“Guten tag kameradens. Haff you met meine daughter, Rapunzel Bustilda-Honecker?”

I just finished Katja Hoyer’s book “Beyond the Wall” recently. The book attracted an insane amount of criticism for telling the 40 year history of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) in a remarkably unbiased and even handed way. Neither laudatory nor condemning, the book gave a history that understood the context of both why the little state had so many defectors it had to build a wall to keep people in, as...