Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990
By Katja Hoyer
Allen Lane, 2023, ISBN: 9780141999340, 496 pp., $26.99

Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990, published in 2023 received international critical acclaim as a nuanced, balanced history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). In Germany the reception has been somewhat different.

The book captures the astounding contradictions that beset the DDR. As a society dedicated to socialist ideals it had many strengths and as a country caught in the power struggle between the imperialist West and the bureaucratised Soviet Union it had innumerable weaknesses.

Hoyer is an honest, brave and diligent historian, but lacks the vital political analytical skills to explain the DDR’s ambiguities. Her’s is a richly empirical study, though not without weaknesses, of a genuine workers’ state that was beset with crippling incongruities from its foundation.

However, almost inadvertently, her book has exposed the deep-seated German ruling class fear of the DDR’s example.

At close to 500 pages, Beyond the Wall is full of detail, providing information about people’s everyday lives as well as behind-the-scenes, internal Politbureau power struggles and geo-political machinations. It is a comprehensive history of the DDR’s 40 years of existence, including a description of how this small country came into being.

After the Second World War the Communist Soviet Union and the Western Alliance of France, UK and USA encountered each other in the middle of Germany. Quickly the wartime alliance began to unravel into the infamous Cold War. Not only were there conflicting agendas between the imperialist powers and the USSR, but there were also games being played between the various German Stalinists and Stalin himself.

I read Katja Hoyer’s book in the miserable, wintery, Berlin November of 2023, in between visits to my local sauna. Having been born in the DDR myself, I couldn’t manage more than a few pages at a time before being overwhelmed by emotions.

My feelings ranged from despair, such as when Hoyer ponders the possible connection between the paranoid power hunger of the early DDR leader, Walter Ulbricht and his lisp, which may have given him an inferiority complex. But also, admiration when she explains the difference between “guest workers” fuelling the West German “economic miracle” and contract workers sent from socialist and developing countries to the DDR, thus addressing issues of racism and imperialism.

I shared her sense of urgency when she defends the great advances made by DDR women against right-wing historians who describe them as exploited. Women in the DDR enjoyed nearly full employment, childcare infrastructure, self-determination and physical autonomy on a scale absolutely unrivalled in Western states even today.

And waves of impatience rushed over me when she failed to capture the spirit, independence and liveliness of the country’s children.

I worried about Katja’s future when she ripped to shreds the myth that the Wall was just an invention of sadistic DDR bureaucrats. Despite her profuse sympathy for the victims of violence at the inner German border, known as The Wall, she has committed the great unpardonable sin of contemporary Germany: failing to adequately slander the DDR.

I laughed out loud at her descriptions of the small country going on holidays. I felt sentimental when reading her comparison of rent prices in the DDR (hovering about 5 percent of income) to West Germany (around 20 percent of income). Of course, both are laughable figures compared to today’s 40 percent to 60 percent.

I was disappointed at the sloppy anti-socialist remarks that can be found in the book. For example, she attests, tongue-in-cheek, that not even socialism was able to destroy the business acumen that characterised the prestigious, annual Leipzig Trade Fair (Messe). Actually, it was a demonstration of the system’s flexibility.

But I adored her explanation of the massive consumption of alcohol in the DDR. Rather than stress and alienation leading to drink, it was insouciance. DDR citizens simply had more spare time to relax with friends, so they drank happily.

My roller coaster ride of emotions is actually a good reflection of what life is like, so I would argue that former DDR citizens can find their lives by and large accurately reflected in aspects of the book. And if international readers find these insights enlightening, all the better.

But reading German book reviews, it appears that my perception of this book is not at all the national norm. In fact, it may be that Hoyer’s publication will spark budget increases for historical research and Aufarbeitung (processing or accounting for the past) regarding the DDR.

Understanding Beyond the Wall

Untangling the fundamentally different approaches to Hoyer’s book requires three lenses:

The German Aufarbeitungs Industry

Since October 7, 2023, it has become obvious that German institutions are intent on enforcing Staatsräson (the national interest). I am referring to Germany’s stance on Israel and the hunting of alleged anti-Semitic persons in all spaces of German society.

People have lost their jobs for speaking out for a free Palestine, state funding has been cut to organisations hosting debates in which Israel was criticised and artists have been uninvited to events or their funding revoked.

There is supreme irony in German pundits, coming from the country responsible for the Holocaust, deriding as anti-Semitic the Jewish voices critical of Israel’s occupation and crimes against humanity.

Besides its unconditional support for Zionist Israel above the lives and livelihoods of generations of Palestinians, there is another Staatsräson in Germany. Its consequences are at first glance less deadly and more like a family affair, like dirty laundry only discretely aired in public.

The narrative is this: the DDR was not a country; it was the direct continuation of the totalitarian Nazi regime. The ex-Communist historian Wolfgang Leonhard puts this line best when he says the DDR was “a country by Stalin’s grace, for his benefit and democratic in name only.”

