Beyond the Wall and Retracing the Iron Curtain
Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany
Katja Hoyer (Basic Books, 2023), 496 pages, bibliography, endnotes, photos, index.
Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War
Timothy Phillips (The Experiment, 2023) 464 pages, bibliography, endnotes, photos, index.
Katja Hoyer and Timothy Phillips have compiled separate Cold War histories that invite new interpretations of the decades-long conflict. Only children when the Soviet Union disintegrated, both recount memories of protests and sinister border crossings during the 1980s as the catalysts for lifelong fascination in a struggle traditionally framed as the showdown between market-oriented democracy and socialist dictatorship. Both Hoyer and Phillips have obviously combed through the available literature, but as thirty-something Europeans whose most formative years came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, their accounts wander wide from the ideological paradigms that often characterized the histories of previous generations.