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In a divided country, heaven is split in two - just as hearts, families, friends and lovers are marked by the Berlin Wall built in the heads of people long before it is physically put in place to illustrate the failure of a people.

This is a strong contender for the saddest love story I have ever read - love for home, love for another person, love for ideas, love for life. Do I have to mention the loving heart is broken in so many places it is impossible to mend it?

Do I have to mention there is no cure for the heartache people feel who have survived the atrocities of the war, only to find themselves in the impossibility of German life between capitalism and socialism, built on the guilt of Nazi Germany's looming shadow?

Two young people meet and fall in love in East Germany before the ominous date of the 13th August 1961, which made the separation between the two German states irrevocable and definitive for the decades to come. They share worries and hopes, and see the development of socialism with critical, yet objective eyes. For the young man, the state represents a way of life he cannot embrace in honesty, seeing too much of his parents' fascism transformed into new doctrine, "preachers of socialism speaking of politics like devout Catholics speak of the Immaculate Conception". He is no martyr, no hero, and refuses to live the hard, devout life of a believer.

Ultimately, that means he has to escape before it is too late. And what about his young fiancée? What should she choose? Following her love, or her hope for a better life in an idealistic and religious sense of the word? Leaving her political religion behind is a sacrifice that will make her suffer and feel guilt, and she instinctively feels that love cannot survive that kind of choice. But if love cannot survive, will she be able to look up at the wrong side of the divided sky each morning?

As she reflects in her misery: it would have been easier to make the choice against West Germany if people there had been suffering under the yoke of their capitalist plight. But they seem happy. How can they be happy and wrong?

A true believer chooses the road of being unhappy and right.

This is a powerful testament of the minds of young Germans in 1961, facing a division that allowed no middle ground, no moderate and common sense objectivity. On the ruins of their horrific totalitarian past, they have to make sense of the senseless reality that is on offer. Private loss and grief hardly play any role at all, but it exists nonetheless - heartbreakingly real to those who are forced to choose sides!

Powerful, powerful reading, by one of the most prominent German authors of the era. Highly recommended, as a love story, as a historical witness account, as a piece of writing on the universal questions of humankind in any given environment!