Beyond the Wall Spiral-Bound | 2023-09-05

Katja Hoyer

★★★★☆+ from 101 to 500 ratings

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AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, "an expansive and generous history" of East Germany (New Republic)

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.
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 496 pages
ISBN-10: 1541602579
Item Weight: 1.7 lbs
Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 101 to 500 ratings
"In this impressively researched history of East Germany, Hoyer excavates the human and the worthwhile from the rubble of a police state. Her lens is primarily on geopolitics, but her narrative kicks into gear when she lingers on the lives of ordinary East Berliners."
--New York Times Book Review
Katja Hoyer is a German British historian, journalist, and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron. A visiting research fellow at King's College London and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and host of the podcast The New Germany. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK.