Beyond the Wall East Germany, 1949 1990 – Book Launch Event with Katja Hoyer

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

In 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.

Beyond the Wall offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, it 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 mid-1980s, the book 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.

At a time when many worry about illiberal tendencies in parts of Europe that once lay to the east of the iron curtain, Beyond the Wall invites readers to dare a fresh glance into this world and its history.

Participants:

Katja Hoyer, German-British historian and journalist, Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Moderator: Will Collins, Lecturer in American Studies at ELTE
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her debut book Blood and Iron was well received by academics and critics. Her latest book Beyond the Wall was a Sunday Times bestseller and long-listed for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize. Katja is a columnist for the Washington Post and the Berliner Zeitung. She also writes for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, Die Welt and other newspapers on current political affairs in Germany and Europe. She hosts the podcast The New Germany. Katja was born in (East) Germany and now lives in the UK.