In 1990, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, a country, East Germany, simply ceased to exist. For over forty years, from the ruins of World War II to the threshold of the new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity from anything that had preceded it and from anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: it was another Germany, born at the geopolitical crossroads of ideology and history. From the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to the relative prosperity of the 1980s, Hoyer presents the rich political, social, and cultural landscape that emerged in former East Germany amidst political oppression and various hardships, staying away from the naive Cold War portrayals common in the West. Through a wide range of previously unpublished sources and interviews, Hoyer weaves the fascinating story of that other Germany, which lay beyond the Wall.