RELEASED MAY 31, 2013

In WALLED-IN: A WEST BERLIN GIRL’S JOURNEY TO FREEDOM, J. Elke Ertle chronicles the first 21 years of her life growing up in West Berlin during the Cold War. Located one hundred miles from the closest West German border, West Berlin was nothing more than a tiny western island in the middle of a large Communist sea. But by the same token, it also represented the front line of the Cold War divide.

Elke was a small child when in 1948 the Soviets blockaded West Berlin by cutting off all surface supply routes to the city. There was only enough food in the entire city to last for 35 days. Starvation seemed imminent. But in an incredible feat of logistics, the United States and Great Britain launched the Berlin Airlift, which for the next eleven months supplied everything Berlin needed by air. The total number miles flown during that period was close to the distance between the earth and the sun.

As the economic disparity between East and West Germany continued to escalate during the 1950s, approximately 150,000 to 300,000 East Germans fled to the west every year in hopes of a better life. Elke was a teen when in 1961 the East Germany government, with Soviet support, erected the Berlin Wall to stem that drain of professionals and skilled labor. Two years later, she stood in the crowd of half million Berliners who wildly cheered when President John F. Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner” in front of West Berlin’s city hall.

In her late teens, Elke struggled with parental walls almost as high as the Berlin Wall. In Walled-In, she draws a unique parallel between the conflicts over the brick-and-mortar Berlin Wall and her own hotly fought battles over equally insurmountable parental walls. Walled-Inprobes the concepts of freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. cooperation, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.