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"In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allies divided Germany into zones of occupation. The Soviet Union claimed the eastern part of the country, out of which soon emerged the German Democratic Republic-East Germany. For the next four decades, the GDR existed in Western minds more as a metaphor than as a place, a gray communist blur somewhere on the far side of the Berlin Wall. And as Germany once again became a single state after 1991, when East Germany was absorbed into West Germany, the history of the German Democratic Republic became almost indistinguishable from that of Soviet Russia. It was nothing but Stasi spies and central planning, nothing but a wall around Berlin. In Beyond the Wall, Katja Hoyer offers a more comprehensive history of East Germany, one that doesn't shy away from the border guards, secret police, and brutal repression that were inescapable in the GDR-but that also embraces the accomplishments of the country's socialist system: excellent free healthcare, unprecedented gender equality, and the destruction of class privilege. By considering the former without the latter, and seeing the GDR only as a Soviet appendage, we miss the extent to which East German history was shaped by Germans, the fruition of long-standing ambitions of generations of German socialists, reaching back long before the Cold War began"--

Germany (East) --- History --- Politics and government. --- Political systems --- Internal politics --- Economic policy and planning (general) --- Germany (GDR)