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.

Hoyer works her way 40+ years chronologically, tracing the roots of the GDR to Stalin-era Moscow. About three quarters of all German communist expatriates died in Stalin’s purges. A small core group of surviving elites, marred by the ubiquitous paranoia, denunciation and intrigue, provided the vanguard for Moscow’s efforts to administer the Soviet-occupied zone.

These individuals, above all Walter Ulbricht, set about building a socialist Germany here, sometimes more and sometimes less subtly, by putting in place the institutions and processes that would culminate in the foundation of the GDR in 1949 (incidentally also the year my mother was born). A new socialist unity party, the SED, dominated the political process, and created a top-down hierarchy with ever fewer dissenting voices tolerated.

As the West German economy recovered faster–it did not have to pay war reparations (which East Germany had to, for many years, to the Soviet Union) and received Marshall Plan aid–the GDR struggled to stay afloat. The small country hemorrhaged people–330,000 in the first six months of 1953 alone, who left the country via the open border in Berlin as wages and living standards in the East were significantly below those in the West.

The uprising on 17 June 1953 was a watershed event that against the odds solidified Ulbricht’s hold on power. After Stalin had died in March, the triumvirate of leaders who emerged after him threatened to cut off support to East Germany and demanded a “new course”. Ulbricht was reticent. Workers went out into the streets protesting against working conditions, as well as higher quotas and stagnant pay. On 17 June, the Red Army intervened and quickly restored order. Having seen the volatility and potential for unrest, Khrushchev (who came out on top of an internal power struggle in Moscow) stuck with the devil he knew.

The Wall was built in 1961. It drew a wedge through my hometown of Berlin, separating East and West along 161 kilometers of barbed wire, concrete slabs and border security installations. Now in my forties, I have stumbled over the fact that this “anti fascist rampart” was only standing for 28 years, despite being one of the (if not the) main physical manifestations of the Cold War and the second half of the twentieth century. This chapter is strong because of the suspenseful narration of individual stories around the construction–and the perfidy of this monstrous wall.

With the wall up and the steady stream of people leaving stopped, the 1960s saw some stabilization of the economic situation, allowing the SED leadership to engage more fully in state-building. The perhaps most visible and iconic images are those of sprawling new construction outside of the old and bombed out inner cities, most famously in Halle, where in Neustadt, about 30,000 units went up altogether.

The East German Trabant was launched, eventually providing wheels to about half of all households. Women were pushed further into the workforce, as labour was short, but also as the prevailing ideology was a lot more progressive in terms of gender. In the 1980s, women had a labor participation rate in excess of 90%–making East Germany a global outlier.

At the same time, the Stasi tightened its grip and widened its reach under its paranoid chief Erich Mielke. Millions of files were written and stored, hundreds of thousands informants won, banalities recorded, but also horrendous crimes committed.

We follow the GDR through to the more stagnant 1980s, which is when I was born. Scarcity was the name of the game. The Soviet Union was in troubled economic waters following the invasion of Afghanistan as well as the oil glut and could not be the benevolent sponsor it once was.

Hoyer recounts the creative ways of the authorities to get their hands on hard currency–with Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski being the individual most associated with this. Loan deals were struck with capitalist countries, most importantly Japan. I wrote two blog posts here (part one, and part two) about the surprising depth of Japan’s cooperation with East Germany.

The end of the GDR came somewhat unexpected, although Cold War developments made it clear that some changes to Europe’s postwar security status quo were inevitable. Poland’s Solidarnosc movement, Perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union, the opening of the green border between Austria and Hungary,… things couldn’t go on forever. The botched announcement of relaxations to the travel regime is legendary of course.

While modern history often treats East Germany as an aberration and focuses on it as the deviation from the German, i.e., West German path, Hoyer suggests that books like hers set the record straight. Because East German history can not only be about documenting the “Unrechtsstaat” or describing the GDR as Germany’s second twentieth-century dictatorship.

Here the debate about the book begins, perhaps somewhat detached from the actual content but rather focusing on the form and tone of the debate.

In the English language world, the book was generally well received. The broadsheets’ reviews were almost all favorable, as was the LRB’s. It’s understandable. Stylistically, the English language and literary tradition is more at ease with books like Hoyer’s. Its narrative-driven reportage style is accessible and clear, sets the scene with detail and personal interest stories. It’s OK for someone young in their late 30s to walk up and write a 600-page tome. Add to that the Anglo-Saxon world’s (strange?) love of German history and fascination with East Germany (just think the John le Carre type of Cold War idolization) that explains this success.

In Germany, however, there has been a more divided reaction. Many East Germans (the book’s German version’s success is mainly explained by sales in the East) have rallied behind “Diesseits der Mauer” (not “Jenseits der Mauer”), notably also many younger people who have no personal recollection of the GDR themselves. It is a history of the everyday–their history that is perhaps not told so accessibly and extensively yet.

Elsewhere, there has been a more negative reaction to the book as painting a too rosy picture of life in the GDR. As many of these voices have come from the culture desks of the major newspapers–almost all of which are West German–many have suspected a concerted campaign against the book: It challenges traditional German historiography–that there should be no agency in the East German narrative–and therefore deserves no praise.

More effective criticism, however, comes from the more established historians of East Germany, most of whom are East German themselves. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk writes that one cannot easily separate dictatorship and everyday life, and Hoyer does not engage with ideology at all, which is naive. Recounting life is not science. (Here I am reminded of the problems with the historicization of everyday life from Japan in the work of my friend Jordan Sand. The emergence of “populist history” is problematic, and I am aware that critics might see Hoyer’s book in this vein.)

There appear to be a lot of mistakes in the book, many of them sloppy and inconsequential, some serious. Even more problematic might be her methodology of relying on secondary source material published long after the GDR ceased to exist, as personal history or memoir of the witnesses featured in her book. If this is the backbone of her argument, then her argument might be flawed.

If Hoyer’s GDR history is for a “Third Generation”, or the children of the transition, then they are not provided with any distance to their parents’ generation. They are given their parents’ own view of the GDR. Jan Gieseke’s review is probably the most detailed in this vein. He also suggests that Hoyer’s book does not represent the latest state of historical research.