
Beyond the Wall
A History of East Germany
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Narrated by:
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Sam Peter Jackson
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By:
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Katja Hoyer
About this listen
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the definitive history of East Germany, "a fascinating, sparkling book, filled with insights" (Peter Frankopan)
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, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to offer a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country, revealing the rich political, social, and cultural landscape that existed amid oppression and hardship. Drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews and documents, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, beyond the Wall.
©2023 Katja Hoyer (P)2023 Basic BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Myth-busting, artfully constructed history. Hoyer displays a special understanding and wants to present a corrective to previous reductive assessments of the GDR that depict it as a field-gray Stasiland. Her command of detail, broad historical brush strokes, and evident sympathy for her interview partners make for a fascinating read.” —Roger Boyes, Times (London)
“Forget everything you thought you knew about life in the GDR. This terrifically colorful, surprising, and enjoyable history of the socialist state is full of surprises. Enormously refreshing.” —Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
"What makes this meticulous book essential reading is not so much its sense of what East Germans lost but of what we never had. A history of the GDR that adds stability, contentment, and women’s rights to the familiar picture of authoritarianism.” —Stuart Jeffries, Guardian
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Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
- By: Bettany Hughes
- Narrated by: Bettany Hughes
- Length: 24 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Koran to Shakespeare, this city with three names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - resonates as an idea and a place, real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was the very center of the world, known simply as "The City", but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city but a global story.
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A daunting undertaking pulled off superlatively
- By SGS on 12-24-17
By: Bettany Hughes
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Narcotopia
- In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA
- By: Patrick Winn
- Narrated by: Patrick Winn
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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In Asia’s narcotics-producing heartland, the Wa reign supreme. They dominate the Golden Triangle, a mountainous stretch of Burma between Thailand and China. Their 30,000-strong army, wielding missiles and attack drones, makes Mexican cartels look like street gangs.
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Absolutely Incredible
- By Oded N. on 05-02-25
By: Patrick Winn
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American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
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fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
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The Soviet Sixties
- By: Robert Hornsby
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 20 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the "sixties" era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period.
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Comprehensive and Emtertaining
- By Peter on 02-26-24
By: Robert Hornsby
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Codename Nemo
- The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and the Elusive Enigma Machine
- By: Charles Lachman
- Narrated by: Qarie Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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On June 4, 1944, the course of World War II was forever changed. That day, a US Navy task force achieved the impossible—capturing a German U-Boat. Called Operation Nemo, it was the first seizure of an enemy ship in battle since the War of 1812, one of the greatest achievements of the US Navy and a victory that shortened the duration of the war. A deeply researched, fast-paced World War II narrative for the ages, Charles Lachman’s white-knuckled war saga and thrilling cat-and-mouse game is told through the eyes of the men on both sides of Operation Nemo.
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The writing drew me back in time the narration made it feel current
- By CE on 06-17-24
By: Charles Lachman
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Stalin's War
- A New History of World War II
- By: Sean McMeekin
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 24 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east.
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Sean McMeekin Does It Again!
- By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 04-21-21
By: Sean McMeekin
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Hitler's First Hundred Days
- When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
- By: Peter Fritzsche
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.
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Whoa! This Is Too Tense To Be A Horror Novel!
- By Ted on 07-02-20
By: Peter Fritzsche
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The Holocaust
- A New History
- By: Laurence Rees
- Narrated by: Eric Vale
- Length: 19 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Laurence Rees has spent 25 years meeting the survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this sweeping history, he combines this testimony with the latest academic research to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. Rees argues that while hatred of the Jews was at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without considering Nazi plans to kill millions of non-Jews as well.
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FANTASTIC BOOK, BUT HORRIBLE READING
- By Aspen on 08-31-17
By: Laurence Rees
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Blood and Iron
- The Rise and Fall of the German Empire; 1871-1918
- By: Katja Hoyer
- Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Before 1871, Germany was not yet a nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring 39 individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France - all without destroying itself in the process?
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Misleading title/subtitle
- By Ethan Brown on 12-15-21
By: Katja Hoyer
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The Weimar Years
- Rise and Fall 1918–1933
- By: Frank McDonough
- Narrated by: Paul McGann
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Established in 1918–19, in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the First World War and the revolution that followed swiftly on its heels, the Weimar Republic ushered in widespread social reform, a radical cultural flowering and the most democratic conditions the German people had ever known. The Weimar Years is a vivid narrative of a dramatic period in German history. Year by year, from 1918 to 1933, Frank McDonough covers the major events in both domestic and foreign policy and the personalities who shaped them, together with developments in music, art, theatre and literature.
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I learned a ton
- By Phyllis on 12-30-24
By: Frank McDonough
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The Ghost Forest
- Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods
- By: Greg King
- Narrated by: Galen Osier
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In this gripping historical memoir, journalist and famed redwood activist Greg King examines how investors and a growing U.S. economy drove the timber industry to cut down all but 4 percent of the original two-million-acre redwood ecosystem. King first examined redwood logging in the 1980s—as an award-winning reporter. What he found in the woods convinced him to leap the line of neutrality and become an activist dedicated to saving the very last ancient redwood groves remaining in private hands.
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How the world’s most magnificent forest was destroyed!
- By John on 09-06-23
By: Greg King
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Hero of Two Worlds
- The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
- By: Mike Duncan
- Narrated by: Mike Duncan
- Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From the massively popular podcaster and New York Times best-selling author comes the story of the Marquis de Lafayette's lifelong quest to protect the principles of democracy, told through the lens of the three revolutions he participated in: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Revolution of 1830.
