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Beautiful New Sky

Fabricating Bodies for Outer Space in East Germany's Military

By: Ines Geipel, Nick Somers (Translator)

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Hardcover | 17 February 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
224 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.1 x 14.48 x 2.54

Hardcover

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It was a bold, ambitious and wildly arrogant idea: extending the reach of communism into space. Spurred on by the defeat of Hitler and the competitive rivalry with the United States, the Soviet space programme saw a frenetic surge of scientific activity focused on the objective of demonstrating Communist mastery beyond the confines of the Earth. In order to create the optimally standardized bodies that cosmonauts would require, top secret military laboratories were set up in 1970s East Germany. The New Man – the modern colonist of space – was intensively trained for the purpose of surviving years of weightlessness in outer space. Experiments were carried out in prisons, hospitals and army barracks with the aim of creating the perfect body: self-sufficient and able to endure extreme conditions for as long as possible. In order to exert dominance over space, it was first necessary to exert total control over those who were being trained to conquer it.

Ines Geipel unravels this largely unknown and extraordinary history by delving into East German military records and talking to those who bear the scars of this state-inflicted trauma. Some of the older scientists conducting experiments had already served under the Nazi regime; others threw themselves into collaborating with the Stasi via the military research programme in order to avoid dealing with the war’s emotional legacy. Written like a thriller and infused with empathy from someone who had herself experienced the debilitating effects of state-administered doping programmes in the former GDR, this book exposes some of the most disturbing episodes in Germany’s recent past.

Industry Reviews

"As a star athlete, Geipel was herself the victim of the GDR’s covert doping regime and had spent years building up an organization to help the victims of enforced doping. This book interweaves the story of her investigations into the GDR research on military medicine and the reactions of human bodies to weightlessness and other effects of space travel with the contemporary story of personal and political attacks on herself and the work of her organization on behalf of victims of state doping and medical experiments, including apes as test subjects. The result is a gripping account as well as an engaging exploration of how to read through mountains of archival files, many previously top secret, in order to produce a picture of attempts to conduct unethical medical experiments on human beings in service of the communist state."
Mary Fulbrook, FBA, author of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

"Smack in the middle of the fifty-year life of the East German state, Honecker's regime indulged dreams of becoming a world leader in the exploitation of outer space. It was the same time as the state was pulling every possible string to dominate the world of athletics. First monkeys and later humans were subjected to experiments to see just how much they could endure. The programme was horribly similar to some of those carried out in Nazi concentration camps. Ines Geipel has exposed a sinister chapter in the short history of the GDR."
Giles MacDonogh, author of On Germany and Great Battles

"Ines Geipel's Beautiful New Sky offers a tantalizing look inside the hidden world of the East German space programme, by an author who is intimately acquainted with the lasting costs of secrecy and authoritarian deception."
Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe

“a powerful, at times deeply moving book about that now defunct state’s sinister involvement in space research […] an important corrective to recent revisionist accounts of East Germany as a place where life wasn’t so bad after all”
Tony Barber, The Financial Times

“deeply researched”
Nature

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