Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990
Katja Hoyer
(Allen Lane, £25)
AS did many a soldier in the British Army of the Rhine, I went to East Germany numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s. Or, rather, I went through it, by road or military train, to get to Berlin. There were only a handful of permitted routes and the authorities didn’t allow stopping. Some of us, of course, would manage to pause at an autobahn raststätte with the excuse that a child needed the loo, but the experience did nothing for the appeal of Communism, even in the most affluent of the Soviet satellite states.
We could go into East Berlin—the Soviet sector—as long as we were in uniform, for, under the four-power arrangements frozen in time since 1945, we and the Russians there were still officially allies. In all these forays, however, I never managed properly to converse with an