Hoyer shows the inadequacy of Leonhard’s sweeping statement by unpicking the tangled web of schemes that resulted in the DDR’s creation. She shows that Stalin definitely did not push for the creation of the state, but Stalin’s bureaucratic legacy hung over the DDR like a curse, fatally weakening it.

Sabotage and delegitimisation of the DDR did not end when the Wall came down. On the contrary, the victory over the socialist DDR needed to be total. The Communist East needed to be economically gutted, deindustrialised, criminalised and morally and ideologically vilified. Its heritage needs to be continually brought to heel.

In the last 30 years thousands of books, studies and research papers, films and podcasts have been published to present the tale of a DDR which was simultaneously a torturous, all-powerful regime and ridiculous caricature of a failed state. It was a country in which there was no food and yet no hunger, in which there was no housing, but no one lived on the street, where everyone was a member of the Stasi and everybody was being spied on.

Every other year, the literature establishment celebrates and rewards a new “DDR-novel” which inevitably recounts that the psychopathically deranged Stalinist elite broke every citizen’s little finger or alternatively their souls. Such assertions now serve as the shortcut explanation for the rise of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany’s east.

This ideological fight is driven by significant resources. The Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany holds assets worth €77 million. In 2021, the Foundation was permanently employing 37 staff and spent some €480k on exhibitions, events, and web offerings alone. In 2022, it increased its funding for projects by €100,000 compared to the previous year, spending roughly €1,6 million on 13 projects in Berlin alone that are “dealing with the reappraisal of the [DDR ruling Socialist Unity Party] SED dictatorship”.

One way to influence perception about the DDR has been succeeding waves of anti-Communist subjugation to ensure that DDR-experiences are silenced. In the first wave, professors and teachers were removed from knowledge production, in the second wave, generations of school children were asked: “What did your parents do during the DDR?” In the contemporary, ongoing, third wave candidates for political functions are screened (and expelled) for their lives in the DDR and their families carry collective guilt if they don’t denounce the DDR on a regular basis.

Enter Katja Hoyer

To German eyes Katja Hoyer is quite noticeably connected with the DDR. The name Katja was one of the ten most popular girls’ names in the country. She is the daughter of a high-ranking member of the DDR national armed forces (NVA) and a schoolteacher.

In the German press, Hoyer’s family background was enough to discredit the book. She was born in 1985 and was 4 years old when the Wall fell. She lives in England and studied at US and British universities.

In Germany, when it comes to writing about the DDR, background matters. Ex-citizens of the DDR and their families are under general suspicion, their ability to be objective is deemed underdeveloped. A German academic career as a historian rests on performatively recognising and denouncing the DDR was a totalitarian regime (Unrechtsstaat).

Every review in the bourgeois press and by Hoyer’s historian colleagues have accused her of whitewashing the dictatorship, of viewing life in the DDR through rose-tinted glasses.

Given these conditions, the book is an amazing achievement and courageous.

For international friends

For readers unfamiliar with the lives of people in one of the few actual socialist countries, this book is a treasure trove of stories of real people, gossip about the leaders and Cold War geopolitical chess games. It explains the hardship and achievements, flaws and successes of the DDR’s 40 years.

The first chapters are dedicated to setting the scene at the end of WWII. It is important to understand how the DDR came into being, as its origin plants the seed of many of its achievements and failures.

When the anti-Hitler coalition came together to shape a post-War Germany, the differing class interests between the unlikely allies became unmanageable. The division of Germany became necessary when it became clear that the terms of unification could not be agreed on. As Hoyer demonstrates, this was despite Stalin’s push for reunification, partly because he was reluctant to support another war-devastated country.

The German Communists of Ulbricht’s group had spent the years of German fascism in the Soviet Union, becoming adept at the nasty skills of surviving Stalin’s purges. They returned from exile to rebuild their country entirely new – and they did it against Stalin’s express orders.

Their creation was poor, idealistic and paranoid with its leadership’s Soviet Union experience starkly contrasting with that of the general population, which was still infested with Nazi ideology and hatred for the Red Army.

Hoyer describes the negotiations between Stalin and Ulbricht about which course of development the DDR should take and the economic hardship of the first years. Refugees streamed into the country, straining the war-ravaged economy. But the Germans had destroyed the Soviet Union with scorched earth tactics. So, Stalin took reparations.

Entire factories and train tracks were dismantled and moved to rebuild the devastated Soviet Union. Industrial production was disrupted and planning ruined when Red Army troops would arrive at a factory and simply confiscate the entire output.

A significant fraction of the DDR’s intellectual elite was kidnapped and sent to work in the Soviet Union. To put it mildly, this affected the DDR’s material, social and cultural development.

The imperialist allies chose to not impose reparations on the western, capitalist part of Germany and lavished Marshall Plan dollars onto its development.

The 1950s and 1960s were characterised by different phases of growth and rebuilding in the DDR. Through people’s anecdotes of the era, Hoyer captures the enthusiasm about the creation of the new society. The equality of men and women, enshrined in its first constitution in 1949, land reforms and the nationalisation of industry, the commitment to working class progress through the reform of the education system all changed society fundamentally.

