Beyond the Wall

July 10, 2023
Historian and journalist Hoyer (Blood and Iron) captivates with this compassionate narrative of a lost nation. The German Democratic Republic was founded on October 7, 1949, and “vanished literally overnight” when Germany unified in 1990. Arguing that the German national obsession with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“the process of ‘overcoming’ history”) has denied East Germans their past, Hoyer retells the country’s short history through the eyes of its soldiers, workers, mothers, and students, capturing the ardor and joy of people striving to build a new nation. Hoyer astutely analyzes East Germany’s formative moments, such as Stalin handpicking the country’s inaugural leaders—president Wilhelm Pieck and Communist Party head Walter Ulbricht. She heaps criticism on Ulbricht for his lack of charisma and for his harsh work quotas that led to the June 1953 uprising; when Moscow sent in tanks to quell the protests, at least 55 people were killed. She writes that the Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961, was “undoubtedly a human tragedy,” but stresses that “the most abiding memories many East Germans have of this time are shaped by the large-scale building projects, new professional opportunities especially for women, families obtaining their first cars,” and other modernizations. While readers may question whether this economic gain and social stability made up for the regime’s repressiveness, Hoyer’s sympathetic chronicle succeeds in reclaiming East German history for the East Germans.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
A historian discards the Cold War caricature of East Germany to deliver a compelling historical study. British historian Hoyer, the author of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, was born in East Germany. She begins her latest eye-opening history in 1933, when thousands of German communists fled to Russia after Hitler took power. Almost all were arrested, and 75% were killed because the paranoid Stalin assumed that many were Gestapo spies. Lucky survivors returned to revive a devastated land with no help from reparations-hungry Russia, which vacuumed up farms, machinery, infrastructure, and even the products of rebuilding factories. In 1953, after years of deprivation, the nation exploded in violence, which required Soviet troops to suppress. Shocked East German leaders paid more attention to economics and, aided by Stalin's death in 1953 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 (which cut off a crippling brain drain), accomplished a good deal. Although no fan of communism, Hoyer points out that, by the 1960s, "East German women enjoyed greater professional and economic autonomy than their Western counterparts." Though the Stasi was pervasive, only a minority suffered. The vast majority came to terms with life in East Germany. By the 1970s, they enjoyed the communist world's highest living standards, but the 1980s brought difficulties as the declining Soviet Union reduced subsidies, loans, and cheap oil. Desperate leaders made overtures to West Germany, which responded favorably. The decade saw an easing of travel restrictions and censorship, and in the final years, there was an explosion of activism, the wall's destruction, and a free election followed by unification. Hoyer incisively examines the consequences. Unemployment skyrocketed as Western entrepreneurs took over, and working women lost cheap, universal child care in favor of the West's skimpy, expensive version. Today, former East Germans often vote for extremist far-right and -left parties, but few long for the old regime. The definitive history of "the other Germany, beyond the Wall."

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.