An exhaustive — and, at times, exhausting — attempt to restore the lost state to the historic significance she feels it has been denied.

Contradictions are beautifully captured.

Enormously refreshing.

Fast-paced, vivid and engaging. Hoyer covers the large political history with economy and confidence.

One way of reading Hoyer’s revisionist history is as a takedown of western hubris.

[A] rich, counterintuitive history.

It is not an easy message to get across, but Hoyer is uniquely placed to do it. Just four-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell, and now resident in Britain, she shares the frustration of Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, when details of her early life in East Germany are dismissed as irrelevant. It helps that she’s a historian of immense ability whose early promise has been more than fulfilled with this brilliant follow-up to her debut Blood and Iron. Exhaustively researched, cleverly constructed and beautifully written (in her second language), this much needed history of the GDR should be required reading across her homeland..

Compelling.