How about an extended edition and a sequel?
Book review of Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer - a detailed, comprehensive and compact history of East Germany.
Emotionally, I can well understand reviews that give the German translation of the English original by
less than 3 stars. Rationally, I see it differently.
Although and precisely because I myself “emigrated” from this very country under adverse circumstances and have no sympathy whatsoever for Ostalgic glorification, unfortunate translations from English into German are no reason for me to devalue this book more harshly than it deserves.
For most people from the Western world with at best a rudimentary knowledge of the East, the English original should be a worthwhile summary of how things actually worked in this strange country.
Yes, there are misleading sentences, nuances of taste and inadequate examples that can lead to false conclusions.
But no, just because the author was a child at the fall of the Wall and her parents were more devoted to the imploding state than others, she shouldn’t have the right to write a bestseller about it that is worth discussing?
That’s as absurd as reducing the entire state apparatus to a few evil old white men in hats and the rest of the republic to silent heroes in constant opposition.
The whole system was much more complicated than can be described 100 percent politically correctly in a digestible reading.
If you want to know more, you have to dig deeper and read more books, of which there are unfortunately too few in the English-speaking world that would be worth translating into German.
“Beyond the Wall” by Katja Hoyer is a good place to start.
While I would give the English original five stars, I can unfortunately only give the German translation four.
In too many passages, it takes too little account of the small but subtle differences in the perception of crude facts from the perspective of tens of thousands of East German dissidents who were disillusioned, intimidated, threatened, asocialized, persecuted, harassed, decomposed, imprisoned, ransomed or driven to suicide by the political system.
This is a lot of hard-to-digest material for at least an extended edition or a second volume in both English and German, which I would love to read just as much as the first, which cries out for a sequel.
I don’t know the German translation but found the original both fascinating and refreshing. Mostly because of the shift of focus onto the average East German and their perception of what was happening to them then and what befell them afterwards.