The book took him on an 800 mile journey down the political faultline that separated Germany until the Berlin Wall came down. Along the way he met resentful former border guards, recalcitrant family members, uptight hitchhikers and towns that were split in half by the arbitrary frontier that made two countries out of one. "The border was defined not by geography but by people; the people it caged, the people fighting it and the people who controlled it".

Oliver's journey took place 50 years after his father had put a suitcase under a pile of cow dung and drove a horse-drawn cart from his house in the village of Ellrich to a nearby field owned by his family. At the time of the ride, which took him from the Soviet to the British zones of post-war Germany, it was casually policed by Soviet guards. A few years later it had become the frontline in the Cold War and, as the frontier between East and West Germany, one of the most fortified borders in the world.