Katya Hoyer - Beyond the Wall

Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall (Allen Lane)

I had always understood 'revisionist' to be a term of disapproval but now I'm not sure. It was a pejorative term when used by Marxists but maybe now it just means what it says and revises previously held assumptions. When Katya Hoyer's comprehensive history of the German Democratic Republic was published earlier this year there were suggestions that it was an attempt to make it sound 'not so bad after all' and a bit of mild controversy does a book a favour in attracting publicity but now, having seen for myself, one can hardly call it a defence of the GDR. I think it was also said that Katya wasn't there, casting doubt on how she would know - she was 4 when the Berlin Wall was dismantled- but surely most histories, like those concerning Julius Caesar, Henry VIII or Shakespeare, are not written by eye witnesses. Not even Herodotus was that. Without wanting to make any more of the comparison, I recently lived for three years under the most appalling Prime Minister and detested everything about him but my life wouldn't have been very different had it been anybody else.

Beyond the Wall is structured around a series of East Germans who definitely were there as it happened, their stories representing situations at significant stages of the GDR's 40 year existence until she provides her own reportage when witnessing demonstrations on the streets of East Berlin far below her vantage point in the Television Tower. All this is told in impressive English given that, in a recent interview, Katya has said,

It doesn't seem so long ago that I sat in my bedroom in Germany learning English by reading Harry Potter books with a dictionary on my lap.

which demonstrates how the best English is so often that of those who learnt it rather than those of us who picked it up as we went along.

The arbitrary drawing of lines on maps by those with the power to delineate new nation states after a war has regularly only saved up further conflict for later whether it was in India/Pakistan, the success that Yugoslavia was while it lasted or Northern Ireland. Germans were still Germans whether thus divided or not and the East, much smaller and less endowed with natural resources 'never stood a chance'. It comes as a surprise to me that Stalin favoured a united but neutral Germany while it was Walter Ulbricht, the GDR's first General Secretary, that saw his role as a devout communist satellite of the Kremlin.

Katya in no way ties to prettify the implacable party line taken by Ulbricht, the Stasi and the often uneasy, conscripted border guards manning the Berlin Wall after 1961. The unsympathetic regime found it necessary to prevent excursions from the East to the West to the extent that Erich Honecker, setting a paragon example, didn't even attend his own parents' funerals in the Saarland in 1963 and 1969. Life for many could be dull, grey, monotonous and overly regulated but for others, the communist party was a way of life and the success of the socialist experiment would be its own reward. As Putin's Russia continues to do, presenting NATO, the USA and the West as imperialist aggressors gave the cause an enemy worth withstanding.

At its best, socialism achieved some things the West could not, not least a more equal role in work for women, a basic standard of living and accommodation for its population and more tolerance for pop and rock music than might have been thought although it appears that it might have been 'rock' rather than Tamla Motown and 'soul' that was available. The USSR and subsequently China had similarly seen sport as a way of advertising the benefits of their ideological cultures by harvesting medals at the Olympic Games but, even as I well remember, the GDR's spectacular outperforming of any sensible expectations was dubious, very suspicious and looked absurd.

In the end, it was the Soviet Union's lack of commitment to it that let the GDR down more than any shortcomings of its own dogged efforts. Leonid Brezhnev's withdrawal of support in oil supplies and funds undermined Honecker's unerring faith in, but dependance on, the USSR in the early 1980's and trying to make compensatory deals with the West was neither desirable or advantageous, not to mention the environmental impact of reverting to old, even dirtier resources to keep their heavy industry going. Even in the 1950's the need to exploit any and all natural resources, which has never been solely an Eastern bloc strategy, mining left,

unsightly craters behind that would turn entire East German regions into desolate moonscapes.

The game was up from then on, if it hadn't always been. I'm not convinced that Katya explains why Stalin was never really behind the GDR project even if it seems that Brezhnev simply didn't think he could afford it. East Germany had partial success in delivering some of the ideals of socialism but at a cost that neither it, or socialism itself could make balance. One of its greatest heroes in its time was the gymnast, Katarina Witt, and Angela Merkel, who became a great European, grew up in East Germany while J.S. Bach and Handel were both born there longer ago and so it is an area, if no longer a country, that should be known for much better things than the Trabant cars that were once, like the Mini in the UK, objects of desire and are again for those Ostalgistes, those with a nostalgia for some of what they remember of the old days.

Katya Hoyer has done her homeland a great service in providing this vivid account of it. I'm no historian because objective truth, especially in the Age of Trump and Johnson, has become even less available than it ever was but I don't imagine it could have been set out any more lucidly than it has been here.