Beyond the Wall

Forget everything you thought you knew about life in the GDR. This terrifically colourful, surprising and enjoyable history of the socialist state is full of surprises -- Dominic Sandbrook * The Sunday Times * What makes this meticulous book essential reading is not so much its sense of what East Germans lost, as what we never had. A history of the GDR that adds stability, contentment and women's rights to the familiar picture of authoritarianism -- Stuart Jeffries * Guardian * A lively, objective and original study ... Although Hoyer depicts a country of which some became proud, she is in no doubt about its inviability: the state gave an illusion of civil rights and basic freedoms that the mass import of Levi jeans to appease a restless youth could not conceal -- Simon Heffer * Telegraph, Books of the Year * We often think of East Germany as grey, but this is a surprisingly colourful book. Born in the GDRs far east in the 1980s, Katja Hoyer is an admirably open-minded guide to its bizarre history. Shes excellent on the communist elite, such as the grim apparatchik Erich Honecker, but her story really comes alive when shes writing about the lives of ordinary people, from their Baltic summer holidays to their beloved Trabant cars -- Dominic Sandbrook * The Times, Best Books of the Year * A from-start-to-finish account of the East Germany where Hoyer was born, which means not just the Stasi but also day jobs, picnics and rock albums. The result is a complete reconstruction of a country that stopped existing 23 years ago * Prospect Magazine, Books of the Year 2023 * Brilliant. . . Hoyer is a historian of immense ability. . . Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed and beautifully written, this much needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland. Five stars -- Saul David * Daily Telegraph * Absolutely fascinating -- Andrew Marr * LBC * A rich, counterintuitive history of a country all too often dismissed as a freak or accident of the cold war * Observer * Myth-busting, artfully constructed history. . . Katja Hoyer displays a special understanding and wants to present a corrective to previous reductive assessments of the GDR that depict it as a field-grey Stasiland. . . Her command of detail, broad historical brush strokes and evident sympathy for her interview partners make for a fascinating read -- Roger Boyes * The Times * Impressively researched Hoyer makes a strong case for paying the vanished state its historical due her well-told stories of valiant East Germans are a tribute to human resilience under brutal conditions -- Kati Marton * New York Times * Enthralling, fascinating and very readable. An extraordinary book. Five stars -- Peter Hitchens * Mail on Sunday * A fast-paced, vivid and engaging book. Beyond the Wall does much to combat amnesia and Cold War prejudice, and to normalize the GDR and the people who lived there * TLS * Having begun her life behind the wall, Hoyer tells the story of the GDR with emotional intensity; but also with the detachment and balance of a professional historian who is determined to portray both the good and bad. And a very interesting stroy it is, too -- Oliver Letwin * The Tablet * Tremendous. Until the publication of Beyond the Wall, there hadn't been an English language history of the GDR with which to colour in that vanished country's past -- Peter Hoskins * Prospect * A bold, deft history of the forty-one years of the German Democratic Republic. Hoyer is a historian with skin in the game -- John Kampfner * Literary Review * Beyond the Wall breaks away from Cold War stereotypes to depict 'normal life' in the German Democratic Republic ... a bestseller against the odds ... unexpectedly resonant -- Thomas Wieder * Le Monde * Humane, deeply historically informed and compelling * Country Life * Now a historian and commentator, Hoyer tells the country's human story with a compelling eye for detail in a boo

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 hosts the podcast The New Germany together with Oliver Moody. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK.