In the early 1970s, Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker – who had at the time worked as a photojournalist for magazines such as Stern and Geo for a number of years – was accredited to work in the DDR along with his then-wife, Eva Windmöller – a journalist who also worked for Stern.

“We took it for granted that our apartment was bugged, maybe even that our car was bugged. We had come there armed with lots of addresses and telephone numbers for relatives living in East Germany – and we called them up: ‘Surprise, surprise! We are now living in East Berlin. Why don’t you come by and we can talk a bit?’ There was zero enthusiasm…” Hoepker recalled in an interview with The Economist, in 2009, “Any East German who had any sort of important job was not meant to have what they called ‘a West contact’.”

The pair spent several years in the East, reporting on politics and everyday life. A selection of Hoepker’s photographs which span the early years of the wall’s construction, as well as his time living in the East, became the book – DDR Ansichten – Views of a Vanished Country.

Here we feature a selection of images from DDR Ansichten – Views of a Vanished Country, along with some of Hoepker’s thoughts and recollections of his time in the East, shared in the aforementioned interview with The Economist.