A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (2 page)

One of the reasons for questioning the diary’s authenticity is its literary merit. The images are often striking. For example, the author describes young soldiers ‘wearing their cartridge belts like some barbaric adornment’. One might even suspect the felicity of its construction. All the main themes of the book are evoked in the first entry for 20 April. The civilians trapped in Berlin are deprived of meaningful news, yet they know that information on the western front, where the Americans have just reached the line of the Ethe, is by then irrelevant. ‘Our fate is rolling in from the east, ’she writes. ‘It will transform the climate, like another Ice Age.’ Yet ‘no one uses the word “Russians” any more. It refuses to pass our lips. ’She also notes that attitudes towards possessions have completely changed. People ‘no longer distinguish clearly between their own property and that of others.’ She finds a love letter written to a previous tenant. ‘A passionate love letter, which I flushed down the toilet.(Most of the time we still have water.) Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now. Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love–life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food. ’In the queue at the bakery that morning she had heard rumours of the Red Army reducing the population of Silesia to starvation. She also realizes that the lack of electricity and gas has reduced modern conveniences from lights, cookers and hot water boilers to useless objects. At this moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave–dwellers.’ Soon, they are all looting stores and shops as the imminent Soviet onslaught and collapse of Nazi power leaves society disintegrating into communities based on each building.

The author’s character comes through clearly in her writing. In contrast to the totally closed mind of Nazi
Gleichschaltung,
she was liberal and open–minded. She disliked the mindless xenophobia of the regime as much as its military machismo. In her twenties, she had travelled around Europe and had even visited the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. This was to prove vital once the Red Army arrived. Everyone in the apartment building came to her, expecting to be saved from the depredations of usually drunken soldiers. This put her in the front line. Apart from the bravery and resilience she demonstrated, her account reveals the close relationship between an enquiring mind and intellectual honesty. It is this quality which makes the diary so impressive and so important.

The author is a brilliant observer of her fellow members of the basement ‘clan’, the strange community transferred from life above ground in their apartments to a troglodyte existence in their communal air–raid shelter. They have buckets and every other form of receptacle filled with water ready to put out a fire, yet, if the building above them were to burn, such precautions would make little difference.

But the biggest fear is what will happen when the Russians arrive. One ‘young man in grey trousers and horn–rimmed glasses’, turns out on closer inspection to be a woman, hoping to save herself from the attention of Red Army soldiers. Other young women try to make themselves appear old and dirty in the vain hope of repelling lust.

Still, the black humour of Berliners resurfaces from time to time. Before Christmas, they had joked about that season’s presents: ‘Give something useful, give a coffin.’ The other witticism, soon out of date as the Soviet armies surrounded Berlin, was that optimists were learning English and pessimists learning Russian.

Deference to the Nazi regime collapses along with an administration that can no longer protect its subjects. Ration cards may still be stamped, but only out of bureaucratic habit. Although a few diehards proclaim their confidence in Hitler, even they no longer speak of the Führer any more. They refer simply to ‘he’ and ‘him’. The propaganda ministry’s premises of victory and a bright future fool nobody; yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. The diarist is more realistic. She glimpses a few German soldiers. ‘That was the first time I saw real front–line men– all of them old. The carts were pulled by Polish ponies, darkcoated in the rain. The only other freight they’re hauling is hay. Doesn’t look much like a Blitzkrieg any more.’

She is always intrigued by paradox. ‘These are strange times,’ she writes. ‘History experienced firsthand, the stuff for tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen up close, history is vexing– nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal.’

The only physical description of herself is: ‘a pale–faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat’, yet she is meticulous in recording her feelings out of an almost forensic curiosity. I’ve had to cope with my fear of death. The symptoms are always the same. First, the sweating beads up my hairline, then I feel something boring into my spine, my throat gets scratchy, my mouth goes dry, my heart starts to skip. My eyes are fixed on the chair leg opposite, memorizing every turned bulge and curve. It would be nice to be able to pray.’ Her reason for writing all this is quite simple. ‘It does me good, takes my mind off things.’ She also thinks of showing her account to her erstwhile fiancé, Gerd, ‘if he comes back’.

One of the most important aspects of this diary is the careful and honest reflections on rape in war. Just before the Red Army arrives, Frau W. jokes in the cellar: ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.’ The diarist looks around at the other women and girls, wondering who is a virgin and who is not. Soon afterwards, when somebody in the cellar ventures that perhaps the Red Army soldiers are not so bad after all, a refugee from East Prussia screams: ‘They’ll find out all right.’ The cellar falls silent. They realize that the horrors she has witnessed and probably experienced were not just the ravings of the. propaganda ministry.

The diarist notes how their language has coarsened. ‘The word “shit” rolls easily off the tongue. It’s even said with satisfaction, as if by doing so we could expel our inner refuse. We debase our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.’

When the Red Army reaches their street on 27 April, they know that the moment of truth has arrived. ‘My stomach was fluttering,’ she wrote after seeing her first Russians through the window. ‘I felt the way I had as a schoolgirl just before a Maths exam– anxious and uneasy, wishing that it was already over.’ At first, things do not appear too bad. The soldiers in the street are playing with bicycles they have found, trying to learn to ride them. She is asked if she has a husband. It becomes a constant refrain. If she says she has, they ask where he is. If she says no, they ask if she wants a Russian husband, ‘followed by crude flirting’.

