I was asking my father for a bit of help with my homework, sticking newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook. He was flabbergasted when he saw that the subject was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the event in 1954 which marked the end of the French presence in Indochina. It was just over twenty years later, as the Americans were retreating from Saigon. I was studying the French withdrawal from its colonies as history whereas he felt he was still living through it.

I had the same reaction when first reading Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall – not a memoir, not a political analysis of the rights and wrongs of German reunification, but a self-contained history of the forty-one years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). I experienced the final years of the state as a foreign correspondent; I know many who experienced its countless indignities and occasional charms more profoundly and far longer than I did. Some are still living them now. The moment must come, though, to stand back. After all, Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, even the Iraq War are now considered history. Why not the GDR?

Hoyer sets out her stall boldly at the start: ‘Perhaps the wounds of separation, of identities lost and gained, were too raw to be examined during the immediate post-reunification era when it seemed preferable to allow them to scab over. Now, it is time to dare to take a new look at the GDR.’

Through a series of interviews, case studies and accounts of specific episodes, she offers a broadly chronological approach, looking at the origins of the state, its evolution and its eventual demise. She reminds readers, as I remember all too well, that the GDR was as close as it had ever