Beyond the Wall
East Germany, 1949-1990
Katja Hoyer
Allen Lane, £25
We tend to associate East Germany with the “Stasi, clown-car Trabants, travel restrictions, gerontocratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and laughable elections”, says Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. But as historian Katja Hoyer, who spent her early childhood in the East before moving to the UK, makes clear, not everyone was unhappy, and for many the country was a “stable place with few concerns or worries”. It had its positive side too, with world-leading policies promoting women’s rights and a degree of social mobility that those raised in “Britain’s sclerotic public-school plutocracy” could only dream of.
Hoyer is “commendably brisk and judicious” in her recounting of East Germany’s political history, says Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. However, her book “really comes alive” when she discusses “the lives of ordinary people”, writing “with palpable gusto” about the “paid holidays in Baltic chalets, the huge popularity of Trabant cars, the thrill of visiting East Berlin’s TV tower, the popular joy at the steroid-fuelled sporting successes”. She also effectively makes the “counterintuitive” argument, that, even in the late 1980s, “although people wanted more freedom, more opportunities and, above all, more consumer goods, few actually wanted the end of the GDR”.
Hoyer’s book is “packed with vignettes and anecdotes that bring this halfforgotten side of German history to life”, and reminds us that those living in the East were “real people, not cartoon characters from a cold-war comic book”, says The Economist. She also “rightly highlights the gaps in modern Germany’s understanding of the four decades of oppression in its eastern regions and the resentments that bequeathed”. However, her “sentimentality and relativism” distort her evaluation of a “loathsome dictatorship” that “mostly functioned badly and harshly”, and depended on “snooping and bullying”, as well as the “presence of some 350,000 Soviet troops”, to keep it in power. These features of life in the GDR were “fundamental not incidental”.