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Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

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Katja Hoyer behauptet und mit dieser Behauptung wird sie nicht falsch liegen, dass die DDR für die Mehrzahl ihrer Bürger Heimat gewesen ist, oft eine unbequeme, oft eine gehasste, aber dennoch eine Heimat. Eine Heimat, auf die man stolz war. Eine Heimat mit sozialistischem Grundgedanken, den man prinzipiell bejahte; wenngleich dieser Sozialismus manchmal lächerliche Züge annahm. Und manchmal brutale. If you’re interested in the Cold War and the GDR then this is solid gold, complete with wonderful insights and a great overview of the country’s history. 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.”

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review - The Guardian

Unsurprisingly, the insidious reach of the Stasi was a serious deterrent to any potential dissenters. It was common for families and friends to inform on each other, and criticising the regime to almost anyone was incredibly risky and could also be a potentially extremely dangerous thing to do. Fear of losing opportunities, being subjected to a sustained harassment campaign or even torture and imprisonment ensured mass compliance with the regime, despite the hardships it often created. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Trapped behind barbed wire, but increasingly prosperous, East Germany began to resemble the gilded cage of the eastern bloc, at least in the eyes of its socialist neighbours. However, as Hoyer points out, at least the gilding was real: East Germany really did enjoy the highest standard of living of any socialist state. Unemployment barely existed. Housing was universally available and relatively cheap. Abundant, accessible childcare allowed women to enter the workforce at a higher rate than in any other country in the world. As Erika Krüger, one of the workers Hoyer interviewed, recalled, life in the 1970s and 80s was “quite happy”: “We worked, received our regular wages as well as bonuses for hard work. We got by and had nothing to worry about.” By 1988, the average East German drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. The obvious explanation is they drank to escape the unbearable awfulness of being in the German Democratic Republic, with its omnipresent Stasi, clown-car Trabants, travel restrictions, gerontocratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and laughable elections. A fantastic, sparkling book, filled with insights not only about East Germany but about the Cold War, Europe, and the forging of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”Drawing a line under both German states in 1990 was never going to happen. West Germans were too wedded to the idea of 1945 as their “zero hour”, the point at which the tender shoots of democracy grew from the ashes of the Second World War. Proud of West Germany’s prosperity and political stability, they saw it as the continuity state and East Germany as the anomaly. Leeder, Karen (31 March 2023). "The good, the bad and the ugly in the other Germany". TLS . Retrieved 2023-06-03. In 1990, a country disappeared. For the previous forty-one years, East Germany had existed in Western minds as more of a metaphor than a place, more of a grey communist blur than a land of real people with friends and families, workplaces and homes. As Germany once again became a single state, the history of the GDR was simplified and politicised. It was nothing but Stasi spies and central planning, nothing but a wall in Berlin. Based on first-hand accounts and extensive new research, Hoyer presents the history of the GDR as never before -- as a kaleidoscope of perspectives, experiences and stories. From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the USSR, this is the definitive story of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

BEYOND THE WALL | Kirkus Reviews BEYOND THE WALL | Kirkus Reviews

Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Two other factors regarding alcohol might merit discussion. First, self-medication of trauma. Hoyer rightfully highlights the uniquely traumatic lives of East Germans. Two world wars, multiple financial collapses, the high proportion of refugees from east Prussia and the Baltic, and the ravages of the Red Army assembled a uniquely scarred population that may have sought solace in the bottle. The other, is state control. Both the USSR and the Russian Empire before it owed a lot of their power (and money) to the state monopoly on alcohol, and finally collapsed in part due to changes in alcohol policy. Katja Hoyer (born 1985) [1] is a German historian, journalist and writer. [2] [3] Life and career [ edit ] It wasn't all bad: East Germany became the most economically successful of the Soviet satellite states (albeit a low pass mark), and the lives and struggles of its people had by the 1970s moments of material success and relative happiness. Their achievements become over time emblematic of the human capacity to survive and even flourish to some extent when circumstances and fate seem to be acting against rational development and humane progress. Hoyer explains that after years of political upheaval, war, economic turmoil and rapid political change, most Germans were exhausted and sought stability, a settled home life, and a future without war and economic disaster. Thus an anti-fascist, socialist one-party state like the GDR appealed to many East Germans.These features of life in the GDR were fundamental not incidental, whether in its heyday decade after the mid-1960s or its moribund decay in the 1980s. Ms Hoyer rightly highlights the gaps in modern Germany’s understanding of the four decades of oppression in its eastern regions and the resentments that bequeathed. But sentimentality and relativism distort her evaluation of a loathsome dictatorship. ■ Insofern sehe ich in „Diesseits der Mauer“ vor allem eine vertane Chance. Ein an sich interessante Buch-Idee, nämlich die DDR-Geschichte aus der Perspektive des Alltagslebens ihrer Bürger nachzuerzählen, scheitert tragisch an der fehlenden geschichtspolitischen Redlichkeit und der ausbleibenden Bereitschaft zur analytischen Tiefe ihrer Autorin

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