'One of the best young historians writing in English today. . . Well-researched, well-written and profoundly insightful, Beyond the Wall explodes many of the lazy Western cliches about East Germany' Andrew Roberts

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today.

Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.