Dagmar Margot was born in East Germany in 1952, during the Soviet occupation. Her earliest memories are of a world that felt both ordinary and quietly constrained. A few weeks before the Berlin Wall sealed her family's lives in place, they-with American help-fled to West Germany, a journey that left Dagmar with a lifelong sense of being between multiple worlds. In 1997, she moved to San Diego, California, with her husband and children.