Katja Hoyer – Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

This event is now sold out, please join the waiting list for any returned tickets, or we think you might like: Tom McTague – Between The Waves. The George Hotel 19 March

The 2026 Peter Barrett Memorial Lecture

An instant Sunday Times bestseller and chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph

For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany that was forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. In Beyond the Wall, historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country, arguing that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron and Beyond the Wall. A Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung, also contributing regularly to the BBC, Bloomberg, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Spectator. She was born in Germany but is now based in the UK. Her next book, Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, will be released in May 2026.