East Germany is one of Europe’s ghosts. Katja Hoyer is just old enough to remember its demise. In October 1989, when she was four years old, her father took her on a trip to the top of Berlin’s Fernsehturm, or Television Tower. Then, and now, the tallest building in Germany, this “masterpiece of socialist architecture” was built between 1965 and 1969 as a demonstration of East Germany’s technological prowess. But on that day in October, when Hoyer looked down, she saw squads of the “People’s Police” arresting protesters on the massive cement square below. Neither policemen nor the protesters could have known that in a mere month, the Berlin Wall would fall. Nor would they have imagined that in a year’s time, the German Democratic Republic (or GDR) would cease to exist.
Thirty years after its passing, Hoyer, now a journalist and historian, has returned to the land of her birth, with this rich, counterintuitive history of a country all too often dismissed as a freak or accident of the cold war. Hoyer’s East Germany is not, though, the walled-in, Russian-controlled “Stasiland”, whose citizens suffered from constant surveillance and intimidation at the hands of the Ministry for State Security. Rather, in her telling, it was a place where people shaped their own destinies and lived lives in “full colour” – a far cry from the “grey, monotonous blur” conjured by the western imagination.
