From the Goodreads.com Synopsis: In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family—of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own.
Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart.
In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk.
A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family.
Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs.
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My Review:
I loved this book, riveting and pulled you along, waiting to what would happen next. We all know to some degree from news stories about East and West Germany and the Berlin Wall, but I had never gotten around to learning more about this particular piece of history. This book is an excellent way to do that and also learn about East Germans as a people and the experience they went through, so not just through the political lens. Told through the interconnected stories of 5 generations of women in one particular family in East Germany and their experience, from Stalin taking over after WWII trying to spread Communism the building then the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, built not to keep dangerous people out but to seal the East Germans in so as to better control and propagandize them. The Communist Party promised them the world, that resources would be shared and prosperity among all, when in reality they took all the best and gave them the scraps, leaving the people in dire straits. One of the few 5 stars I have given! If you like history you will like this book! I was given this book as an Advance Reader Copy in return for an honest review, which in no way influenced my review! This is an excellent book. True, like one of the previous comments left on Goodreads, the transitions from one persons story to another are a bit abrupt but it only marginally took anything away from the enjoyment of the book.
