicable in the context of their formative years in the '30s and '40s, but their almost religiously cultish commitment to the communist dream is very much of the period, and difficult to accept as in any way a rational act. 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.

Barber, Tony (2021-01-18). "Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer — conflicted Germany". Financial Times . Retrieved 2023-06-29. If you’re interested in the Cold War and the GDR then this is solid gold, complete with wonderful insights and a great overview of the country’s history. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

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

However, the question of the Stasi remained a recurring thought as I read the book. The German Democratic Republic, with its all-pervasive Stasi and political oppression, instilled fear and earned East Germany the reputation of being one of the most severe authoritarian surveillance states. Those familiar with the book Stasiland by Anna Funder will understand the gravity of this. 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. German reviewers have also identified worryingly many factual inaccuracies. For example, Hoyer gets Angela Merkel’s age wrong in the very first sentence of the book. These combined with the immature writing style and a meagre bibliography serve to undermine the pretensions to scholarship. Undoubtedly the Soviet Union viewed East Germany as a pawn to advance its interests during the Cold War, and the authoritarianism and repression that were characteristic of the Soviet Union were also evident in the East German state. The pervasive presence of the Stasi secret police created an atmosphere of fear and unease that they then proceeded to exploit. Furthermore there were severe restrictions on political and personal freedoms. 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.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. Hoyer's narrative ultimately portrays the old story of a dictatorship that was, in her view, relatively comfortable for many. For those who experienced the regime's oppression, this perspective falls short of capturing the full truth. German historian and English resident Katja Hoyer's 2023 history of East Germany (Beyond the Wall) is a sympathetic history of the people of the communist totalitarian state of East Germany, which collapsed spectacularly on the night of 9 November 1989, when guards on the Berlin Wall gave up trying to prevent people from walking into West Berlin. While the English translation of Kairos is relatively hot on the heels of the German original, which appeared in 2021, older East German fiction is also being discovered by British publishers. Another book now found on British shelves is Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming. The novel appeared in Germany in 2006, where it was awarded several prizes and made into a film. The fact that it appeared in the UK this year speaks volumes about the increasing interest in its subject matter.

Book Review: ‘Beyond the Wall’ by Katja Hoyer - The New York

Utterly brilliant . . . Authoritative, lively and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-World War II Europe' Julia Boyd 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. While Katja Hoyer relates the troubled gestation of the GDR, the subtlety of “Beyond the Wall” is that it shows that the East German state had some laudable achievements to its name. East German state socialism was able to realise relative female equality and career progression for their citizens - for much of its existence attaining the highest rate of female participation in the workplace in the world - and maintaining a high level of access to university education and lifelong learning. And this book isn’t just dry historical analysis; “Beyond the Wall” is replete with quirky socio-cultural stories such as the tale of Dean Reed (the ultimately doomed ‘Red Elvis’) and the surreal spectacle of the East German state buying up 1 million pairs of Levi’s jeans in a vain attempt to keep a lid on youthful rebellion. Leider muss ich sagen, dass ich den Kritikern recht geben muss: das ist ein sehr einseitig geratenes, die DDR verklärendes Buch.A great strength of the book is its use of anecdotes and personal stories to illustrate the diversity of life in the DDR - salvaging the lives of the citizens of the former DDR from the dustbin of history into which their former state has been unceremoniously dumped. Beyond the Wall is a satisfying synthesis of social history with political and diplomatic history and, as such, reads well; shifting between different conceptual lenses in a way that it feels dynamic and exciting throughout. Hoyer animates the story of the people of the East by beginning each chapter with an anecdotal snapshot of a personal event that replicates on an individual level broader political and social developments. Otherwise, her account follows a standard historical chronology of the East. It starts with post-war establishment in the late 1940s, and records the struggle to establish a working economy and society in the 1950s and '60s. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Moody, Oliver (2023-06-29). "Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer review — Germany: glued together by enemy blood". ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2023-06-29.

From rampaging teens to female assassins: why has East German

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.” On October 7 1989, a four-year-old Hoyer and her father celebrated the GDR’s 40th anniversary with a trip to the viewing platform of Berlin’s Fernsehturm, the socialist-built TV tower. Below, police cars converged on Alexanderplatz in an attempt to quell the unstoppable protests that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall a month later. 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.

The establishment of West and East Germany

The iconic development in East Germany was of course the erection of the infamous Wall in 1961. What the east government Orwellianly termed the 'anti-fascist protection barrier' was in fact necessitated by the substantial leakage of key personnel from the East. By the time of the Wall's construction, over 300,000 highly credentialed doctors, lawyers, architects and engineers were emigrating to the West each year, to escape repression and earn reasonable incomes. 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. One of the most interesting things that I had never thought about before, but explains a lot of why the DDR became what it was, is the origins story of the leaders of the DDR. Basically they were all German communists that fled to Soviet Russia in the 30s. What I also didn't know that 3 quarters of all German communists were murdered in the Stalinist terror. The horror. More members of the KPD's executive committee were murdered by Soviet Russia than bij Nazi Germany. To survive that and to climb to the higher positions one had to be rather morally flexible (the worst kind of scab) and become more stalinist than Stalin. These were the people that set up the DDR. Dedicated and in some way idealistic communists yes, but also the worst kind of party-hierarchy climbing apparatchiks. The 1920s - Philosophy's Golden Age Wittgenstein changed his mind, Heidegger revolutionised philosophy (and the German language), and both the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle were in full swing. Matthew Sweet is joined by Wolfram Eilenberger, David Edmonds and Esther Leslie. Plus, a report on the plight of the Lukacs Archive in Budapest https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q380 Katja Hoyer begins her book with a strong narrative, highlighting an important moment in modern German history. On 3 October 2021, Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel stepped down after almost 20 years held the position. In her remarks, she emphasised that her experience growing up in East Germany was not only “lost years”, as the common narrative about her life often describes. Her political career is often counted only in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall, ignoring her formative years in East Germany that shaped the person she is today.