Beyond the Wall
Katja Hoyer
This is an excellent history book. Sometimes history concentrate just on the big themes and the major characters, others try to tell the story by offering little vignettes of the life of ordinary folk but miss the big picture. Katya strikes a nice balance, opening each section with the back story and actions of an ordinary person and their observations and reaction to a major event that is happening around them. I like this approach and the overall story is a suprisingly interesting one. The picture painted is not at all bleak (although I can’t help feeling it plays down the influence of the Stasi - after all, it’s head is invariably referred to as “the Hated Mielke”) so it punctures the bleak and grey impression that I certainly had from living through those times and seeing East Germany potrayed in the news and media. And it was interesting trying to spot any signs of the impending collapse in the events of the late 1980s (remarkably few, even with the benefit of hindsight).
I certainly have a much better understanding of what happened and also why the eventual reunification was so challenging, there surely where lessons that West Germany could have learned from the East, not least in the provision of child care and role of women in general.
A triumph of historical writing that is a must for anyone interested in modern European history.