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Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany
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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.
Reviews
"One way of reading Hoyer's revisionist history is as a takedown of western hubris ..."
"As a guide to East Germany's political history, Hoyer is commendably brisk and judicious."
"Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed and beautifully written (in her second language), this much needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland."
"[A] rich, counterintuitive history ..."
"An exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — attempt to restore the lost state to the historic significance she feels it has been denied ..."
"Despite its curious blanks, Katja Hoyer's book does much to combat amnesia and Cold War prejudice, and to normalize the GDR and the people who lived there."
"Crafting an expansive and generous history of East Germany, Hoyer brings long-standing academic scholarship to a broader audience ..."
"Compelling ... Definitive."
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