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. Unsurprisingly, the insidious reach of the Stasi was a serious deterrent to any potential dissenters. It was common for families and friends to inform on each other, and criticising the regime to almost anyone was incredibly risky and could also be a potentially extremely dangerous thing to do. Fear of losing opportunities, being subjected to a sustained harassment campaign or even torture and imprisonment ensured mass compliance with the regime, despite the hardships it often created. Forget everything you thought you knew about life in the GDR. This terrifically colorful, surprising, and enjoyable history of the socialist state is full of surprises. Enormously refreshing.”

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer, review: a brilliant warts-and Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer, review: a brilliant warts-and

That says it all. The dull, grey, managed economy of the East could never compete with the free market liberalism of the West. But, amazingly, the communists who governed East Germany from 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990 remained convinced that a socialist state could succeed. Their stubborn commitment to the communist fantasy persisted until the end, despite by the late 1980s only being able to keep the State financial by borrowing heavily from Western financiers. Fazit: „Diesseits der Mauer“ ist ein verständlich geschriebener 500seitiger Abriß über die Geschichte der DDR und das Leben in diesem Staat. Katja Hoyers Sicht ist eine völlig legitime, ihr Anliegen ist es, das ganze Leben in der DDR abzubilden, ihr Fokus liegt nicht auf dem Leben in einer Diktatur. Ihr Buch ist gerade wegen seiner Verständlichkeit hervorragend, sollte jedoch durch andere Sachbücher zum Thema ergänzt werden. 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. No says Katja Hoyer, the high beer consumption can be attributed to the fact that East Germans simply had fewer worries. In her book "Beyond The Wall," East German-born historian Katja Hoyer challenges the prevailing narrative that portrays life in the GDR as overwhelmingly negative and oppressive. Instead, she argues that many East Germans enjoyed a relatively stable and comfortable life with fewer concerns compared to Westerners. Her book offers a new perspective by delving into the lives of ordinary people, aiming to depoliticize the past and provide a more balanced view of history. Trapped behind barbed wire, but increasingly prosperous, East Germany began to resemble the gilded cage of the eastern bloc, at least in the eyes of its socialist neighbours. However, as Hoyer points out, at least the gilding was real: East Germany really did enjoy the highest standard of living of any socialist state. Unemployment barely existed. Housing was universally available and relatively cheap. Abundant, accessible childcare allowed women to enter the workforce at a higher rate than in any other country in the world. As Erika Krüger, one of the workers Hoyer interviewed, recalled, life in the 1970s and 80s was “quite happy”: “We worked, received our regular wages as well as bonuses for hard work. We got by and had nothing to worry about.”

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. This book has been getting a good reception from critics and fits well with the emerging revisionist history of socialist Eastern Europe from authors like Kristen Ghodsee, Lea Ypi, Gal Kirn etc. 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. Request Desk/Exam Copy

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review - The Guardian

The reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990 marked the end of the division between the democratic West (FRG) and the communist East (GDR), which had persisted since 1949. However, while West Germans continued their lives as usual, the reunification brought about significant changes for East Germans. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman 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.Not that Hoyer is an ostalgie-filled apologist. The GDR she describes is one divided between those “who resented the permanent state of alert and politicisation of life” and “others who craved meaning and belonging in contrast to what they perceived to be the empty consumerism of the West”. That said, I'm willing to forgive any personal bias of the author because, on top of this being both an excellent and well-researched book, it is also highly entertaining and well-written. In particular, the book is littered throughout with personal stories and personal experiences which are included to illustrate bigger themes. By way of example, the author describes how she, as a four year old child, together with her father and pregnant mother, observed street protests from the Berlin Television Tower in the last days of the republic. 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.

Beyond the Wall (book) - Wikipedia

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. A rich, counterintuitive history of a country all too often dismissed as a freak or accident of the Cold War.” Hoyer argues Germany’s formal division into two separate states in 1949 hadn’t always been inevitable. Initially, Stalin aimed to keep Germany unified and neutral. However, Moscow eventually deemed it necessary to establish a socialist state in East Germany as a buffer between the capitalist West and the socialist East. Indeed w hile the West was rebuilding and forming a partnership with the UK and Americans after World War Two, the Soviet Zone’s gradual nationalisation of the economy made establishing a separate socialist state increasingly desirable to the Russians. The definitive new history of East Germany by a highly acclaimed young historian. 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. These features of life in the GDR were fundamental not incidental, whether in its heyday decade after the mid-1960s or its moribund decay in the 1980s. Ms Hoyer rightly highlights the gaps in modern Germany’s understanding of the four decades of oppression in its eastern regions and the resentments that bequeathed. But sentimentality and relativism distort her evaluation of a loathsome dictatorship. ■The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Beyond the Wall” adds depth to caricatures of East Germany “Beyond the Wall” adds depth to caricatures of East Germany

Katja Hoyer behauptet und mit dieser Behauptung wird sie nicht falsch liegen, dass die DDR für die Mehrzahl ihrer Bürger Heimat gewesen ist, oft eine unbequeme, oft eine gehasste, aber dennoch eine Heimat. Eine Heimat, auf die man stolz war. Eine Heimat mit sozialistischem Grundgedanken, den man prinzipiell bejahte; wenngleich dieser Sozialismus manchmal lächerliche Züge annahm. Und manchmal brutale. Why did the East Germans drink so much more beer than the West Germans? In 1988, they drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. Was it to forget their worries, which came with living in the German Democratic Republic? Was ich auch interessant fand, war wie die DDR in ihrer Anfangsphase (und später auch) um ihre Eigenständigkeit auch gegenüber der UdSSR pochte. Lange hält sich Hoyer mit der Frage auf, ob Stalin wirklich einen "eigenen" deutschen Staat wollte, oder ob er ihn eher widerwillig in Kauf nahm, nachdem sein Plan, die Westbindung von Westdeutschland zu verhindern, gescheitert war. Whilst initially political events following World War Two created a sense of unrest, eventually the GDR provided East Germans with the stability they desired. a b Jeffries, Stuart (29 March 2023). "Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review – overturning cliches of East Germany". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 July 2023.Hoyer brilliantly shows the history of East Germany was a significant chapter of German history, not just a footnote to it or a copy of the Soviet Union. To understand Germany today, we have to grapple with the history and legacy of its all-but-dismissed East.” Historian and journalist Hoyer ( Blood and Iron) captivates with this compassionate narrative of a lost nation." Boyes, Roger (2023-06-03). "Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review — why East Germany was doomed from the start". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2023-06-03. By 1988, the average East German drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. The obvious explanation is they drank to escape the unbearable awfulness of being in the German Democratic Republic, with its omnipresent Stasi, clown-car Trabants, travel restrictions, gerontocratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and laughable elections. Where “Beyond the Wall” slips a little is that Hoyer does not give as detailed an analysis as elsewhere as to how the Stasi developed to become one of the most notorious and all-consuming secret police apparatuses the world has ever seen. And the events leading up to the collapse of the regime in November 1989 are also skipped over in a surprisingly cursory manner.