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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Katja Hoyer, "Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany" (Basic Books, 2023)
Description: In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.In Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (Basic Books, 2023), acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to...