A Woman in Berlin

Gritty, grimy, cynical, human and oddly cinematic. This wasn't really what I expected. It was far more self-aware, far calmer, and far more “modern” than I anticipated.

This is an anonymous (though she was eventually de-anonymized, you can google it for yourself) account by a 30something journalist in Berlin at the end of WW2. The Soviet Army is rolling in, and this diary is tightly focused on the two months when the Nazi Reich fell, the Soviets arrived, and Berlin began to be carved up by Allied Forces. I expected it to be brutal and “foreign” feeling - both in cultural temperament (a defeated Nazi Germany) and history (1940s culture). Instead, it felt very, very immediate - and not at all foreign (which was disconcerting).

A lot of this book is about rape. The author is repeatedly raped, as is (almost) every other woman she knows. The way she talks about it, the way they all talk about it, is also blunt, shell-shocked, even with some gallows humor. It's hard to take it (including, for example, for the returning men - who insist the women not speak like that). It's confusing: many of the Soviet Army men speak of “love” and “marriage” and make romantic gestures, even as they rape. The German women likewise have a range of resistance: trading sex for protection or food; one woman, a lesbian, wears men's clothing and escapes it all by passing as a man; others hide for weeks in crawlspaces or welcome Soviet officers to their salons. The author herself takes a pragmatic approach: always seeking a high-level officer.

Indeed, this blunt treatment of one of life's “primal horrors” led the book to be published twice: first in the 1950s in Germany, when it was “ignored or reviled” (wiki) by a German public unable to digest it and then again, after the author's death, in the early 2000s.

Beyond its steely portrayal of rape and near-starvation (since Berlin, as a starved sieged city, is in a state of near total anarchy during these two months), the author also repeatedly and strongly condemns men - especially German men. They're repeatedly described as “pathetic”, pathetically limping home, starving and defeated, unable and unwilling (and seemingly no longer caring) to defend their women from the Soviets.

Meanwhile, the Nazi leadership - Hitler, Goebbels, etc. - is also portrayed as universally reviled by the Berliners hiding in their basement bomb shelters, except by a few die-hards (portrayed as naive).

That said, the author is not necessarily a heart-warming “lifelong anti-fascist” - she's shocked and horrified by the newspaper's recounts of the Holocaust, but doesn't dwell on it - and doesn't seem to feel a sense of personal guilt. The personalization of the war is in the sense of loss, the humiliation, the defeat of Germany. Not, in other words, the crimes or the guilt of Germany. That came later, I guess, with the truth and reconciliation (and generational inculcation of German war guilt) in the 1960s and 1970s. This lady doesn't feel bad about what Germany has done, she seems to be as much a victim as anyone. As an American - and especially someone who had a lot of ties with the Jewish community in high school - I felt uncomfortable here: I kept thinking, “THIS IS NOTHING COMPARED TO ELIE WIESEL” and things like that. But I don't think that's a helpful response - in fact, I was a little appalled with myself, with my brain, for even going there. It's not the Suffering Olympics here. This woman didn't personally deserve what happened to her. Indeed, it's interesting that my American reaction - inculcated with endless Hollywood representations of a cartoon evil, and now the revival of “Nazi” as a catch-all for “evil monster” in modern American politics - would lead me to have difficulty accepting German non-Jewish suffering during WW2 (when, obviously, it did also happen), and lead me to feel sometimes tense in letting myself feel bad for her.

Anyway, I recommend this (especially if read in conjunction with Tony Judt's Postwar).

Marta lived through WWII in Berlin, and writes bravely and without shame of what it was like to survive the eight weeks at the end of the War when Berlin was captured by the Soviets, and what she had to do to survive. Some women were able to hide out in crawl spaces but she had no one to help bring her whatever meager food or water could be found; she had to find a way to survive with no help, and she did, and she writes with truth her experiences. The smell of rotting corpses, the hunger, not having any control over what may happen to her in this new world of defeat, but living in the moment the best she could, which meant hunting for nettles to eat, finding a Soviet “protector” so that she at least could be raped by only one man rather than multiple, random men and perhaps even get some bread or wine out of it. Well-written, moving, important story to read.