At first a little reluctant to invest the time, I am now happy to have read Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall (mainly as it allows me to write this blog post). In true Anglo-Saxon narrative nonfiction style, Hoyer primes storytelling over exhaustive documentation, and produced an engaging read. While her book may not contribute anything new to the historical discourse, it makes East Germany’s history more widely accessible in the English-speaking world. In Germany, however, the book’s German version has played to a different audience, within a different discourse, and has justly received some devastating reviews.