Kim Bülow Bonfils
Countries that have ceased to exist hold a certain fascination. Especially when this has happened to a neighbouring country within one’s own lifetime. Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall” tells the story of the GDR – the short-lived attempt to create a socialist republic in East Germany. Historian and journalist Hoyer was born and raised in the GDR herself and has...
At its release in 1985, this was praised as the ultimate biography of the infamous German terror organization, Rote Armee Fraktion. And to this day, I can’t imagine a more perfect telling of this traumatic story.
Night after night, a man stands by his elevator with a suitcase, waiting for the secret police to take him away and punish him for his crimes.The man is the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the setting is Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the crime is his music.
