Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Forty Autumns
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1961
WEBSITE: http://www.ninawillner.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Lives in Wash, DC, and Istanbul, Turkey * http://www.ninawillner.com/about.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 2016045891
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016045891
HEADING:
Willner, Nina, 1961-
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1_ |a Willner, Nina, |d 1961-
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__ |a Her Forty autumns, 2016: |b ECIP title page (Nina Willner) galley, etc. (born in 1961 in the U.S.; former American military intelligence officer)
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__ |a rf14
PERSONAL
Born 1961; children.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army, served as intelligence officer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
In her debut memoir, Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall, Nina Willner recounts the story of her mother’s last-minute escape from East Germany into West Germany. Nina’s mother, Hanna, was only twenty when the Iron Curtain fell, and she was separated from her mother, father, and siblings for forty years. As Willner explains, Hanna met and married a U.S. Army intelligence officer in West Berlin and then moved to the United States. Not only was Hanna unable to return to East Germany, she was rarely able to communicate with her family. Few letters made it through. Hanna’s family, in the meantime, was subject to increased suspicion because of her escape. As a child, Willner had only her mother’s photos to turn to, but as an adult, she became a U.S. Army intelligence officer herself, and she was stationed in Berlin in 1983. Willner was working just a few miles from her mother’s family, and she explains how she was assigned to lead intelligence operations in East Berlin.
Noting the personal import of her story in a Guardian interview with Giulia Rhodes, Willner commented: “My father’s family had all died in the Holocaust so having this side of the family–even if we couldn’t actually see them–was particularly important.” As Julia M. Klein stated in the Chicago Tribune, “in Germany, stories of such ruptures have long been integral to the political discourse. They are more unusual in this country. Forty Autumns, Willner’s meticulous and compassionate family memoir, is a powerful addition to the genre. Charting the twists and turns of politics in communist East Germany over more than four decades, it shows how currents of repression and reform affected individual lives.”
Critiquing the memoir in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune, Maureen McCarthy advised: “Overall, this is an interesting story, unevenly told. The narrative tone is so strong in places that you can forget you’re reading nonfiction.” McCarthy added: “It’s no easy feat to weave a personal memoir into a larger tableau of world events, and Willner complicates her task by trying to do justice to so many family members.” Eloise Kinney, writing in Booklist, was even more positive, asserting: “Not just the author’s storytelling skill but also the many photos touchingly portray this charming, divided family.” In the words of Library Journal correspondent Rebecca Hill, this is “an excellent and intriguing account of the impact of the Cold War on families.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Willner, Nina, Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall, William Morrow, 2016.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2016, Eloise Kinney, review of Forty Autumns.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2016, review of Forty Autumns.
Library Journal, September 15, 2016, Rebecca Hill, review of Forty Autumns.
ONLINE
BookPage Online, https://bookpage.com/ (October 5, 2016), review of Forty Autumns.
Chicago Tribune Online, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (October 7, 2016), Julia M. Klein, review of Forty Autumns.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 8, 2016), Giulia Rhodes, “Forty Years of Family Life Lost behind the Iron Curtain.”
Nina Willner Home Page, http://www.ninawillner.com (May 31, 2017).
Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/ (November 11, 2016), Maureen McCarthy, review of Forty Autumns.
Nina Willner is a former US Army intelligence officer who served in Berlin during the Cold War. Following a career in intelligence, Nina worked in Moscow, Minsk and Prague promoting human rights, children’s causes and the rule of law for the US Government, non-profit organizations and a variety of charities. She currently lives in Washington, DC and Istanbul, Turkey. Forty Autumns is her first book.
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OUT OF THE COLD WAR COMES A POWERFUL AND INSPIRING TRUE STORY…
Forty Autumns Book Cover
Amazon Barnes and Noble Books-A-Million
“The [Berlin] Wall is… an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity...”
—President John F. Kennedy
Forty Autumns tells the story of what happened to one family during Cold War. It is a story of a divided Germany - of eighteen million people trapped in a country knowing that freedom lay just beyond its borders - and about the four decade clash of communism and democracy, the Soviet-American superpower fight for dominance in the space race, the nuclear arms race and battles around the globe that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Most notably, Forty Autumns is a timeless story of humanity – about faith, courage, resilience and the power of the human spirit.
