“Freedom is the most valuable thing a human being can possess. The only people who know that are people who have had to live without it. If you’ve grown up free, you don’t know what it means.”
In Forty Autumns, Nina Willner gives a very personal account of her mother Hanna’s bid for freedom from Communist controlled East Germany
Hanna made two failed attempts to escape East Germany. Aged 20 she absconded while en route to begin teacher training, this time succeeding in making it into West Germany. In Heidelberg she met her future husband, moving with him to the USA where they raised six children.
Over the next four decades, contact with her family was sporadic. Letters occasionally made it through to America and there were a couple of phone calls but the family had to wait until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall to be fully reunitedl. Only then did Hanna learn that her parents and siblings had paid heavily for her escape to the West.
Classified as “politically unreliable” by virtue of their association with an escapee, her parents and siblings were treated with suspicion and subjected to harsh treatment by the Communist officials.
Her father (Opa), mother (Oma) and her youngest sister were banished from their village of Schwaneberg to a tiny farming community of just seven buildings. It was intended as a punishment but was also designed to prevent them ‘contaminating’ other citizens. Opa eventually lost his job as a headmaster because he found it too difficult to toe the party line in his teachings. He was confined in a mental hospital where he underwent intensive ‘re-education training’. By the time he was released, he was a shell of a man.
Nina Willner’s detailed account of her grandparents’ experience is set in the context of the increasingly harsh conditions imposed by East German leaders to keep the population under control.
The Red Army descended on the eastern territory with a plan to reshape the face of the East. The first challenge the soviets faced was to change the mind-set of the almost 19 million German citizens who, long before World War II, had been led to believe that communism was the greatest threat to the Western World. Stalin demanded the transition be swift and the approach uncompromising.
Much of the information about life in the East comes from the family members themselves, enriched though Nina Milner’s own experience of life beyond the wall.
Willner was the first female US Army Intelligence Officer to lead intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War, often crossing from the western-controlled sector into the east. Though only a few miles physically separated her from her German relatives, it was too dangerous to try and make contact. The minute she left the west, she and her colleagues were tailed by East German security forces.
The story she tells is one of courage, resilience and sacrifices individuals make when faced with forces that are outside their control. Opa became increasingly frustrated and disillusioned by the attitude of East German leaders towards the country’s intellectuals and its failure to prevent food shortages. Oma however never lost her faith that life would improve one day. “No one can say what will happen or if things will change, but all I know is, justice will win,” she says at one point. “Truth will prevail and justice will win.”
In Forty Autumns, Willner paints a vivid picture of what life was like for the family in East Germany. She also shows that freedom posed its own challenges — without qualifications or even a high school diploma Hanna found it difficult to secure jobs paying her enough for a decent flat. in West Germany. She also had to overcome suspicions from US military officials who warned her future husband that he was risking his career in intelligence if he married an East German.
I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. Other people’s family history is seldom that interesting to outsiders who don’t know the individuals and have no connection to their lives. This one is different however, because Willner makes her relatives so real in their resilience and love for each other. The liberal use of photographs of various family members and places they lived was an added bonus. The sections involving Wilner’s covert forays into East Germany didn’t have the same appeal and felt overly detailed.
Overall however, I thought this was a fascinating book, one that enriched my knowledge of life in East Germany under the communist regime.