Book & podcast collection

Beyond the Wall

byKatja Hoyer

Katja Hoyer reconstructs the history of East Germany from its creation after World War II to its disappearance in 1990. Using archives and personal testimony, she examines socialist ideals, central planning, surveillance, work, family, culture, education, and ordinary efforts to build meaningful lives within an authoritarian state. The book neither excuses repression nor reduces the German Democratic Republic to the Stasi and the Berlin Wall. Hoyer asks what reunification obscured and why many former citizens retain complicated memories of a country whose institutions failed but whose society cannot be dismissed as unreal.

Publisher

Basic Books

Publication date

2023

Format

Print edition

Pages

496

ISBN

9781541602571