Beautiful New Sky

Ines Geipel is a writer and Professor of Verse Arts at Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin.

• Acknowledgements Unknown SoldierThe New ManCybernetic LanternsNo admittance for unauthorized personsWeightlessnessCoupling manoeuvreAbrek and BionCosmic microwave background radiationSuitable ground modelsWe are the firstRevolution of the apesBack to the future

"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