In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story…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.
Rich in drama and beautifully evocative…Nina Willner (has) discovered an extraordinary story. In Forty Autumns she vividly brings to life many accounts of courage and survival, set against the backdrop of four decades that divided a nation and the world.
Forty Autumns Nina Willner talked about her book Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall, in which she recalls her mother’s decision to leave her family and escape to West Germany during the Cold War. Years later, Nina would become the first female U.S. Army intelligence officer to lead intelligence collection operations in East Berlin, where her grandmother, her mother’s sister, and her cousin remained. close
5/5/17, 11'44 AM
Print Marked Items
Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
Eloise Kinney
Booklist.
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p13. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. By Nina Willner. Oct. 2016. 400p. illus. Morrow, $27.99 (9780062410313). 943.1087.
Willner's mother, Hanna, just 20 years old, escaped from East Germany into West Germany at nearly the last possible moment. His telling of her story quickly becomes a page-turner about a loving family facing East Germany's hardships, restrictions, and fears under the oppressive communist regime and the manipulative secret police. Young Hanna eventually lands in America, but she leaves her beloved family behind--Oma, Opa, and many others, but especially her younger sister Heidi. Hanna and daughter Nina's tale spins unexpectedly when Nina is commissioned in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer--and stationed in 1983 in Berlin, just miles from the family members she has never met. Not just the author's storytelling skill but also the many photos touchingly portray this charming, divided family. Plenty of background--both heartbreaking (would-be escapees shot at the wall) and fascinating (President Kennedy's Berlin speech, preceded by his peeking over the wall)--is woven neatly in. A multigenerational tale that brings the Cold War and the iron curtain to tragic, memorable life.--Eloise Kinney
YA/M: Mature teens will find much to admire in the story of brave, steadfast Hanna and Heidi, and the personalized account will help brim history lessons to life. EK.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kinney, Eloise. "Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall."
Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 13. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771205&it=r&asid=484b1980e6062c16a46a653bbe6bd573. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771205
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Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family's Story
of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the
Berlin Wall
Rebecca Hill
Library Journal.
141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p95. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. Morrow. Oct. 2016.416p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN 9780062410313. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062410337. BIOG
Written by the first female U.S. Army intelligence officer during Cold War operations, this gripping book details Willner's family's experience during the post-World War II conflict. As a little girl, Willner's mother, Hanna, would explain that her grandparents lived behind a "curtain" in East Berlin. Telling Hanna's story, the author describes how a shove by her grandmother Oma literally landed 17-year-old Hanna in the arms of an American sergeant, presenting her with a chance to escape East Berlin. On her third attempt, Hanna safely landed in West Berlin, where she met and ultimately married a U.S. Army intelligence officer. Leaving her family behind, Hanna moved to the United States at age 20, suffering extended periods when she was unable to communicate with her loved ones because her escape deemed them "politically unreliable." Willner's book follows her East Berlin family up to the destruction of the wall in 1989 and their reconciliation with Hanna. Throughout, Willner intersperses historical fact, which adds a brutal realism to the story. VERDICT An excellent and intriguing account of the impact of the Cold War on families and their lives on either side of the Berlin Wall. [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]--Rebecca Hill, Zionsville, IN
Hill, Rebecca
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hill, Rebecca. "Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin
Wall." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 95. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463632557&it=r&asid=31c75d5ea15845aceb71f051e02d8757. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463632557
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Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
Publishers Weekly.
