MY COLD WAR COLD CASE: The True Story of My Journey to Find a Friend Who Vanished Behind the Berlin Wall tells the story of Debby Pattiz’s quest to find a dissident who vanished when she was a Brown University student  abroad for a semester in East Germany.

With only a first name and a single photograph, Debby returned to Germany three decades later. Clue by clue, document by document, the mystery unraveled. Her search led to a forgotten journal, a renegade German president, and a hidden tombstone.

Debby’s timely project examines the big idea of authoritarianism through the narrow lens of a personal journey into an untold chapter from history: Germany’s second twentieth-century dictatorship. The prism of the Cold War opens a back door for readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the pervasiveness of surveillance, erosion of democratic norms, and resurgence of authoritarianism in the 2020s. It also sparks important conversations about the psychological toll authoritarianism exacts on ordinary people, and the wrenching choices they face when conscience collides with ambition. Or survival.