Is Britain’s sudden appetite for the GDR an unhealthy obsession? Katja Hoyer, author of Beyond the Wall, examines the new wave of books and shows about life under the Stasi in the vanished state
“It is obviously incredibly difficult to understand and make comprehensible how we lived back then,” sighed a frustrated Angela Merkel shortly before she was appointed chancellor of Germany in 2005. She was about to become one of the most powerful women on Earth, yet the world made no effort to understand how she had got to this point. Occasionally a commentator would remark that she was different from other German politicians: a scientist, a woman, and from the East! But like many others who were born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially called, Merkel found that any references to this past were met with derision or even suspicion. It was “as if this life before German reunification didn’t really count,” she said in 2021 in a rare public show of her frustration, “no matter what good and bad experiences one had.”
More than three decades have now passed since the Berlin Wall fell and, like Merkel’s, other East German voices are finally beginning to break through. And not just in Germany. There is a new and much welcome curiosity in Britain, too, about what life was really like in the countries that once lay behind the iron curtain.