263.35 (Aug. 29, 2016): p80. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Coinage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall Nina Willner. Morrow, $27.99 (416p) ISBN 9780-06-241031-3
Willner's epic memoirtraverses three generations of mothers, recounting the tragedy, estrangement, and overwhelming courage of a family torn apart by the ideological division of Germany during the Cold War. Willner, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, weaves familial legends of escape from farmsteads guarded by roving East German border patrols, with tales of international espionage at the 1958 World's Fair. Her interrogative and unabashed voice explores the painful intersection of national duty and familial responsibilities, as when she describes the first encounter of her maternal grandfather and her father in 1959: "The two shook hands: the tall East German and onetime soldier in the Third Reich meeting his new son-in-law, an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor and now a U.S. Army intelligence officer." Faced with government-sanctioned propaganda and manipulation, readers follow a family of educators led by their daughters as they attempt to navigate "the fabric of East German society [that] began to fray under the yoke of an Orwellian climate of oppression." Willner's depiction of the brutal East German regime and the fight of one family to unite is a thrilling and relevant read for historians and casual readers alike. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Forty Autumns: A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall." Publishers Weekly, 29
Aug. 2016, p. 80+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462236486&it=r&asid=6ede190daaa59d9a25d2499b4034548c. Accessed 5 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462236486
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Forty years of family life lost behind the iron curtain
Growing up, Nina Willner wondered why she had no uncles, aunts or cousins. Then she learned her mother had escaped to the west as a teenager. The family waited 40 years to be reunited
Nina Willner’s mother Hanna aged 17
Nina Willner’s mother, Hanna, aged 17, just before she escaped to the west.
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Giulia Rhodes
Saturday 8 October 2016 01.15 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.37 EDT
Nina Willner’s childhood was, on the surface, little different from that of her classmates in Kansas, deep in America’s midwest. School, piano lessons, sports matches, camping trips, television, plenty of food: Nina – and in due course her five siblings – enjoyed the trappings of 1960s suburban America. There was, though, Nina realised, one large difference. Her friends had grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Where, she asked aged five, were hers?
The explanation was baffling. “We learned they were behind an iron curtain. What do you mean they can’t get out? A curtain, wait, I’ll go pull that aside,” recalls Nina, now 55. It was, she vaguely understood, no ordinary bit of window dressing. “It must be huge. I thought it must go up to the sky. I somehow realised we were lucky.”
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Nina’s mother, Hanna, had grown up in the village of Schwaneberg, about 100 miles south-west of Berlin. She was 17 when, with the second world war over, Russian troops rolled in. Germany was being carved up among the allied victors and the villagers were now in Soviet-controlled East Germany.
As life grew harder – with food, land and the school curriculum taken over by the Communist party and the zone’s borders ever more harshly policed – Hanna became increasingly unhappy. In 1948, a week before she was due to collect her high-school diploma, she bought a return train ticket to the city of Magdeburg, telling her family she was going to register at teacher training college. But she was really planning to escape. Two previous attempts to reach the West had left her fully aware of the risks. She had been fired on. Her family was already being watched.
Nina Willner
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Nina Willner: ‘The reunion was epic’
On this occasion, she tagged on to a group who were trying to cross. They made a dash for the border and guards shot at them. The rest of the group was rounded up, but Hanna hid in a barn where a woman and her son were living. When the guards came looking, the woman pretended Hanna was her niece. The son had struck up a relationship of sorts with the guards, giving them things in return for letting him cross back and forth. He told them Hanna was his cousin visiting her grandmother in the West, handed over cigarettes and she got through.
She had nothing with her but a small case containing a photograph of her parents and seven siblings, 10 marks and a warm jumper.
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“It was heartbreaking for my mother. She was little more than a teenager,” says Nina.
Hanna settled in Heidelberg, where she learned English, found a job with the US army and married a serviceman, Eddie, an Auschwitz survivor with American citizenship. In 1960, the couple moved back to America, where Nina was born.
It would be 40 years before Hanna and her family were reunited.
In November 1989, Hanna and Nina (by then herself the mother of two young children) watched stunned as images of the Berlin Wall being torn down were relayed on American TV.
“We just couldn’t get it into our heads. It took days to sink in,” says Nina. “My mother kept waiting to hear that the borders had been closed again.” In East Germany, Nina learned later, her relatives were even more shocked and wary. “They thought it was another trick to ferret out the non-believers.”
Five months later, Hanna and Eddie flew to Frankfurt to meet her five surviving siblings and their families. “When the reunion came, it was epic,” says Nina. “There were tears for months and months. They knew the family could have been destroyed. Everybody knew what it meant to come back together. And everybody knew what they lost in those 40 years.”
