A history of the much hated wall that for nearly thirty years divided Berlin and created two separate countries.

A chronicle of Germany's transformation during a pivotal year describes the devastation from the war's final battles, the death marches and acts of vengeance suffered by ordinary citizens, and the first postwar year's burgeoning social, economic, and political cultures.

In 1961 East Berlin, thirteen-year-old Heidi copes with the stress of a crisis with her best friend, government pressure on her father to leave his West Berlin job, her mother's pregnancy, and the ever-present threat of the closing of the border with West Berlin.

Late April, 1945. The war is over, yet Dr Doll, a loner and 'moderate pessimist', lives in constant fear. By night, he is haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped -- he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in north-east Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army. Dr Doll flees for Berlin, where he finds escape in a morphine addiction: each dose is a 'small death'. He tries to make his way in the chaos of a city torn apart by war, accompanied by his young wife, who shares his addiction. Fighting to save two lives, he tentatively begins to believe in a better future. Written with Fallada's distinctive power and vividness, Nightmare in Berlin captures the demoralised and desperate atmosphere of post-war Germany in a way that has never been matched or surpassed.

Travel writer Thomas Nesbitt, age 50, retreats into his house in Maine to wallow in memories of living in Germany 25 years earlier after the success of his first book. In West Berlin as a worker for Radio Liberty, Thomas meets his soul mate, Petra Dussmann, a translator with an iron curtain around her heart. Petra's mysterious melancholy proves irresistible, and as Thomas is drawn into a passionate affair, he also becomes entangled in spy games played by the Stasi and the CIA.

Separated by time but united by sacrifice, four women experience love, loss, war, and hope from the rise of Nazism to the fall of the Berlin Wall as they embark on journeys of self-discovery and find themselves to be living testaments to the power of maternal love.

"A moving, darkly funny road trip novel about World War II, returning to one's birthplace, and coming to terms with tragedy. It is 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in West Germany, is asked to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia - where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications - to write about the route for a car rally. It's a plum job, but his interest is piqued by a personal connection. Here, among the refugees fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, he was born. Marrow and Bone is a nuanced work from one of the great modern European storytellers, in which an everyday German comes face to face with his painful family history, and devastating questions about ordinary Germans' complicity in the war."--

A city divided. When the Berlin Wall goes up, Karin is on the wrong side of the city. Overnight, she's trapped under Soviet rule in unforgiving East Berlin and separated from her twin sister, Jutta. Two sisters torn apart. Karin and Jutta lead parallel lives for years, cut off by the Wall. But Karin finds one reason to keep going: Otto, the man who gives her hope, even amidst the brutal East German regime. One impossible choice ... When Jutta finds a hidden way through the wall, the twins are reunited. But the Stasi have eyes everywhere, and soon Karin is faced with a terrible decision: to flee to the West and be with her sister, or sacrifice it all to follow her heart?

Rome open city: When the Nazis occupied Rome, a brave few fought against it. An underground agent who is cornered by the Germans in a certain quarter of Rome, flees the Germans. In the course of his flight he imperils his resistance friends. Paisan: Set during the liberation of Italy at the end of World War II, and taking place across the country, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley. Looks at the struggles of different cultures to communicate and of people living their everyday lives in extreme circumstances. Germany year zero: The concluding chapter of Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy is the most devastating, a portrait of an obliterated Berlin seen through the eyes of a 12-year old boy. Living in a bombed-out apartment building with his sick father and two older siblings, young Edmund is mostly left to wander unsupervised, getting ensnared in the black market schemes of a group of teenagers and coming under the nefarious influence of a Nazi-sympathizing ex-teacher. With their stripped-down aesthetic, largely nonprofessional casts, and unorthodox approaches to storytelling, these intensely emotional works were international sensations and came to define the neorealist movement. Shot in battle-ravaged Italy and Germany.

"Checkpoint Charlie is the story of the men and women - from both sides of the Cold War's political divide - who lived, served on, or escaped through the Berlin Wall during its life span (13th August 1961 - 9th November 1989). This physical monstrosity created by the East German communist state was to divide one of the most beautiful and by 1961, ruined cities of the world; dividing families, friends and lovers. Its creation, and its sudden collapse twenty-seven years later, were the key moments of the Cold War. Checkpoint Charlie was the one place in a paranoid continent where East faced West across one hundred yards of No Man's Land. Where soldiers served, spies watched through trained binoculars, escapees fled, politicians made speeches, people died and, mothers wept. The Wall was seen by many as permanent as the Himalayas. Across the Wall's almost three decades of existence, over two hundred people died trying to escape through it to the West, and these are just the recorded deaths. Many more who attempted and failed to break to freedom, would later die of their wounds in an East German hospital or prison. Historian Iain MacGregor travels to America, Britain, Germany and France to talk to the many people the Berlin Wall affected and who found themselves at the gates of Checkpoint Charlie - either on the Allied, or Soviet side. He interviews soldiers, politicians, journalists, spies, policemen, refugees and escapees to build a picture of what life was like in the city that was universally seen as the "hot spot" of the Cold War for four decades"--

Set in a rubble-strewn Berlin in 1945, is like no other film about post-World War II Jewish identity. After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret performer, her face disfigured and reconstructed, returns to her war-ravaged hometown to seek out the gentile husband who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis. Without recognizing her, he enlists her to play his wife in a bizarre hall-of-shattered-mirrors story that's as richly metaphorical as it is preposterously engrossing.

Living and working in a bombed-out Berlin, Millie Mosbach must come to terms with a past decision made in a moment of crisis with the help of a mysterious man who is surprisingly understanding of her demons.