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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and my guest this week is a historian Katya Hoyer, whose new book is Beyond the Wall, East Germany,

1949 to 1990. Katya, welcome. To start with, can I ask what the sort of impulse behind this was?

Because it feels to some extent like a corrective to a historical record. Is that the right way of seeing it?

That depends what you, how you define a corrective. I wouldn't want it understood as a

complete kind of revisionist history of the sort of clichés that are out there of the GDR.

I've more sort of set out to treat the GDR as a proper chapter of German history rather than just this caricature that it's become.

So I've sort of what I'm trying to do is complicate the story, perhaps complemented and add to it and make it a more comprehensive history,

kind of taking it seriously as a social, political and economic experiment of 41 years as

opposed to relegating it to a footnote of Cold War history. There's also, I would say,

perhaps a personal angle there in the sense that I was born in the GDR, but wasn't old enough,

I was still a child, so I wasn't old enough to fully comprehend its kind of politics and its economics and

the way that, you know, life unfolded in it. So in many ways, this is also me now returning to

something that I never experienced as a historian and as an adult to try and explore, you know,

what this, what this country was like. Well, can you say a bit about that personal side? I mean,

there's one, one little description in the book just around 1988, I think the four-year-old Katya is peering out of window.

But, you know, can you talk about your impression and understanding of the upheavals that happened when you were four as you were growing up and came to adulthood, your relationship with your parents?

Well, at the time, because I was so young, like the memories that I have are largely of upheaval,

excitement, something big happening. And that memory that I described in the book of kind of

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