Hanna’s parents had died, as had three of her brothers – Roland, the oldest and Hanna’s favourite, only one year earlier. “That was very tough.” In all the years of separation, says Nina, Hanna never resigned herself to losing her family.
“Letters, when they did get through, were already open and usually devoid of information.” Letters announcing the deaths of two brothers were withheld, Hanna only finding out through devastatingly oblique references a year later.
On the bureau in her bedroom, recalls Nina, Hanna kept the few photographs she had. “There was a family frozen in time, her brothers as little boys. I would look them over and wonder who they really were.”
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To a large extent, to Nina if not to her mother, this proof of existence was enough. “My father’s family had all died in the Holocaust so having this side of the family – even if we couldn’t actually see them – was particularly important.”
Nina enjoyed helping her mother to pack parcels. “She was always packing boxes. Clothes, knitted blankets, food, soaps, cigarettes, trinkets, nail clippers, anything she could think they might need.” Few parcels reached their destination. Cigars, clothes, grapefruit were all intercepted. There were occasional successes, though. A swimming costume sent for Nina’s cousin Cordula – a promising athlete who was later selected for East Germany’s cycling team – was particularly treasured.
Though Nina would not meet Cordula until after the fall of the wall, their paths had almost crossed earlier. After graduating in 1982, Nina joined the US army as an intelligence officer. She was posted to Berlin, undertaking regular reconnaissance missions into East Berlin at the same time Cordula was training in the city’s velodrome.
“The moment we passed through Checkpoint Charlie I knew we were in my mother’s family’s country. They were somewhere there,” says Nina. “The contrast with the West was stark. We were followed immediately. There was very little movement, few people around. It felt eerie, grey, dark. It gave me a much clearer sense of what my mother – who always had so much spirit – had escaped.”
During one visit from her parents, Nina arranged a bus tour into East Berlin. Hanna, immediately struck by anxiety, was unable to complete the outing. “She was safe. We were with the US army, but she felt so frightened she couldn’t get off the bus.” It was, for Nina, an important moment. “I had never seen her like that. It was a visceral reaction. I understood.”
Today, Nina is delighted that her children can enjoy the extended family she once missed. “We all visit. We talk. We send pictures. I even get weekly reports from my aunt Heidi on what is growing in the garden. We all know how important it is. We have come full circle and there is no going back.”
• Forty Autumns by Nina Willner is published by Little, Brown, £20. To order a copy for £16.40, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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'Forty Autumns': A powerful family history covering both sides of the Berlin Wall
'Forty Autumns' by Nina Willner
"Forty Autumns" by Nina Willner.
Julia M. Klein
Chicago Tribune
American-born Nina Willner was 5 years old when she learned that her maternal grandmother, Oma, lived "behind a curtain," in East Germany. The so-called Iron Curtain was an ideologically charged metaphor but also a harsh reality that divided many German families in the aftermath of World War II.
In Germany, stories of such ruptures have long been integral to the political discourse. They are more unusual in this country. "Forty Autumns," Willner's meticulous and compassionate family memoir, is a powerful addition to the genre. Charting the twists and turns of politics in communist East Germany over more than four decades, it shows how currents of repression and reform affected individual lives.
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Willner's rebellious mother, Hanna, successfully escaped East Germany at 20, after three previous attempts. But she paid a steep, if predictable, emotional price: virtually complete separation, for decades, from her parents and eight siblings, including her youngest sister, Heidi, born after Hanna's flight.
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Like many East Germans, Hanna's family struggled to come to terms with the regime's totalitarian demands and to find some measure of satisfaction in their private lives. Meanwhile, only a couple of visits, a rare phone call and anodyne letters pierced the silence between Hanna and those she left behind. With even mail subject to the snooping — and often interdiction — of the ubiquitous secret police of the Stasi, it was perilous to express genuine emotions, let alone political complaints.
Beyond their sorrow at her absence, the family suffered concrete consequences as a result of Hanna's departure: They gained a reputation for political unreliability that would shadow their lives and careers. Hanna's favorite brother, Roland, an ambitious educator, responded by essentially cutting off contact with her.
