By 1988, the average East German drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. The obvious explanation is they drank to escape the unbearable awfulness of being in the German Democratic Republic, with its omnipresent Stasi, clown-car Trabants, travel restrictions, gerontocratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and laughable elections.
Not so, argues East German-born historian Katja Hoyer. Most East Germans drank not to forget their worries but because they had so little to worry about. She writes: “for those who wanted a quiet life with the small comforts of home it was a stable place with few concerns or worries”. By the late 1980s, true, the level of surveillance carried out by the Stasi was at an all-time high, but often it did little with the information gathered. In this, it was arguably less intrusive, certainly less effective, than today’s data-plundering techno-giants.
Not that Hoyer is an ostalgie-filled apologist. The GDR she describes is one divided between those “who resented the permanent state of alert and politicisation of life” and “others who craved meaning and belonging in contrast to what they perceived to be the empty consumerism of the West”.
Indeed, one way of reading Hoyer’s revisionist history is as a takedown of western hubris, using the example of East Germany to highlight our shortcomings in social mobility and women’s rights. Take childcare. In 1989, the GDR had one of the highest rates of female employment in the world, mostly because state nurseries, open from 6am to 6pm, admitted children from birth. But after the Berlin Wall fell, such expensively egalitarian services were dismantled and East German mothers found it difficult to square parenting with a career. As Hoyer puts it, they were “baffled when they had to justify why they even wanted both”.
As for social mobility, the GDR gave ordinary citizens chances that homologues raised in, say, Britain’s sclerotic public school plutocracy, can hardly aspire to. “Tens of thousands of young people from working-class backgrounds had been encouraged to study, promoted to leadership positions and given scholarships,” Hoyer writes. In 1953, when there was an uprising against the four-year-old GDR, many saw it as a threat to their new status. One consequence was the rise in voluntary security organisations such as the Freiwilliger Helfer der Volkspolizei (Voluntary Auxiliary of the People’s Police). An estimated 5,000 volunteers even helped defend the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, believing no doubt that their homeland, with all its opportunities, needed protecting and prepared to spend their free time doing so.
When Germany was divided into British, French, American and Russian sectors after the fall of the Third Reich, few expected the last one would become an independent nation, still less a walled-in Stasiland. “What is this GDR?” asked Stalin’s security henchman Lavrentiy Beria in 1952. “It’s not even a proper state. It only exists because of Soviet troops.”
True, Hoyer argues: Moscow saw East Germany as geopolitical pawn to be sacrificed if necessary in order to win the burgeoning cold war. Indeed, Stalin sought a reunified and neutral Germany as buffer between the socialist east and capitalist west. A year later, though, Stalin was dead, and Beria was executed with a bullet to the head, while East Germany would survive for another 37 years.
On October 7 1989, a four-year-old Hoyer and her father celebrated the GDR’s 40th anniversary with a trip to the viewing platform of Berlin’s Fernsehturm, the socialist-built TV tower. Below, police cars converged on Alexanderplatz in an attempt to quell the unstoppable protests that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall a month later.
Like most East Germans, her dad had no inclination to join the demonstrators: the Hoyers were comfortable with their secondhand Trabant and two-bed flat in a 1960s prefab block. Today their daughter lives in the UK, but not without a memory of what died that day. What makes her meticulous book essential reading is not so much its sense of what East Germans lost, as what we never had.
• Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
