Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany

In this engaging book, a journalist and historian born in East Germany re-creates the ambivalence of life in the German Democratic Republic. Thirty-five years after East Germany collapsed, the vanished country continues to inspire in Germans a curious combination of loathing and longing. Today, few defend the GDR’s use of torture, incarceration, and constant surveillance to keep a Stalinist police state in power or its decision in 1961 to maintain its viability by walling in its own citizens. Yet many former residents of the GDR nonetheless feel nostalgia for its less stressful lifestyle, lack of commercialism, full employment, gender equality, low cost of living, sense of collective identity, social stability, and, interestingly, upward mobility. They also resent what they perceive as their second-class status in a reunited Germany—a sentiment that may be fueling support for right-wing populism. Although this book has inspired widespread criticism for hinting at a moral equivalence between the shortcomings of East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War era, it nonetheless vividly evokes the ethos of a state and society that have disappeared from the pages of history.