When the Berlin Wall went up, Gerta, her mother, and her brother Fritz are trapped on the eastern side where they were living, while her father, and her other brother Dominic are in the West--four years later, now twelve, Gerta sees her father on a viewing platform on the western side and realizes he wants her to risk her life trying to tunnel to freedom.

Describes the history of the Berlin Wall, from its construction in 1961 to divide the city of Berlin to its destruction in 1989.

"In The Collapse historian Mary Elise Sarette shows that the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, was not, as is commonly believed, the East German government's deliberate concession to outside influence. It was an accident. A carelessly worded memo written by mid-level bureaucrats, a bumbling press conference given by an inept member of the East German Politburo, the negligence of government leaders, the bravery of ordinary people in East...

"In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family--of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 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...

"In the summer of 1961, a wall of barbed wire goes up quickly in the dead of night, officially dividing Berlin. Aware of the many whose families have been divided. Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help East Germans escape across Berlin Wall and into the West. Bob Inama, a soldier in the US Army, is stationed in West Germany. He's glad to be fluent in German, especially after meeting Luisa Voigt at a church social. As they spend...

"The American Sector explores the presence of the Berlin Wall in the United States: as an object, artifact, and supposed symbol of national values. For 18 months Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens traveled the US to document sections of the wall that are on display in over 75 locations, ranging from the serious (Fort Benning) to the bizarre (Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas) and even the campus of nearby Capital University. Along the way, interviews...

In a book based on the podcast series, a broadcast journalist tells the unbelievable true story of 22-year-old Joachim Rudolph, who, in 1961, set out to build an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall and was faced with many obstacles before freeing 29 people.