History book reviews: East Germany recalled fondly but with warts too

Elsewhere, an outstanding history of IRA attempt to kill Thatcher, and two riveting books on louche killer Malcom Macarthur

The iconic ‘Trabi’ car in an exhibition that shows what everyday life was like in the former communist East Germany at the DDR Museum in Berlin, Germany. Picture: Maja Hitij/Getty

Anyone visiting the DDR museum in Berlin, dedicated to life in the old East Germany, will be struck by the spanking clean Trabant car that features at the beginning of the exhibit. 

It was beloved by East Germans and there was a three-year waiting list for one. 

The problem was it kept breaking down and replacement parts were almost impossible to get. The fuel gauge was continuously faulty and drivers had to constantly guess when to put petrol into their car.

Part of the problem with many contemporary history and politics books is that in discussing big issue themes they miss the stories of people central to the tale they are telling.

This year the best political works I read placed character at the heart of their books. Of these books the very best was Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. 

Born in a country that no longer exists, Hoyer tells a fascinating tale of the ordinary lives of her fellow citizens.

While it does deal with high politics, and the section on the fall of the Berlin Wall is riveting, the real value of this book is in its portrayal of how ordinary East Germans lived. 

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

One of the great dangers of history is the tendency of many to read it backwards. 

In the case of East Germany our propensity is to think of it as an unremittingly grim place, always raining, and with so little to do that people mostly just spied on each other and reported their findings to the authoritarian state. 

We also tend to think of it as full of people who wanted to bring about its collapse.

Yet, as Hoyer shows, the state had so much information on its people that it had little idea of what to do with it. While most of its citizens were loyal East Germans, the state simply did not understand them. 

She also shows that its people had the normal fears, anxieties, hopes, and joys as anyone else. Very few wanted it to stop existing and there was great shock across the country when the Berlin Wall fell.

East Germans had sex earlier and later in age and more of it than anywhere else in the world. There were also hardened drinkers, again consuming more alcohol per capita than in any other country. 

The female employment rate at well over 90% was the highest in the world, and more women went to university, and owned fridges for instance, than in capitalist West Germany.

Like everywhere else, national sporting success was wildly celebrated. We now know that pretty much all of East Germany’s Olympic success was based on steroids and the shameful manipulation of its athletes’ bodies by the state. 

But for ordinary East Germans, Olympic success showed the validity of their way of life. Its football team’s 1-0 victory over West Germany in the 1974 World Cup was one of the country’s greatest days. 

The match might have been one of the worst at that year’s competition but all of East Germany rejoiced at the result.

It was not all milk and honey, and Hoyer expertly dissects the repression and paranoia of the East German state. Simply put, the authorities did not trust their people, and ultimately those people rebelled. 

Very few of the demonstrators in late 1989 wanted the regime to end. Rather most wanted reform, the right to travel, and the opportunity to own cars other than Trabants. The old regime was quickly swept away but it remains alive in this terrific book.

Elsewhere there were a number of outstanding books of contemporary history which again placed character at their centre. 

At the top of my list is Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown. This is history as gripping thriller as Carroll gives us the inside story of the 1984 Brighton bombing, its perpetrator, its victims, and its consequences. 

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown by Rory Carroll

At its heart is Patrick Magee, forever known to history as the Brighton bomber. Only a quirk of luck stopped him from being the man who killed Margaret Thatcher.

In September 1984, Magee booked into the Grand Hotel in Brighton and stayed in his room for three days. He was visited by three people, who have never been traced.

Over those days he painstakingly constructed a lethal bomb. The following month the Conservative Party would hold its annual conference in the very same hotel. 

IRA engineers estimated that the force of Magee’s bomb would bring much of the floor down and kill those in the rooms below, where they rightly assumed Thatcher would be staying.

When the bomb exploded at 2.54 am on October 12, Magee was having a restless night in a safe house in Cork. 

When he awoke early that morning the radio told him his bomb had exploded but that it did not kill Thatcher. 

Nevertheless, the IRA rejoiced and said it had only had to be lucky once, its enemies had to be lucky all the time.

Carroll is excellent on Magee but also on Thatcher, and those charged with finding her would-be assassins. 

After dogged legwork, English police traced Magee to Dublin and bided their time. 

He returned to Britain and was part of a ruthless IRA bombing team which planted a lethal device in the Reubens Hotel, close to Buckingham Palace, as part of a campaign to destabilise the British state. 

Ultimately, he was traced to a flat in Glasgow in June 1985 and the pages leading up to the arrest of the five-person IRA cell are as enthralling as any I have read in contemporary history.

Character is also central to two very good but different books exploring the terrible crimes of Malcolm Macarthur over a blazing hot weekend in July 1982. 

Harry McGee’s The Murderer and the Taoiseach: Death, Politics and GUBU — revisiting the notorious Malcolm Macarthur case offers a riveting account of the murders of Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne by the louche playboy Macarthur.

What makes his book stand out is the intertwining of politics and murder. 

He traces how Macarthur was arrested in the Dalkey apartment of the state’s Attorney General, Patrick Connolly, who had been handpicked for the job by Charlie Haughey and the media frenzy that followed. 

McGee commendably reclaims the victims of Macarthur as people in their own right in his fine book.

Mark O’Connell’s, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder is a more meditative study of Macarthur. O’Connell tracked Macarthur down and interviewed him many times in the long dark days of covid.

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell

The result is a brilliant book where O’Connell tries to understand why Macarthur committed his appalling murders. 

Despite his best efforts he cannot. He admits there is what he calls a “sulphurous whiff of madness emanating from the whole affair, a persistent sense that none of it adds up”.

What does add up though is the dogged research, the beautiful writing, the empathy O’Connell has for Gargan and Dunne, and his frustration at failing to penetrate what he calls the inner logic of Macarthur’s life. 

The result is one of the finest pieces of contemporary history writing in Ireland in many years.