The case of Hanna's father, known as Opa, is more nuanced. A teacher and school headmaster, he at first embraced the communist regime and its ideology with a blend of enthusiasm and calculation. But his disillusionment grew, and he took the dangerous step of writing to East German authorities in protest of agricultural collectivization.
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, he was denounced, expelled from the party, forced into retirement and exiled with his wife from rural Schwaneberg to the remote hamlet of Klein Apenburg. While Oma, a farmer's daughter, drew comfort from a new garden, Opa continued to voice his dissent. As a result, he was confined to an insane asylum for "re-education," and returned a broken man.
By contrast, Hanna did find the better, freer life she craved. In West Germany, she met a U.S. Army intelligence officer who spoke unexpectedly perfect German. He turned out to be a German Jew whose family had been murdered in the Holocaust. Drawn together by their losses, they married and settled outside Washington, D.C.
Like her father, Willner became an Army intelligence officer, and conducted missions in Berlin and East Germany in the 1980s. During those years, she never met her East German family. But the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany's reunification a year later made meeting possible. And it enabled her to reconstruct their lives, from her grandparents' struggles to her cousin Cordula's achievements as a swimmer and cyclist.
"Forty Autumns" has one notable omission: It offers only the sketchiest information on the family's stance and situation during the Nazi years. We do learn that, as part of Hitler's last-gasp mobilization of every able-bodied German male, Opa and his oldest son, Roland, were both drafted into the German army. Willner suggests that Opa had tried to adapt to Nazism, just as he did to communism, while he privately called Hitler "a madman who despised human beings." Years later, when Hanna married a German Jew, he wrote to his prospective son-in-law: "I welcome you, with all my heart, into our family."
During the long years of suffering and separation, it was Oma who kept the family from fracturing. She invented the concept of a "Family Wall," creating a zone of trust on which they could rely. She told her children and grandchildren, "we are strong because our souls are free," and promised them that one day they would see Hanna again. She was right.
Julia M. Klein is a freelance writer.
Forty Autumns
By Nina Willner, William Morrow, 391 pages, $27.99
Review: "Forty Autumns" by Nina Willner
NONFICTION: Memoir re-connects lives of family separated by the creation of East and West Germany.
By Maureen McCarthy Star Tribune NOVEMBER 11, 2016 — 10:54AM
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The Iron Curtain rises again in “Forty Autumns,” Nina Willner’s account of a German family divided after World War II. Stitched from memories collected on both sides, it’s a Cold War story Willner knows well. It’s her family.
In East Germany in 1948, the relief of peacetime gives way to dismay over tightening Communist control. Hanna, the oldest daughter of a school principal in Schwaneberg, flees to the West, leaving behind her parents, a growing number of siblings and the taint of suspicion that her family will carry for decades.
Their separation widens after Hanna marries an American army intelligence officer and moves to the United States. It intensifies as the fencing that Hanna slipped through becomes fortified by barbed wire, watchtowers and the Berlin Wall.
Harassed by Communist Party officials, her father snaps. But such family news rarely gets past the censors. As years pass, parallel lives unfold. Hanna has six children, including Nina, who is stunned at age 5 when her mother tells her about the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who cannot visit because of this Iron Curtain. “Someday, she reassured me, we might be able to meet them,” Willner recalls. “Someday indeed. For goodness sakes, I thought. It’s just a curtain.”
Willner’s understanding deepens when she becomes an army intelligence officer in Berlin in 1982. She leads a team of agents who cross the “Bridge of Spies,” trying to find evidence of military activity and evade their Soviet pursuers. That experience yields some of the memoir’s most dramatic moments.
Overall, this is an interesting story, unevenly told. The narrative tone is so strong in places that you can forget you’re reading nonfiction. Then Willner drops in a “My mother” or other personal details. It’s no easy feat to weave a personal memoir into a larger tableau of world events, and Willner complicates her task by trying to do justice to so many family members.
“Forty Autumns,” by Nina Willner
“Forty Autumns,” by Nina Willner
She heightens the difficulty further by trying to construct a second set of parallel lives between herself and a cousin who grows up to be an East German cycling champion headed for the 1988 Olympics. She can’t quite pull all the strands together.
