Rather, she displays a special understanding and wants to present a corrective to previous reductive assessments of the GDR that depict it as a field-grey Stasiland, a dystopian model of a surveillance state.
"[9] A review in The Guardian calls the book "revisionist history" but also notes that it is "essential reading" for giving readers "not so much [a] sense of what East Germans lost, as what [western democracies] never had.
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who was persecuted by the East German regime in his youth, accused Hoyer of downplaying the extent to which the state influenced everyday life commenting that "If a book like this about the Nazi period came out, there would be an outcry...
Norbert Pötzl, a former reporter for Der Spiegel, took the view that Hoyer was "trying to prove that not everything was bad in the GDR" implying that her family background made her sympathetic to the regime as both her parents were government employees.
A review in Die Tageszeitung also argued she was not critical enough of the regime and mocked the fact her mother had taken her to interview Egon Krenz, the final communist leader of East Germany, as part of her research.