Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

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It is here where one occasionally wishes that Hoyer broadened her vision from East Germany to the eastern bloc as a whole. A comparative viewpoint might have made clearer the peculiarity of East Germany’s achievement and its tragedy. Both were rooted in the same geographic fact. As part of a larger, pre-war Germany, East Germany was faced with the constant counter-example of the neighbouring Federal Republic. Its proximity just over the Wall encouraged its leadership to make their version of socialism as effective as humanly possible. It also pushed them to create one of the most extensive systems of control the world has ever seen. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman

BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking, East Germany BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking, East Germany

Well-researched, well-written, and profoundly insightful, it explodes many of the lazy Western cliches about East Germany." While the end for East Germany came fast as its economy collapsed and its population actively protested on the streets, Hoyer seems keen to record some elements of its culture as positive. She notes the very high participation rate of women in the labour market, and the concomitant widely deployed state sponsored childcare facilities, both of which far exceeded comparable developments in the West. The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our

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Originally under Soviet army occupation following the end of the second world war, East Germany became an independent country on 7 October 1949. But the story Hoyer tells in Beyond the Wall starts much earlier with the German Communist party’s struggle to survive “between Hitler and Stalin”. In the run-up to the second world war, party members faced arrest and torture in Nazi Germany. This drove much of its leadership into exile in the Soviet Union, where most eventually perished, either in the gulags or by firing squad, as victims of Stalin’s purges.

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David, Saul (2023-03-20). "Willkommen to the GDR! A warts-and-all history of East Germany". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235 . Retrieved 2023-06-03. 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. 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. Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ 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.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 this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Waterstones Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Waterstones

This “ideological sediment” of diehard loyalists determinedly recreated the Soviet system they revered. They faced a population traumatised by defeat (and the accompanying mass rapes by Soviet soldiers), along with an economy crippled by their occupiers’ relentless demands for reparations. Harsh economic conditions prompted the workers’ uprising of 1953. It was bloodily crushed by the Soviets, dispelling any pretence that the place was run on behalf of the toiling masses. Utterly brilliant.This gripping account of East Germany sheds new light on what for many of us remains an opaque chapter of history. Authoritative, lively, and profoundly human, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand post-WW2 Europe.” Yet the process of dismissing the GDR as a footnote in German history is, for Hoyer, “ahistorical”. Like her, millions of Germans alive today “neither can nor want to deny that they had once lived in the GDR”. The system was far from perfect, but along with the “tears and anger”, “oppression and brutality”, there was “laughter and pride”, “opportunity and belonging”. Hence her decision to write a new “warts and all” history of the GDR that places it firmly in the wider German narrative. I discovered Beyond the Wall (2023) in the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction long list. I’m very interested in the GDR so was keen to read it.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Heavy metal … a woman at work in East Germany, in an image from Beyond the Wall. Photograph: Imago Images Social control was a priority, with often ludicrous thought controls such as regulating the amount of western music teenagers could hear and play, and, of course, establishing the notorious Stasi, which spied on people's lives continuously. It often violently disciplined the livelihoods and liberty of those deemed to be entertaining non-socialist thoughts and habits. Hoyer's own father was interred when young for making a politically sensitive joke while working. These are all fair points. West Germany itself was stiflingly conformist. Not only that, it was infested with Nazis in its early decades, plagued by political corruption and subject to hidden American tutelage. It came close to adopting police-state tactics against terrorism in the 1970s.

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Hachette Book Group Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer | Hachette Book Group

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. A rich, counterintuitive history of a country all too often dismissed as a freak or accident of the Cold War.” It's a popular history book on the DDR. As I don't know all that much about it and as I am rather interested in how daily life must've been, I really liked this book a lot. It's an easy read with lots of stuff that was new for me. I would have liked to know a bit more on how the economy worked, but it has a lot of information that corrected the cliché views on the DDR. For a small isolated country without raw materials it did do a lot things rather well, not just the olympics. The regime tried hard to fulfil consumer wishes, even subsidized mass importing of levi jeans and stuff like that. BEST BOOKS OF 2023: THE TIMES * SUNDAY TIMES * FINANCIAL TIMES * INDEPENDENT * DAILY TELEGRAPHY * NEW STATESMAN Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Social mobility

One of the most interesting things that I had never thought about before, but explains a lot of why the DDR became what it was, is the origins story of the leaders of the DDR. Basically they were all German communists that fled to Soviet Russia in the 30s. What I also didn't know that 3 quarters of all German communists were murdered in the Stalinist terror. The horror. More members of the KPD's executive committee were murdered by Soviet Russia than bij Nazi Germany. To survive that and to climb to the higher positions one had to be rather morally flexible (the worst kind of scab) and become more stalinist than Stalin. These were the people that set up the DDR. Dedicated and in some way idealistic communists yes, but also the worst kind of party-hierarchy climbing apparatchiks. Die Zeit, "'Das Interesse an deutscher Geschichte ist groß'" (in German), 8 May 2023. Retrieved 30 June 2023. 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. David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai