AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERCHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES *
TELEGRAPH * SPECTATOR * PROSPECT'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
cliches about East Germany' Andrew Roberts 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 * SUNDAY TIMES *
FINANCIAL TIMES * INDEPENDENT * TELEGRAPH * NEW STATESMAN
