AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERCHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES *
TELEGRAPH * SPECTATOR * PROSPECT * IRISH INDEPENDENT '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 * DAILY TELEGRAPH * NEW STATESMAN The instant
Sunday Times bestseller April 2023
