An exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — attempt to restore the lost state to the historic significance she feels it has been denied ... Impressively researched ... Hoyer also draws sharp portraits of the hardened German Communists ... Tepid descriptions are among this important book’s weaknesses ... Hoyer makes a strong case for paying the vanished state its historical due. But her well-told stories of valiant East Germans are a tribute to human resilience under brutal conditions — not a credit to the state itself.
Contradictions are beautifully captured ... Crafting an expansive and generous history of East Germany, Hoyer brings long-standing academic scholarship to a broader audience ... Apt.
Enormously refreshing ... As a guide to East Germany’s political history, Hoyer is commendably brisk and judicious. But it’s when she’s discussing the lives of ordinary people that her book really comes alive ... Terrifically colourful, surprising and enjoyable.
Fast-paced, vivid and engaging. Hoyer covers the large political history with economy and confidence ... Despite its curious blanks, Katja Hoyer’s book does much to combat amnesia and Cold War prejudice, and to normalize the GDR and the people who lived there.
One way of reading Hoyer’s revisionist history is as a takedown of western hubris ... What makes her meticulous book essential reading is not so much its sense of what East Germans lost, as what we never had.
[A] rich, counterintuitive history ... One occasionally wishes that Hoyer broadened her vision from East Germany to the eastern bloc as a whole. A comparative viewpoint might have made clearer the peculiarity of East Germany’s achievement and its tragedy.
It is not an easy message to get across, but Hoyer is uniquely placed to do it. Just four-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell, and now resident in Britain, she shares the frustration of Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, when details of her early life in East Germany are dismissed as irrelevant. It helps that she’s a historian of immense ability whose early promise has been more than fulfilled with this brilliant follow-up to her debut Blood and Iron. Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed and beautifully written (in her second language), this much needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland.
