Well, how lucky was I when a book group in Berkshire sent me a copy of Forty Autumns by Nina Willner. The group had read and discussed this 'family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall', were recommending it far and wide and thought I might like to read it too. One of their number had met the author at the school gates whilst living in Prague, and Nina Willner had done a Facetime session with the reading group during their meeting.
It was a Saturday morning, and a leisurely breakfast when the arrival of a new book always demands an immediate peruse. I read solidly until Sunday evening, hard pushed to put the book down for any but the most essential tasks. The clincher in the book for me was that this was written by a woman who knew first hand, and from several very different perspectives, what life was really like behind the Berlin Wall. Not only had her mother Hanna fled the divide as a young adult, succeeding after several attempts, but Nina Willner had worked for US Intelligence in Germany during the years of the Cold War.
Hanna's decision and eventual escape from East Germany in 1949 is real edge-of-the-seat reading...
'She was young and deserving of a future. Hadn't Opa always inspired her to have big dreams and seek adventure?...and so she had made up her mind. With no way of knowing what impact her escape would have on her family and believing that somehow their separation would only be temporary...she was choosing to escape...'
What follows is an intimate and gripping account of a grey and colourless country, because Hanna left behind a large family who would have to surrender to the demands of the communist regime. It would be forty years before she would see her family again, but Nina Willner paints a vivid picture of life in post-war Germany for her own grandparents and myriad aunts, uncles and cousins and the impact on ordinary lives. It is sobering to read of the indoctrination, the need to 'embed orthodox communist doctrine' in a nation who had previously been trained to despise it. The manipulation of the people through oppression, brutality and disproportionate punishment via the Stasi makes for chilling but compelling reading, as does the indoctrination of the children via compulsory membership of youth organisations, simultaneously creating a climate of fear, suspicion and spying, often on your own family.
Except...
'Informing on your parents and one another simply will not happen in this family.' says Opa Karl, Hanna's father, to her remaining eight siblings. Nevertheless there will be constant anxiety and deep mistrust of the wider community along with a heightened awareness of potential traps...even something as simple as being offered extra eggs in a shop could be a trap that would result in arrest and persecution. Hanna's parents, Oma and Opa (Erna and Karl) will eventually be exiled after Opa, a teacher, finally cracks and challenges the authorities, but in a strange way they are suited to remote isolation and make the best of it whilst the support from their children is unwavering.
Nina meanwhile, trained by U.S. Intelligence services, has been deployed to West Berlin in 1983, at that time 'the spy capital of the world', and her account of the work is both fascinating and at times terrifying. It was fraught with danger as the death of colleagues revealed and, unable to make contact with her extended family, at times must have been incredibly frustrating.
Despite the hardships, powerless and oppressed, and with rebellion futile, the family stick together, weathering the onslaughts and finding ways to support each other, giving the reader of Forty Autumns a poignant and moving insight into the human aspects of these years, and the wider social and cultural impacts of the repression. An entire population silenced and submissive and being fed a distorted world view... hard to believe such places still exist today. The loss and separation are profound for a family who 'lose' forty years of togetherness and freedom until the day, that most memorable day, when the wall, built in 1961, falls in November 1989.
The end, when it came, was like toppling dominoes. A combination of people in power (Reagan and Gorbachov) determined to breach this divide, and a people starting to rebel and defy the authorities in subtle ways (listening to radio broadcasts from the West) and in increasing numbers. I defy anyone not to well up at that moment in the book. It is intensely emotional and beautifully portrayed and I certainly had a tear in my eye, and at the prospect of subsequent family reunions.
Given that all this happened in my lifetime and its existence spans the first thirty-five years of my life, my recollections of it are typically 'western'. Perhaps most vivid are those memories of the athletes, a sphere covered in some detail in the book because Nina's cousin Cordula would become a world class cyclist for East Germany. It is the Olympics I remember, though with little awareness of Erich Honecher's mission to achieve sporting superiority for his small nation.
Forty Autumns all makes for fascinating reading and again, how grateful I am to Judith and her book group for sending this to me. So much I didn't know and if you are looking for an excellent book group selection you couldn't go wrong with this one. Plenty to discuss that will keep you going long after the biscuits have run out.
Meanwhile there's this, perhaps one of the most moving moments of that time. Russian musician Mstislav Rostropóvich, one of the best cellists of the 20th century, performing as people were destroying the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989....
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