Katja Hoyer, born in East Germany, was four years old when, on the eve of the state’s collapse in 1989, her parents took her to the Berlin Television Tower and she gazed spellbound from its rotating visitors’ platform at the protesters and police cars gathering in the square below. In this book, Hoyer sets out to show an East Germany that amounted to more than just the Berlin Wall and the Stasi. That now-vanished, would-be-socialist world is presented critically, but also with empathy and the undertone of affection you may feel for something that mattered to people you love.

I started Beyond the Wall with high expectations that were at first somewhat dashed. Yes, East Germany had good child care, support for the advancement of women, cars for the people (Trabants, affectionately called ‘Trabi’), regular paid holidays at resorts for workers, a fair amount of comradeship, and even some rock musicians, as well as offering much more opportunity for upward mobility than most countries in the West. Yes, it had deutsche Qualitätsarbeit, that is, a level of workmanship and technical finish that was the envy of the socialist world. And yes, this all coexisted with boring sanctimonious leaders (first, Walter Ulbricht, then Erick Honecker) who seemed either old before their time or just old; the country was kept under surveillance by the secret police, whose reach and size (proportionate to population) were without parallel; and a Wall had to be built to keep the population in. But, while some of this might be a shock to those who know East Germany only via Anna Funder’s Stasiland, it isn’t too much of a surprise to anyone with any acquaintance with the GDR before 1989.