And despite hardship (for example, food rationing only ended in 1958), there was a sense of progress. Interesting here are Hoyer’s descriptions of the economic development, a combination of a planned economy leading to 1963’s New Economic System (NÖS).

The NÖS corrected weaknesses in the pre-existing centralised planning model to reduce raw material wastage, increase industrial mechanisation and put production quality ahead of quantity. It was followed by the Economic System of Socialism in 1968, which fostered technologically advanced industries.

But Hoyer does not forget to embed these stories and developments into the larger geo-political context. Throughout the book we learn just how much German politics and policies on both sides of the Wall were influenced by the Second World War’s respective victors.

The US supported but also guided West Germany’s foreign policy, integrating it into NATO and enforcing the Hallstein Doctrine, a comprehensive sanction regime against the DDR until the mid-seventies. On the other side, the Soviet Union demanded the DDR’s loyalty, such as during the events of the Prague spring in 1968 when NVA forces were about to be deployed in Czech Territory. In the 1980s Brezhnev forbade Honecker establishing independent relations with West Germany.

Hoyer brilliantly dispels the notion that the DDR was a homogenous country where all its citizens were discontented, grey, traumatised and bland. She takes great efforts to show the social achievements and the wealth of the population. In fact, she notes that ownership of fridges and cars surpassed ownership in the West of those consumer goods.

In the 1980s, according to Hoyer, a sense of stagnation and discontent befell many people in the DDR. They wanted to see their country do better, became increasingly infatuated with Western products and the perceived freedoms of travel and speech and disenchanted with the unsightly aging of its leadership.

The DDR crumbled from within because its population’s rising expectations could not be met. The leadership was sclerotic and bureaucratic and the people lost interest in the geo-political processes intent on destroying the country. Hoyer explains all the components but misses calling out the destructive agenda of the West.

Reclaiming Socialism

In close to 500 pages, Hoyer examines nearly every aspect of DDR society, contextualises the bad, relativises the good, comments on the naivité or bad intentions of the protagonists at the top and the complacency of the population. Her style oscillates between banal personal anecdote, which could all be used to prove any point, to geopolitical issues, some of which were caused by psychological dysfunctions of particular leaders.

She succeeds in enumerating the contradictions that beset the DDR without presenting a coherent analysis of its nature as a workers’ state with distortions. Without an overall class perspective, such a history can become a shopping list if items searching for balance.

For example, she describes the successful sports programs in the DDR, pointing out that at the Olympics, this small country of 15 million regularly came second in the medal tally. She discusses the dark side of doping, gruelling training schedules and surveillance of athletes (so they wouldn’t defect when competing in capitalist countries). She ends by saying that there was also a commitment by the state to ensure all children got an opportunity to play sport and that DDR citizens were proud of their country’s achievements.

At different times in the book Hoyer raises the issue of militarisation in the DDR and condemns early military education in schools. She also points out that mandatory military service was introduced in West Germany in 1956, before it was introduced in the East (1962) and that in the Cold War atmosphere with its arms race and nuclear threats on all sides, some understanding for the DDR’s strategy on military preparedness was in order.

Military service in the DDR was hellish – punitively disciplinarian and purposefully disorienting – but the army also gave previously unheard-of opportunities for working class men and women to advance in an institution that had until then been extremely classist.

Hoyer recounts all of that very well. But, through reading her book, it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that the DDR was the ambitious project of three men (Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and and Stasi chief, Erich Mielk) combined with the accidental side effect of their insecurities. It is possible to arrive at the conclusion that the DDR was just a country like any other (while this thought is considered taboo in Germany).

But then what is the point? Everything is good, everything is bad, everything can be contextualised but how do we identify what was due to socialist ideas and practices, how do we reject the mistakes and failures and the consequences of interference?

The current government of Germany has an approval rating of 27%. I doubt that the approval rating of the Socialist Unity Party, which ruled the DDR was ever that low. But even if it was, back then the West was presenting itself as an alternative. When given the chance, it swallowed the DDR and with it any alternative to capitalist misery.

Within the former-DDR, the socialist comfort that is now ridiculed has given way to insecurity, poverty, a backflip on women’s emancipation, to militarism and war. And yes, some people also got very rich and the pot-holed roads on former East German territory are fixed. But now we are told there is no alternative.

With the socialist projects of the 20th century thoroughly discredited, we need books that reclaim our experiences. Hoyer’s history is at least a first step in the right direction.

As a postscript, there is one amusing mistake in the book. When writing about the consumption of alcohol in the DDR, Hoyer references a US-researcher and scientist, Thomas Kochan, who does indeed exist. However, the Dr. Thomas Kochan who wrote about what and how much the people in the DDR drank turned his research passion into his life’s work and now runs a famous specialty Schnapsladen (liquor store) in former East-Berlin. Come and visit.

Franziska Kleiner, born in East Berlin during the existence of the DDR, contributes to the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR, an archival project into DDR history, and is a member of the European Secretariat of the International Peoples Assembly.