Forty autumns: A family's story of life on both sides of the Berlin Wall

A little bit of background📃

I had just read Beyond the wall, Katja Hoyer's account of life in East Germany from 1949 to 1990. I have always been fascinated by life behind the Berlin Wall and I was keen to read more about East Germany. I went searching and found Nina Willner's Forty autumns, a personal story of Nina's mother's family.

Forty autumns: A family's story of courage and survival on both sides of the Berlin Wall | Published October 2016 | Read September 2025

The author✏️

Nina Willner was born in the United States to German immigrants. Nina's mother, Hanna, escaped from East Germany at aged 20, eventually meeting and marrying Nina's father, Eddie, a German Jew who survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, later becoming a US Army major. Nina served as an intelligence officer during the end of the Cold War. Her second book, The boys in the light, tells the story of her father's Holocaust experience and his rescue by the US Army's 3rd Armoured Division.

The subject matterℹ️

Forty autumns tells the story of the author's family. Nina Willner's mother, Hanna Liebscher, lived with her family in Schwaneberg, south west of Berlin, at the end of the Second World War when Germany was divided into East and West. The book recounts Hanna's escape to the West in 1948, the family she left behind, and their life under Soviet control. Nina was born in the Midwest in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was erected, after her mother met her father, Eddie Willner, in Heidelberg and they moved to the United States in 1960. Nina became the first female US Army Officer to lead intelligence collection operations in East Berlin between 1983 and 1986, while her cousin, Cordula, trained for the East German Olympic team. Hanna was separated from her family for forty years - hence the book's title - other than two brief visits in Heidelberg in 1954 and 1958. In the spring of 1990, Hanna and Eddie flew to the newly formed Germany to reunite with Hanna's family.

My thoughts on the book💭

I really wanted to love this book as the subject matter is a special interest of mine. The family and their experiences in East Germany had such potential to be a fascinating, poignant story interwoven with the history of the period. However, it feels like Willner couldn't decide whether to write a memoir or a historical text. The result is that the book does not fit neatly into either category. One Goodreads reviewer wrote this: "The Iron Curtain may be history, but a rigid curtain still veils this family's story." I completely agree! There's so much to learn about the East German experience from Forty autumns, and I did find the history interesting, but the family's part in that history feels strangely devoid of emotion and of their voices. The tone of the book is quite dry and factual, and the writing pedestrian.

There are so many pivotal moments for the family that do not get the treatment they deserve, to give the reader an in-depth picture of how being part of such a landmark period in history affected them. Hanna, who is the linchpin of the story, is not very present in the book, and neither is Eddie, himself a fascinating person, having survived two concentration camps to migrate to the US and join the army.

Nina wove herself into the story through her intelligence work in East Berlin in the mid 1980s, but there was too much detail around this work when it is the family's East German experience that is a more compelling story. Nina was working in East Berlin when her cousin, Cordula, was training for the the Olympics, yet they never met. Willner wasted the opportunity here to explore the two realities, as she could have done throughout the book. I was expecting a parallel story of life on the two sides of the Berlin Wall, but this is not how the book is presented. it offers little insight into how the family felt about their divided life.

I also baulked at Nina's comments about the fall of the Berlin Wall that came across as nationalistic, biased, and generally way too rah-rah for me. She attributes so much of the Fall to Reagan, relegating Gorbachev to a bit player. I believe this to be historically unfair at best, inaccurate at worst. This stance made me doubt Willner as a narrator of the story. It lessened the power of the book for me, when taken alongside the unimaginative writing and lack of emotional depth to the book overall. The vibe of the book feels very much Americanised and anti-communist, but perhaps Willner had to approach her story that way for American audiences. The book felt jarring to read after the Beyond the wall that presented a much more balanced view.

In sum📝

I struggled to rate Forty autumns as I had such high expectations of a thoughtful memoir of life behind the Iron Curtain. The book is disappointing in that respect. In all honesty, it is probably a 2-star read, but I have awarded an extra star for the subject matter and the fascinating Liebscher family. There are some glimpses into the emotional side of the family's experience, but overall the book lacks heart. Yes, I did add to my knowledge of the East German experience, but I was hoping for so much more. The book simply isn't as vivid as is warranted by the story.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