At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Katarina Witt, the figure skater once dubbed “the most beautiful face of socialism,” took to the ice to perform a routine set to Bizet’s opera Carmen.

Beyond the Wall. By Katja Hoyer. Allen Lane; 496 pages; £25. To be published in America by Basic Books in September; $35 In the eyes of its critics, the communist-run part of Germany was never a ...

Vladimir Putin was a married KGB officer, living in comfort in East Germany, when the world as he knew it collapsed around him. As the regime of his host nation fell in December 1989, Putin watched as ...

No major combat incidents occurred in the GDR, but the S-200 system’s presence deterred potential aggressors, aligning with Warsaw Pact exercises and Soviet oversight. East Germany was at the ...

Shari Green was awarded the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People at a gala event in Toronto on Oct. 27 for her novel, Song of Freedom, Song of Dreams. “Green’s gripping novel ...

Hoyer has several important advantages that Steinbeck and Capa lacked. East Germany’s fearsome internal security apparatus is long gone, which means her surviving subjects are free to speak openly ...

Photos held in a German archive reveal how barriers were tested to prevent East German citizens attempting to flee to freedom, even by killing them. 1 A vehicle smashes into a steel barrier at a ...

Near the East German village of Wandlitz, nine miles to the east of Berlin, is a most unusual settlement. It is a walled-in compound of semi-forested land and wide lawns, within which sit some 20 ...

Seen through the calculating eyes of East Germany’s economic planners, the Berlin Wall has been a huge success. Though a moral outrage and a physical eyesore, it has stanched the drain of manpower ...