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Home > Cold War Conversations > Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (284)
Podcast: Cold War Conversations
Episode:

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 (284)
Category: Society & Culture
Duration: 01:26:17
Publish Date: 2023-03-31 23:00:00
Description:

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.


I talk with acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer Whose new book Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, we discuss that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social, and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.



Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters, and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall. 


 Buy the book here https://uk.bookshop.org/a/1549/9780241553787


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