AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERCHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES SUNDAY TIMES TELEGRAPH SPECTATOR PROSPECTUtterly brilliant . . . Authoritative lively and profoundly human it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand postWorld War II Europe Julia BoydOne of the best young historians writing in English today. . . Wellresearched wellwritten and profoundly insightful Beyond the Wall explodes many of the lazy Western cliches about East Germany Andrew RobertsIn 1990 a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before and anything that 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 offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create first under the watchful eye of Stalin and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to the relative prosperity of the 1970s and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid1980s Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship East Germany was yet home to a rich political social and cultural landscape a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.Powerfully told and drawing on a vast array of neverbeforeseen interviews letters and records this is the definitive history of the other Germany the one beyond the Wall.LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2023 THE TIMES SUNDAY TIMES FINANCIAL TIMES INDEPENDENT TELEGRAPH NEW STATESMAN