Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany

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.

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.