My family tells the story of a cousin who one afternoon, it must have been the end of the fifties, comes back from the inn and hurls the sentence at his father – my uncle: "You are a Nazi." The boy got a scrub that sat in such a way that he never spoke to his father about the subject again.

Rainer Hank

Freelance writer in the business of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Katja Hoyer, born in the GDR in the mid-eighties, one day asked her politics and history teacher in reunified Jena how he could teach today the opposite of what he had taught before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The teacher kicked Katja out of his class.

The philosopher Hermann Lübbe coined the dictum of "communicative silence". After 1945, it was agreed in post-war Germany not to address the years between 1933 and 1945. Lübbe spoke of "silence", not of "repression", a necessary precondition for a new beginning. The two examples could be called "aggressive silence" in a variation of the Lübbe dictum.

A normal life with everyday worries

It can take years for silence to become understanding. In West Germany, it took until the early 80s, more than thirty years, for an open conversation about the Nazi era to become possible. A good 30 years have passed since the collapse of the GDR. It is only now that my circle of friends is having somewhat open-minded and self-confident conversations about biographical experiences in the GDR, that "strange, vanished country" (Katja Hoyer).

So it is not surprising that books are now piling up that claim to do justice to the GDR without immediately becoming apologetic: "Lütten Klein", the book by sociologist Steffen Mau, describes the humiliations to which East Germans were subjected in the years of transformation after 1989. "The East: A West German Invention", the bestseller by literary scholar Dirk Oschmann, eloquently asserts that the West needs the East as a negative projection surface in order to put itself in a better light.

Katja Hoyer's exciting book "This Side of the Wall", which has just been published, also belongs to this circle. The GDR was not a grey country full of hopeless existences, so the thesis goes. The other Germany is more than the Wall and the Stasi. Hoyer also claims that the historiography of the GDR is still dominated by the Western gaze. By focusing on the misdeeds of the dictatorship, it is overlooked that most of the 16 million inhabitants of the GDR led a relatively peaceful and normal life with everyday problems, joys and sorrows. The wall had restricted freedom, but other social barriers had fallen.

Katja Hoyer describes forty years of German socialism from the point of view of those who experienced it themselves. As a "West German", I am surprised and ashamed of how little I know. We meet the communist Erwin Jöris in 1937 in a dirty cell in Sverdlovsk in Siberia. We meet Regina Faustmann, who rolls up her sleeves in 1951 to participate in the reconstruction of the economy ("Build up, build up, Free German Youth, build up!"). Or Andreas Weihe, a young conscript who ended up with the NVA in 1980 "through voluntary coercion" and who desperately hopes not to have to shoot.