This month we will be reading
Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 by Katja Hover

The German-British historian and journalist, Katja Hoyer, gives us new insight into
East Germany, founded in 1949 and dissolved in 1990. Beyond the Wall— well-
written, well-researched, and widely acclaimed—is political history augmented with
interviews of East Germans.
“When the victors of the Second World War agreed, in 1945, to build a
“decentralized” and “denazified” Germany, they set the stage for the creation of
the German Democratic Republic, which was founded in the region formerly
administered by Soviet authorities. In this layered history, Hoyer combines analysis of
the government’s inner workings and interviews with East Germans.
She takes up the state’s surveillance apparatus and its appetite for ideological
conformity, but also considers the country’s cultural idiosyncrasies and its
generous social safety net, which included a robust child-care system. As she
does so, she relates details that lend weight to her conclusion that reunification was
“a waymarker in Germany’s quest for unity rather than its happy ending.”

"The New Yorker”

Penguin UK (Allen Lane), published 2023, 496 pages.

We hope you will join us to discuss Hoyer’s East Germany.

Please note: For our next meeting on February 18, we will be reading Eugen Ruge’s award-winning novel In Times of Fading Light, a sweeping story of one family over four generations in East Germany.
In the spring of 2024, we hope to make an overnight trip to the former East Germany
to visit Jena, and Weimar, the center of German Enlightenment and Romanticism in
1800, featured in Andrea’s Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels.