Katja Hoyer, <i>Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany</i>

Katja Hoyer's Beyond the Wall draws on memoirs and secondary scholarship to offer an overview of the history of Communist-ruled East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). Reviewers in major newspapers in the United States and Britain offered lavish praise. The reviewer in The New York Times referred to “this impressively researched history.” The Guardian saw in it a “meticulous book.” The New Republic referred to “an expansive and generous history.” The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement saw a book that “does much to combat amnesia and Cold War prejudice.” Foreign Policy in Washington saw in it “an erudite plea for empathy.” A noted historian called it a “masterpiece” that is “profoundly insightful” and “explodes many of the lazy Western clichés about East Germany.” (These remarks are included in the book's front matter.) In fact, the book is not meticulous, deeply researched, erudite, or a “masterpiece.”Beyond the Wall presents material long familiar to historians about the grim story of German Communists who survived Joseph Stalin's purges in the USSR and returned with Walter Ulbricht to form the leadership of what became the GDR. It also recounts the by-now familiar terrible individual stories of women raped in the initial weeks of the Soviet occupation at the end of World War II. We read about the poverty of the Soviet zone of occupation and then of the GDR as the Soviet Union stripped it of much of its industrial base. Through a combination of statistics and individual memoirs, Hoyer describes how, before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, there was a debilitating “brain drain” of professional middle classes who fled to wealthy, democratic Western countries, above all the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). We read about the building of the Wall and its impact on East Germans, those who died trying to escape through the Wall, and those who had to adjust to living behind it.Hoyer describes how GDR Communist leaders feared the East German population, in part because of their memories of the mass support for Nazism before 1945 and the resulting impressive security procedures surrounding the Berlin outer suburb in which they resided. She recalls the entry of East German women into the work force combined, in supposed contrast to the FRG, with abundant childcare facilities; the provision of modest but safe housing stock; vacations on the Baltic Sea and in Eastern Europe; and the Trabant automobile, the “Trabi,” whose small engine and plastic composite body stood in stark contrast to the world-famous West German Mercedes-Benz BMW and Volkswagen road cars.Inside East Germany offers discussions of familiar political events, including the place of East Germany in the policy of Stalin and his successors, the nature of purges and de-Stalinization, Erich Mielke and the formation of the infamous State Security Ministry (Stasi), the replacement of Ulbricht by Erich Honecker, the policies of détente and antagonism in the tensions of the early 1980s, and the tumult of the revolution and reunification of 1989–1991 (oddly, pp. 207–222, which deal with the Stasi and the years 1965–1971, are missing in the edition under review).For example, Hoyer writes that “there has been much debate” about whether Stalin wanted a separate German state in 1947, when the Soviet Military (SMAD) and Ulbricht's “inner circle” were working toward that aim. “The matter will never be fully resolved,” she claims (p. 72). On the previous page, Hoyer's footnote refers to “Mählert.” To find out who “Mählert” is, one needs to look under “Books,” where we learn that the reference is to Ulrich Mählert's 2010 Kleine Geschichte der DDR (Small History of the GDR.) Assuming that Hoyer has correctly rendered Mählert's interpretation of events, his book, already intended for a general audience, is an insufficient basis for Hoyer to assert so confidently that historians will “never” fully resolve the facts about Soviet policy toward the establishment of East Germany. She implies that the evidence about the early Cold War is not yet there, a conclusion that will raise eyebrows among experts in the area. Making such a sweeping judgment based on reference to one source is hardly convincing.There are many pages without a single numerical reference to a note and others with one reference or a reference every two or three pages. There are stories that have the ring of truth. Some capture the repression and others the virtues of life in the GDR. Yet most are memoirs, not diaries, and come with all the advantages and drawbacks of memoirs as evidence. The corroborating evidence is too often lacking. Perhaps the events she describes, some in considerable detail, took place. Then again, perhaps they did not. For much of the book, the verdict remains possibly true but not proven. The paucity of corroborating evidence is odd, given the ready availability over the past 35 years of all the files of the East German government's social, economic, cultural, political, foreign, military and intelligence decision-making institutions. Millions of Stasi records have also become available. Beyond the Wall does not reflect the depth and richness of the results of decades of this historical scholarship.The bibliography to “Individual documents” is hard to use. It should be alphabetically organized by the surname of individuals or the name of organizations. Hoyer properly lists some entries, such as “Stoph, Willi,” “Ulbricht, Walter.” Yet “Individual Documents” begins with “Address given by Mikhael Gorbachev to the Council of Europe” and includes entries such as “Herman Matern's contribution” and “Willy Brandt's speech” (433-439). It is a time-consuming compilation that will quickly frustrate the casual reader and irritate a serious scholar trying to find the source of a document. The responsibility lies with both Hoyer and her editors at the Hachette Book Group and Basic Books. They should all consult the Chicago Manual of Style. The bibliography of books and articles is properly alphabetized but in the list of published materials I noticed some major works and key memoirs that were left off the bibliography of secondary work.Because one reviewer called the book “an expansive and generous history,” it is important to note the glaring absence of any discussion of the regime's anti-Semitism and antagonism toward Israel. Hoyer describes the purges of the early 1950s and the arrest of the Politburo member Paul Merker but does not mention that the issue of anti-Semitism and antagonism toward Israel were at the core of a purge that affected him and leaders of the small Jewish community in the GDR. See, for example, Jeffrey Herf, “At War with Israel: East Germany's Key Role in Soviet Policy in the Middle East,” Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer 2014), pp. 129--163; Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Memoir literature of Jews who came of age in the GDR is extensive but is not featured here. The topic was central to discussions in the first freely elected parliament in Berlin in 1990 and since then. (See, for example, Enrico Heitzer et al., eds., After Auschwitz: The Difficult Legacies of the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 2021), the English version of Nach Auschwitz: Schwieriges Erbe DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Wochenschau Verlag, 2018). Yet Hoyer chose not to convey these voices, Jewish, Protestant and secular. As a result, Beyond the Wall offers silence about the history of the self-described “anti-fascist” regime propaganda, military, and diplomatic antagonism toward the state of Israel. Meticulous, erudite, well-researched works of history do not avoid speaking the truth about such an important matter. There is a need for a new general history of East Germany that encompasses the full range of abundant scholarship.