German historian Katja Hoyer caused an international stir with her book beyond the Walls, published in Dutch as Behind the wall. In England, the book by Hoyer, a fellow at King’s College London, became a bestseller. Hoyer emerged with a ‘new history of East Germany’, as read in the subtitles of the German edition, on podcasts, on radio, and in newspaper interviews (including in NRC May 5).

However, it turned out that German critics were not interested in the new history of the GDR. Reviews in the German media were almost without exception scathing. A editorial comments in the Glass stated that Hoyer was “dark.” [in de geschiedenis] ignore or ignore’ and classify his book as ‘feel good history instead of critical analysis’.

A reviewer in the left magazine Der Freitag accused Hoyer of “a naïve positivist view of history, who believed that the retelling of stories was already a historical science.” The author ‘does not take historical facts seriously’, according to critics, and ‘happy to repeat the SED proposition’: the views of the ruling communist party in the GDR.

In South German Zeitung mentioned reviewers ‘very disappointing’ book. Critics are not surprised that Hoyer concluded that life in the GDR was ‘fairly comfortable’, since Hoyer was the daughter of a ‘National Volksarmee officer and a teacher’. Hoyer’s parents, reviewers say, were good followers of the regime, and for anyone who didn’t join the dictatorship, his “comfortable enough” assessment is a travesty.

The debate was so fierce because for many Germans this ‘new history’ was more their own biography than history. Hoyer wanted to show that not everything in the GDR was shabby, gray and corrupt, and illustrated this through interviews with GDR citizens. In the NRC Hoyer said he wanted to “depoliticize” the past and chart the “bad and good qualities of the GDR”.

Confession

Hoyer, born in 1985 in Guben, East Germany, responds to the desire of many Germans in former GDR countries, who find it important that certain aspects of their GDR existence be recognized. For example, housing that is accessible to everyone or female labor participation which is higher than in West Germany. Not everything is better in West Germany and West Germany doesn’t know everything better, so the sentiment goes. By contrast, in the states of the ‘old’ Federal Republic, the consensus was that all aspects of GDR life were contaminated: there was nothing ‘good’ in a dictatorship.

Hoyer seems to have anticipated some of the criticism of his book. In his preface he stated that East Germany in 1990 was ‘right’ [verloor] to write its own history’, because history was written by the ‘victors’, i.e. the West. Hoyer quoted Angela Merkel in her foreword, who said in one of her last speeches as Chancellor that her East German ancestry was often characterized as nothing more than “ballast” which she had skillfully removed. No one thought that the first 35 years of Merkel’s life were more than ‘ballast’, that those 35 years had shaped her and could not simply be erased.

The fact that the narrative about East Germany is still largely determined by West Germans can be deduced from the figures in a recent report: less than 8 percent of key positions in German media are held by East Germans. At the university, only 1.7 per cent of management positions were held by East Germans.

Dirk Oschmann, Professor of Literature at Leipzig, writes about the continuing differences between the old East and West Germany, a Filippic that has been at the top of German bestseller lists for months. In his book East. Eine Westdeutsche Erfindung Oschmann argued that no one in Germany was discriminated against like the East Germans. He himself shortened his children’s allowance if they spoke with a Saxon accent to protect them from social stigma, and omitted his birthplace in East Germany from his resume.

‘The political experience in the East’, writes Oschmann, ‘many times does not apply in the West because it can only be the experience of a dictatorship’. This ‘dictatorship experience’ is often used to explain why the far-right AfD was so successful in the ‘new’ federal states. Easterners are used to dictatorships and are still not ready for a pluralistic democracy.

The biggest flaw

The main weakness of Hoyer’s book is that it does not bridge the gap between the everyday experiences of the interviewees and analyzes of the functioning of a regime. How was it that the people he interviewed, and perhaps most GDR citizens, did not experience repression? Because even if they are incompatible with dictatorships, the state gets everything from them. From kindergarten to university, in media and culture, everything is dictated by the communist party.

With Hoyer, the party, the Stasi, and the Wall quickly faded into the background time and time again, as if, for example, being locked up in their own country was some sort of impractical side-effect. The construction of the Wall in 1961 forced the government to slightly improve living conditions, Hoyer said, to keep imprisoned citizens happy. That is why in 1970 more households in the GDR had refrigerators than in West Germany, according to Hoyer, holidays were well organized and even sailing on the Baltic Sea was possible. In the late 1960s, the GDR was dominated by ‘prosperity and optimism’ and ‘pride’, Hoyer concluded; a bit too rosy summary.

His landmark project eventually weakened Hoyer’s more optimistic forecasts. For example, Hoyer noted that alcohol consumption in East Germany was twice as high in the GDR as in West Germany, but he explained it this way: ‘Most East Germans don’t drink to get over their worries, but because they have too little to do. to worry about.’ Alcoholism was a particular problem in the East German states.

In one pieceGuard Katja Hoyer responded to criticism in Germany of her book last week, which she called “demeaning”. That’s at least partly true. But by calling East German culture “cool” in the headlines, he also made it too easy for his critics.