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Thrillingly storytelling — brilliant narration
- By Byron on 08-24-21
By: Mike Duncan
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Can't Be Satisfied
- The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
- By: Robert Gordon
- Narrated by: Keb' Mo'
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The epic, rollicking, up-and-down life of Muddy Waters—who went from Mississippi farmhand to musical legend, invented electric blues, and created the template for the rock-and-roll band and its wild lifestyle—is chronicled with rare vividness in Robert Gordon’s widely praised biography.
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Muddy!
- By govtmule1 on 02-08-25
By: Robert Gordon
What listeners say about Beyond the Wall
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- Tim Rands
- 11-23-23
Opening Our Eyes to DDR
Wonderful. An open and deep discourse into the DDR, what it meant to live there, and the political and economic struggles. As someone who grew up in Western Europe of the 60s, 70s and 80s this book stands as a stark contrast to the simplified presentation our media provided us of real life behind the Wall. Thank you to Katja Hoyer for opening my eyes.
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- JRT
- 01-09-24
Outstanding
The narrative is very well told, and the history is fair-minded, well-researched, and clear-sighted. The author uses the experience of ordinary people as an entry point into the history of the GDR, which gives the history a real sense of time and place. The audiobook narrator does an excellent job as well.
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- kilroywashere
- 01-06-24
Great work on an overlooked subject.
I found this book to be insightful and entertaining. A great history of the DDR.
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- Thorsten Kramer
- 04-24-24
Very well researched and written
It was very in-depth and tried to be balanced to represent different viewpoints. It was interesting and an easy listen
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- Z'
- 03-09-24
Good summary of ordinary life in the DDR
The story does a good job of the founding of the DDR and the people behind it. Once the country is formed it then mostly shifts to talking about daily life in the country. It does go into a lot of detail about how people lived and how the majority of them were mostly happy, almost to a fault. It’s probably true that most people didn’t have any trouble with the Stasi, but outside of taking about the founding of the organization and occasionally mentioning it, you’d barely know what they did and the kind of brutal methods they used. They mention how the DDR had mass emigration problems but barely talk about why.
The fall of the DDR also barely gets any detail. According to the book everyone was happy (even though emigration was still a priority for many people) but just one day they decided to rise up against the state with barely any detail of why the people were so unhappy and starting to revolt. They don’t even talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall, just a few stories of people who walked across the border when it opened. No mention of Honecker being tried for his crimes afterwards and how he had to escape the country.
Some people might think that it has too much of a positive bias, but again, this book is about the people who lived there and what they experienced and for the most part they just lived their lives the best they could without getting involved in politics or caring about the rest of the world. So, for better or for worse, that’s what you’re getting. There are a couple stories of people who were harassed by the Stasi, but even those examples were people who got off light. Perhaps some stories of people who were targeted by the state and suffered under the regime would have given some different and welcome perspectives.
The book is fantastic with plenty of details of how people lived in the DDR and these are stories worth remembering. Just be aware that if you’re looking more for a macro view of the country’s history and fall, you may be disappointed.
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- Jane
- 11-05-23
Well written and accurate
Shortly after the wall fell, we lived in Bayreuth, Germany for a year. That city is located less than 40 miles from the former border city of Hof. This book correctly reflected what we experienced during that time. We watched the euphoria of the first few months when former east Germans drove the 40 miles to Bayreuth to buy bananas and electronics with the “welcome money” they had received. Within 6 months though, that euphoria had faded and the complex problems of reuniting two countries back into one became obvious. Former east Germans were initially welcomed, but then resented by west Germans for things like expecting subsidized daycare for working mothers. I also remember many stories about west German businesses scooping up east German businesses for pennies. A few years after the reunification I asked a former west German how long it would take for the country to feel united again. He said decades. That has proved to be true.
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- NorCal Dude
- 09-23-24
Lived it from the FRG as an American Soldier
I was stationed in West Germany as an American Soldier from 1987-90. I was flying an OH58 helicopter on a training flight the night the wall opened up in Berlin. I was confused to say the least but over the next few months saw more and more curious East Germans in their Trabis. It was very historic but of course I didn’t understand the history until listening to this book. I saw the author on a podcast discussing current German politics when this book was mentioned in her introduction. Glad I saw that and it leading to this book which gave me a much greater understanding of not only the reunification of Germany but also the history of how the Eastern link to the USSR was a strained relationship at best.
One of my biggest regrets was never getting to East Berlin as an American Soldier. The plan was to go towards the end of my tour in order to purchase inexpensive home furnishings (crystal, plates, etc) like my predecessors. East Germany didn’t last long enough and I never experienced the drama of the train ride and walking through Checkpoint Charlie. Today’s tourist trap near the original checkpoint doesn’t do it justice.
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- Werner-SD
- 10-01-23
Fascinating, balanced history
Fascinating and unique overview of East German history, highlighting the dark as well as the creative aspects of its forty year growth.
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- Mary B.
- 05-06-24
Excellent history of the DDR - Ich war dabei
I lived in then-West Germany (the BRD) from 1986 to 2009, and I found this book an excellent, very-well-informed history of the former DDR. I especially appreciated the reference at the end to that wonderful film, Goodbye Lenin, because this book also provides a well-balanced perspective of that small country and its brief history. Yes, the Stasi was monstrous - I didn't realize that it was the biggest secret police on a per-capita basis of any in modern times - yet the DDR also has a significantly higher birth rate than the BRD did, due to excellent family services. I recall West German entrepreneurs setting up recruitment offices at border towns, because the Ossi workforce was so well trained. Highly recommended. And the narrator is obviously bilingual in German and English - really important. I would appreciate more narrations from Sam Peter Jackson.
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- John
- 05-19-24
Excellent look at our modern history
Professor Hoyer does an excellent job of taking the reader/listener from the Second World War to the recent past.
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