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Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany

by Katja Hoyer

Basic Books ·2023 ·496 pages ·Travel
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About This Book

From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the definitive new history of East Germany 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 wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to offer a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country, revealing the rich political, social, and cultural landscape that existed amid oppression and hardship. Drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews and documents, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, beyond the Wall.


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Reviews

"Compelling ... Definitive."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Crafting an expansive and generous history of East Germany, Hoyer brings long-standing academic scholarship to a broader audience ..."

Samuel Clowes Huneke· The New Republic Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"As a guide to East Germany's political history, Hoyer is commendably brisk and judicious."

Dominic Sandbrook· The Times (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"One way of reading Hoyer's revisionist history is as a takedown of western hubris ..."

Stuart Jeffries· The Guardian Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Just four-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell, and now resident in Britain, she shares the frustration of Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, when details of her early life in East Germany are dismissed as irrelevant."

Saul David· The Telegraph (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"[A] rich, counterintuitive history ..."

Jacob Mikanowski· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

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