A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. A Diary.

Anonymous [presumed to be Marta Hillers (1911 – 2001)]. Metropolitan Books,
Henry Holt & Co., 261 pages. 2005 (first published 1953). $23.00

On Friday, April 27, 1945, Russian troops first entered the Berlin neighborhood where the author of this diary lived. That night she was raped three times. On Saturday, April 28, it happened again. In an entry made several days later, she tells the story. Two gray-haired soldiers, drunk, force their way into her apartment at 3:00 in the afternoon. One points his rifle at the author’s roommate, identified only as “the widow.” The author describes what happens next in a voice that moves from first-person to third-person and back again.

“The one shoving me is an older man with gray stubble, reeking of brandy and horses. He carefully closes the door behind him and, not finding any key, slides the wing chair against the door. He seems not even to see his prey, so that when he strikes she is all the more startled, as he knocks her onto the bedstead. Eyes closed. Teeth clenched.

“No sound. Only an involuntary grinding of teeth when my underclothes are ripped apart. The last untorn ones I had.

“Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to Eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.” As he leaves, the rapist drops something on her nightstand, then slams the door behind him. “A crumpled pack of Russian cigarettes, only a few left. My pay.”

Immediately after this experience, still vomiting, the author decides she will choose her next rapist. She must find a “wolf to keep away the pack. An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage.”

Selecting a rapist. That kind of horror can only be imagined in a place where moral order and social fabric are no longer recognizable, a place like Berlin at the close of World War II. Toward the end of the day, as it’s described in these pages, small clumps of Russians, often drunk, patrol the streets and bang on doors, looking for likely candidates, making choices, standing guard while the rape ensues, then moving on. Historians have estimated that some 2 million German women were raped in the aftermath of the war, many dying of their injuries.

But the author of this chilling diary does not wish to see herself as a victim. She’s determined to survive, along with other women in her building and her neighborhood. Building and neighborhood are about as far as anyone’s connections to the world extend in these claustrophobic early days of Russian occupation, with bombing and burning on every side, with combat still hammering nearby neighborhoods, with Hitler still cowering in his bunker, so what we see in these pages is a vivid picture of a desperately sick and constricted world. Some of this diary was written furtively on scraps of paper, some of it more deliberately in notebooks, with later additions made as she typed it out in July of 1945. Almost always, though, there’s a sense of immediacy, a feeling that the life it witnesses is never more than a few steps away.

The author, a widely traveled journalist in the years before the war, who speaks a bit of Russian, does eventually find an officer to protect her. He treats her well, by the standards she has come to expect, bringing her gifts of food and protecting her from the near-random rapes that had been her earlier fate. However, she’s not at all sure what kind of bargain she has made. One afternoon, in relative quiet, she writes a long reflective entry while he relaxes in the next room.

“By no means could it be said that the major is raping me,” she observes; “one cold word, and he’d probably go his way and never come back. So I am placing myself at his service of my own accord.” The reader, from the perspective of a comfortable desk more than a half century later, might well disagree with her take on the situation.

“In addition,” she goes on, “I like the major, and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person. And he won’t be wanting much, I can tell. His face is pale. His knee wound is causing him trouble. Out of all the male beasts I’ve seen these past few days, he’s the most bearable, the best of the lot.”

However, once she has reasoned herself into this position, she becomes uncomfortable. All this reassuring analysis, she says, this patting herself on the back about her relatively stable condition, “Still isn’t an answer to the question whether I should now call myself a whore, since I am essentially living off my body, trading it for something to eat.” She’s not about to give herself easy answers. In fact, she avoids self-pity and self-congratulation equally, eschewing any attitude that smacks of conviction. Ruefully aware that her nation fell prey to a politics of absolute conviction, and that she didn’t raise much of a voice against it, she figures now the nation is paying the price, and that price is laid, as is often the case, on the bodies of the women who have survived.

Although a contemporary reader may see the sexual negotiations between the victorious army and the defeated populace as the most striking symbol of the collapse that ended the war, it is not the primary subject of this work. There is a great deal of specific information about the necessary business of daily life—sources of food and water, living arrangements in the midst of aerial bombardment, accommodation to the conquest of a highly educated and civilized society (at least in its self-image) by an uncivilized horde—the Russians—given to pissing in stairwells and generally afraid of climbing stairs beyond the second floor. The author wonders how the Romans felt when Rome was overrun by vandals, and suggests that Berlin may have something in common with them.

Her most persistent topic, I think, is the loss of moral underpinnings. Most of us in the comfortable West, after all, live in a plenitude we take for granted, a world of goods and services and supplies and money, a world of regulations and exigencies that generally serve to reinforce a widely shared morality. Early in her journal she notes, almost impassively, that the distinction between one’s own possessions and the possessions of others has disappeared. Her world has shrunk to very few things she can call her own. Some bits of clothing, a supply of ink and paper, a borrowed apartment open to the sky where she no longer sleeps, another borrowed apartment where she sleeps but does not truly live, and a hodgepodge group of people, mostly women, together with a few invalided men, who have washed ashore in the same upended street, scrabbling for food and water, tobacco and wine, soap and safety. This is a fierce landscape, devoid of moral heroes, where stature among the conquered people no longer exists, except that the living outrank the dead.

She ruminates about her family’s past, especially about her father’s advice to her mother when he went to war in 1916: “he reminded her never to forget to put my lace bonnet on to protect me from the sun. So that I would have a lily-white neck and a lily-white face . . . . So much love, so much bother with sunbonnets, bath thermometers, and evening prayers—and all for the filth I am now.”

The relations between Russians and Germans are not all violent. The author recounts one afternoon in early May, just a few days before the official end of the war. A couple of Russian soldiers bring chocolate to share with a German family, while the author serves as translator. As the soldiers exclaim about the beauty of the family’s baby, they pull out tattered photos of their own children, whom they haven’t seen since 1941. Among the memories of home and the tangled present, at some point in the afternoon a silence falls across the room. Inevitably, then, the bitterness of the adults’ tainted relations with the world shows through. By now we have a pretty clear idea what they have done to survive—soldiers in their way, civilians in theirs—and it’s not something anyone wants to put into words.

“The baby pays no attention—she bites the foreign finger, cooing and squealing. I feel a lump rising in my throat. She seems like a miracle to me, pink and white with copper curls, flowering here in this desolate, half-looted room, among us adult human beings so mired in filth. And suddenly I realize why the warriors are drawn to the little baby.”

The tone of this journal is quiet and quotidian, despite its horrifying subject matter. Clearly the act of writing is, at times, the only way she can stop her hands from shaking or stave off the convulsions of hunger and fear. Yet she insists on being a witness, on recording what she can as clearly as possible, on continuing to live in both deeds and words.

She has been shorn of illusion. Once Berlin is partitioned among the Allies, and a semblance of order begins to return, she wonders about what purpose her life might ever regain. She believes the earthly sum of tears is fixed and immutable—not a strange belief for someone in her position. There’s no progress, no happiness, no escaping to a quiet corner, no love, no art she can see, nothing that can possibly give her life any purpose at all. “What’s left is just to wait for the end,” she says. “Still, the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.”

It’s not much, but it may be the best an honest witness could muster.

Reviewed by Larry ten Harmsel

Larry ten Harmsel is Dean of the Lee Honors College at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Dutch in Michigan.