Even so, she paints a vivid picture of life for East Germans who didn’t toe the party line, and bears witness to her mother’s poignant meeting with surviving family members in a reunited Germany. “There were so many feelings all at once: overwhelming emotion, immeasurable joy, but also heartache for those who had passed, who had not lived to see this day.”
Maureen McCarthy is a team leader for the Star Tribune.
Forty Autumns; A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
By: Nina Willner.
Publisher: William Morrow, 391 pages, $27.99.
FORTY AUTUMNS
A Family's Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall
by Nina Willner
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A former U.S. Army intelligence officer’s story of her East German mother’s flight to the West and of the family she left behind.
Willner was just 5 years old when she first learned that her mother Hanna’s parents lived “behind a curtain” in East Germany. But it would not be until several years later that she would understand that this “curtain” was really a symbol of their political oppression and that Hanna had barely escaped entrapment herself. Her own mother, Oma, had literally pushed her into the arms of the departing American soldiers who had been occupying their hometown. The 17-year-old Hanna soon returned out of concern for her family. But when, after fleeing and returning a second time, she saw how communist ideology was changing her father and destroying the freedom, happiness, and security she had once known, she left, this time barely escaping with her life. Piecing together the story of Hanna’s family from relatives encountered only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Willner re-creates an at times painful account of how her aunts, uncles, and especially her grandparents survived a brutal East German dictatorship. Though marked as “politically unreliable” due to Hanna's defection, they never gave up hope that one day they would be reunited. However, the price they paid was high. Willner's grandfather became a target of communist officials, who banished him, his wife, and youngest daughter, born after Hanna's third and final escape, to a tiny farming community to prevent the spread of possible dissent and then forced him to undergo “intensive reeducation training” at a mental hospital. Yet through all the suffering, the family managed to stay together and survive by building a “Family Wall” of love and loyalty against the powerful outside forces they could not control. Thoughtful and informative, Willner’s book not only offers a personal view of the traumatic effects of German partition. It also celebrates the enduring resilience of the human spirit.
A poignant and engrossing, occasionally harrowing, family memoir.
Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241031-3
Page count: 384pp
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2016
Web Exclusive – October 05, 2016
FORTY AUTUMNS
Life behind the Iron Curtain
BookPage review by Roger Bishop
When World War II ended in Europe, American, British and Soviet military units rolled into communities throughout Germany to establish order. Within a short time the country was officially divided into East and West zones, as was the city of Berlin. The Soviet Union occupied the East sector, and with the beginning of the Cold War and the establishment of a Communist-led government, the residents there would have their lives changed for decades to come.
In East Germany, one small, seemingly innocuous act judged, by a person in authority, as a challenge against the police state could lead to a reprimand, imprisonment or worse. Many were able to escape but many others were killed or captured during their attempts. A brave young woman named Hanna from the rural village of Schwaneberg was able to escape and eventually lead a free and happy life as a U.S. citizen. But her close German family, which included her parents and eight siblings, had been the center of her life, and she missed them terribly.
Nina Willner, Hanna’s daughter, tells the true story of what life was like for her mother and her East German family during this period in her compelling Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall. Drawing on a wide range of sources including interviews with family members, memoirs, letters, archives, trips to relevant locations and historical records, this is a moving account of one family’s life under tyranny. In a fascinating twist, the author was the first woman to lead U.S. Army intelligence operations in East Berlin during the Cold War in the 1980s, and she relates some of her experiences.
At the heart is the story is Oma, the author’s grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated. Throughout the many devastating changes in their lives, she was able to keep up the morale of her children and her husband by word and deed, demonstrating the central importance of love and family.
After the war, as West Germany began to rebuild, people in the East went in the other direction, depriving many of basic items. The government’s propaganda, however, painted the West zone as much worse off.
Perhaps the most distressing aspect in the East was the establishment of the secret police, the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, for short. Eventually it became responsible for the wholesale manipulation and control of all citizens. The Stasi used clandestine operations, fear tactics and intimidation, attempting to get everyone to spy on everyone else as a way of life.
Forty Autumns includes a family and historical chronology that helps the reader put events in context. Willner’s sensitive and well-written account causes us to reflect on what is really important to us and how we would react in a similar situation.