About

This talk is based on the book which was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, Sunday Times, Telegraph and Spectator book of the year and is authored by someone Andrew Roberts called ‘one of the best young historians writing in English today’In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.In this talk, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall.Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian specialising in modern German history. She was born in East Germany and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. She is a columnist for the Washington Post and has written for History Today and the BBC’s History Extra. Her debut book Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 became a bestseller in the UK.

A Q&A Session will follow.