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 the author of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society, and her writing has appeared in History Today, BBC History Extra, and The Spectator. Born in East Germany, she lives in Sussex, UK.