According to a pattern, which almost all firsthand accounts confirm, the soldiers’ first interest is in looting watches. Most had five or six strapped round each forearm. But once the evening came and they had drunk their ration of vodka, the ‘hunting parties’ began. The diarist manages to save the baker’s wife from rape in the cellar by fetching an officer who persuades them to leave. He evidently has little authority to prevent such acts, and immediately after his departure, the diarist is seized by the same men. The whole subject of mass rape in war is hugely controversial. Some social historians argue that rape is a strategy of war and that the act itself is one of violence, not sex. Neither of these theories are supported by events in Germany in 1945. There have indeed been cases of rape being used as a terror tactic in war – the Spanish Civil War and Bosnia are two clear examples. But no document from the Soviet archives indicates anything of the sort in 1945, Stalin was merely amused by the idea of Red Army soldiers having ‘some fun’ after a hard war. Meanwhile, loyal Communists and commissars were taken aback and embarrassed by the mass rapes. One commissar wrote that the Soviet propaganda of hatred had clearly not worked as intended. It should have instilled in Soviet soldiers a sense of disgust at the idea of having sex with a German woman.

The argument that rape has more to do with violence than sex is a victim’s definition of the crime, not a full explanation of male motive. Certainly, the rapes committed in 1945 – against old women, young women, even barely pubescent girls – were acts of violence, an expression of revenge and hatred. But not all of the soldiers’ anger came in response to atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS in the Soviet Union. Many soldiers had been so humiliated by their own officers and commissars during the four years of war that they felt driven to expiate their bitterness, and German women presented the easiest target. Polish women and female slave labourers in Germany also suffered.

More pertinent, Russian psychiatrists have written of the brutal ‘barracks eroticism’ created by Stalinist sexual repression during the 1930s (which may also explain why Soviet soldiers seemed to need to get drunk before attacking their victims). Most important, by the time the Red Army reached Berlin, eye–witness accounts and reports show that revenge and indiscriminate violence were no longer the primary factors.

Red Army soldiers selected their victims more carefully, shining torches in the faces of women in air raid shelters and cellars to find the most attractive. A third stage then developed, which the diarist also describes, where German women developed informal agreements with a particular soldier or officer, who would protect them from other rapists and feed them in return for sexual compliance. A few of these relationships even developed into something deeper, much to tile dismay of the Soviet authorities and the outrage of wives at home.

For obvious reasons it has never been possible to calculate the exact figure of the number of rape victims in 1945. A general estimate given is two million German women, this figure excludes Polish women and even Soviet women and girls brought to Germany for slave labour by the Wehrmacht. But the figures for Berlin are probably the most reliable in all of Germany – between 95,000 and 130,000, according to the two leading hospitals. These can hardly be inflated figures if one takes into account that at least a dozen women and girls were raped in the single medium–sized apartment block where the author lived. Some pockets in the city escaped completely, but not that many when one considers that over a million troops were either billeted in the city or passed through it. Most wanted what they saw as their share of loot in one form or another.

A number of victims, as the diary indicates, suffered grave psychological damage, but the author and the widow she comes to live with instinctively see the best means of self–preservation. ‘Slowly but surely we’re starting to view all the raping with a sense of humour,’ she writes. ‘Gallows humour.’ The widow jokes to everyone they meet about the compliment she was paid by one rapist who declared that she was much better than any Ukrainian woman. The author’s sense of humour is drier. She finally manages to wash her sheets. ‘They needed it,’ she notes, ‘after all those booted guests.’

Rape in war is a ‘collective experience’, she also observes, as opposed to in peacetime when it is individual. ‘Each woman helps the other, by speaking about it, airing her woes.’ But, as she soon found out the male half of the German population wanted the subject to be buried. ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men are changing,’ she writes as Hitler’s regime collapses. ‘We feel sorry for them, they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man– is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man”. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.’ Her optimism proved sadly premature. The late 1940s and the 1950s, after the men returned from prison camps, were a sexually repressive era in which husbands reasserted their authority. Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonoured their men who were supposed to have defended them. It remained taboo until the late 1980s, when a younger generation of women started to encourage their mothers and grandmothers to speak about their experiences.

A Woman in Berlin
is a war diary unlike any other. This is a victim’s eye view, a woman’s perspective of a terrifying onslaught on a civilian population. Yet her account is characterized by its courage, its stunning intellectual honesty and its uncommon powers of observation and perception. This book is one of the most important personal accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat. It is also one of the most revealing pieces of social history imaginable.

Antony Beevor, 2004

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

This translation, like every other, must reckon with certain challenges. Local terrain familiar to the author is foreign to us: streets and districts, outlying towns, and even the specific architecture of apartment buildings, which in Berlin are frequently built around a courtyard, with shops at street level, below the residences. In conveying this topography I have tried to make it as accessible as possible while preserving a sense of place. Most names of places and streets have been kept in German (Müncheberg, Berliner Strasse), although a few (Landwehr Canal instead of Landwehrkanal) have been anglicized for clarity. The district
Rathaus
is identified once as a town hall and remains “Rathaus.” Most military terms have been rendered with the UK equivalent (sub lieutenant), although some Nazi–era formations have been kept in German (Schutzpolizei, Volkssturm.)
Schnaps
is a generic word for certain distilled spirits and has been variously translated as “liquor,” “brandy,” or “vodka,” depending on the context. Russian words have been transliterated, with any necessary translations provided in the text.

Philip Boehm

FRIDAY, 20 APRIL 1945, 4P.M.

It's true: the war is rolling towards Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar. We breathe the din; our ears are deafened to all but the heaviest guns. We've long given up trying to figure out where they are positioned. We are ringed in by barrels, and the circle is growing smaller by the hour.