Short Review | Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willmer

Forty Autumns by Nina Willner

There are books that are great not because of how they are written, but because of the information they carry, the story they tell, or the truth they convey. Forty Autumns is just such a book, great because it tells a story that is heartbreaking and tragic, because it is true, and because it is a cautionary tale to those who have already forgotten the lessons of history.

Forty Autumns tells the story of a family divided when Hanna escapes to the west from East Germany just in time to escape the rise of the Berlin Wall. Over the next forty years, she and her family will have only scarce and limited contact, divided by the oppression of the East German communist government. Nina Willner is Hanna’s daughter and becomes a US Army intelligence officer.

I was 12 when the wall came down, and the event was a landmark in my life. I grew up like many waiting for the day when the confrontation between superpowers, the United States and the USSR, would either lead to war or nuclear attack. Then, one day, it all ended, and I don’t think anyone saw it coming. It’s been over thirty years since the wall came down, and again autocratic forces are rising across the world, Europe is involved in a land war no one thought would ever happen again, and Germany has increased its military spending.

A whole generation has grown up not knowing what the Iron Curtain was, or how communist leaders oppressed their people, and how badly they wanted the freedom, prosperity, and rights that we seem to take for granted in the west. Willner’s story–or stories, really, because it is two stories: one in the west and one in East Germany–shows that contrast in a way I’ve not seen quite so well demonstrated. Told with clarity and with a tension that kept me turning pages, I found it to be a stirring reminder of all that we have in America, and why liberty and freedom can be so fleeting when taken.

I will make my daughters read this book someday. Their generation will need this story more than mine, which is only being reminded of things we lived and saw in our own lifetime. My daughter’s generation has never seen this, and if they are not careful history will repeat itself again.

Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall Book Cover

Title: Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
Author: Nina Willner
Genre: non-fiction
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Release Date: August 15, 2017
Pages: 416

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.