Perhaps more than any former Eastern Bloc state, East Germany continues to exude a strange fascination for many. Images of the Berlin Wall with its barbed wire, watch towers and ‘death strip’, as well as stories of the all-seeing, all-knowing State Security Service – the dreaded Stasi – have helped to cement the German Democratic Republic in the public imagination as the ultimate example of an oppressive communist police state. In contrast to scholarly research on the GDR, popular history books rarely consider what life was like for ordinary East Germans. Katja Hoyer seeks to fill this gap with Beyond the Wall, which arrives purporting to be ‘the definitive history’ of the self-proclaimed workers’ and peasants’ state.
Hoyer’s account of the history of East Germany begins in Moscow before the Second World War. Here we meet several German communists residing in exile to escape the Nazis. Two of them – Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht – were later tasked with planning a new postwar order to be built on the ruins of Nazi Germany. When East Germany was founded on 7 October 1949, Pieck became its first president, but it was Ulbricht who held all the political power as First Secretary and de facto leader of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Hoyer then takes us on a chronological journey through East Germany’s short existence, from the construction and stabilisation of the SED state in the 1950s, to its consolidation in the 1960s, and onto the slow and steady decline of the regime from the mid-1970s to its ultimate and rather unexpected collapse in 1989.
