A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary Read online

  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

  This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war.

  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.

  Now and then whole hours pass in eerie silence. Then, all of a sudden, you remember that it's spring. Clouds of lilac perfume drift over from untended gardens and go wafting through the charred ruins of apartment houses. Outside the cinema, the acacia stump is foaming over with green. The gardeners must have snatched a few minutes between sirens to dig at their allotment plots, because there's freshly turned earth around the garden sheds up and down Berliner Strasse. Only the birds seem suspicious of this particular April: there's not a single sparrow nesting in the gutters of our roof.

  A little before three o'clock the newspaper wagon drove up to the kiosk. Two dozen people were already waiting for the deliveryman, who immediately vanished in a flurry of hands and coins. Gerda, the concierge's daughter, managed to grab a few 'evening editions', and let me have one. It's not a real paper any more, just a kind of news–sheet printed on two sides and damp on both. The first thing I read as I went on my way was the Wehrmacht report. New place names: Müncheberg, Seelow, Buchholz – they sound awfully close, like from somewhere in the Brandenburg Mark. I barely glanced at the news from the western front. What does it matter to us now? Our fate is rolling in from the east and it will transform the climate, like another Ice Age. People ask why, tormenting themselves with pointless questions. But I just want to focus on today, the task at hand.

  Little groups milling around the kiosk, people with pasty faces, murmuring.

  'Impossible, who would have thought it would come to this?'

  'There's not one of us here didn't have at least a shred of hope.'

  'Nothing the likes of us can do about it.'

  The talk turns to western Germany: 'They've got it good. For them it's over and done with.' No one uses the word 'Russians' any more. It refuses to pass our lips.

  Back in the attic apartment. I can't really call it a home, I no longer have a home. Not that the furnished room I was bombed out of was really mine either. All the same, I'd filled it with six years of my life. With my books and pictures and the hundreds of things you accumulate along the way. My starfish from that last peacetime summer on Norderney. The kilim Gerd brought me from Persia. My dented alarm clock. Photos, old letters, my zither, coins from twelve different countries, a piece of knitting that I'd started. All the souvenirs, the old skins and shells –the residue and warm debris of lived in years.

  Now that it's gone and all I have is a small suitcase with a handful of clothes, I feel naked, weightless. Since I own nothing, I can lay claim to everything – this unfamiliar attic apartment for instance. Well, it's not entirely unfamiliar. The owner is a former colleague, and I was a frequent guest before he was called up. In keeping with the times, we used to barter with each other: his canned meat from Denmark for my French cognac, my French soap for the stockings he had from Prague. After I was bombed out I managed to get hold of him to tell him the news, and he said I could move in here. Last I heard he was in Vienna with a Wehrmacht censorship unit. Where he is now...? Not that attic apartments are much in demand these days. What's more, the roof leaks as many of the tiles have been shattered or blown away.

  I keep wandering around these three rooms, but I can't find any peace. I have systematically searched every single cup board and drawer for anything usable, in other words, something to eat, drink or burn. Unfortunately there isn't much. Frau Weiers, who used to clean the place, must have beaten me to it. These days everything is up for grabs. People no longer feel so closely tied to things, they no longer distinguish clearly between their own property and that of others.

  I found a letter wedged inside a drawer, addressed to the real tenant. I felt ashamed for reading it, but I read it all the same. 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.

  Two hours later. The gas is running on a tiny. dying flicker. The potatoes have been cooking for hours. The most miser able potatoes in the country, only good for distilling into liquor, they turn to mush and taste like cardboard. I swallowed one half–raw. I've been stuffing myself since early this morning. Went to Bolle's to use up the pale–blue milk coupons Gerd sent me for Christmas. Not a moment too soon– I got the last drops. The saleswoman had to tilt the can, she said there'd be no more milk coming into Berlin. That means children are going to die.

  I drank a little of the milk right there on the street. Then, back at home, I wolfed down some porridge and chased it with a crust of bread. In theory I've eaten better than I have in ages. In practice, the hunger is gnawing away at me like a savage beast. Eating just made me hungrier than ever. I'm sure there's some scientific explanation. Something about food stimulating the digestive juices and making them crave more. No sooner do they get going than the limited supply is already digested, and they start to rumble.

  Rummaging through the few books owned by the tenant of this apartment (where I also found the blank notebook I'm using to write this), I turned up a novel. The setting is English aristocratic, with sentences like: 'She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table.' Ten lines later I found myself magnetically drawn back to that sentence. I must have read it a dozen times before I caught myself scratching my nails across the print, as if the untouched meal which had just been described in detail– was really there and I could physically scrape it out of the book. A sure sign of insanity. Onset of mild delusions brought on by lack of food. I'm sorry I don't have Hamsun's Hunger to read up on the subject. Of course, I couldn't read it even if I hadn't been bombed out, since somebody snatched my copy right out of my shop ping bag over two years ago in the U–Bahn. It had a raffia cover, evidently the pickpocket mistook it for a ration–card holder. Poor man! He must have been a very disappointed thief! I'm sure Hamsun would enjoy hearing that story.

  morning gossip at the baker's: 'When they get here they'll go through the apartments and take whatever they can find to eat... Don't expect them to give us a thing... They've worked it all out, the Germans are going to have to starve for two months... People in Silesia are already running around the woods digging up roots... Children are dying... Old people are eating grass like animals.'

  So much for the vox populi – no one knows anything for sure. There's no Völkischer Beobachter on the stairs any more. No Frau Weiers coming up to read me the headlines about rape over breakfast. 'Old Woman of Seventy Defiled. Nun Violated Twenty–Four Times.' (I wonder who was counting?) That's exactly what they sound like, too, those headlines. Are they supposed to spur the men of Berlin to protect and defend us women? Ridiculous. Their only effect is to send thousands more helpless women and children running out of town, jamming the roads heading west, where they're likely to starve or die under fire from enemy planes. Whenever she read the paper, Frau Weiers's eyes would get big and glaze over. Something in her actually enjoyed that brand of horror. Either that or her unconscious was just happy it hadn't happened to her. Because she is afraid, I know for a fact she wanted to get away. I haven't seen her since the day before yesterday.

  Our ra
dio's been dead for four days. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can't plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you're in Rome, Peru or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age – they're nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. At the moment we're marching backwards in time. Cave dwellers.

  Friday, probably around 7p.m. Went for one last quick ride on the tram headed for the Rathaus. The air is full of rolling and rumbling, the constant thunder of heavy guns. The tram conductress sounded pathetic, shouting over the din. I studied the other passengers. You could read in their faces what they weren't saying out loud. We've turned into a nation of mutes. People don't talk to one another except when they're safe in their basements. When's the next time I'll ride a tram? Will I ever? They've been pestering us with these Class I and Class II tickets for the past several weeks, and now the news–sheet says that as of tomorrow only people with the red Class III tickets will be allowed to use public transportation. That's about one in four hundred– in other words no one, which means that's it.

  A cold evening, dry taps. My potatoes are still simmering on the tiny gas flame. I poked around and managed to fill some shopping bags with split peas, pearl barley, flour and ersatz coffee, then stashed the bags in a box. More luggage to drag down to the basement. After I'd tied it all up I realized I'd forgotten the salt. The body can't do without salt, at least not for long. And we'll probably be holed up down there for a while.

  Friday, 11p.m., by the light of an oil lamp in the basement, my notebook on my knees. Around 10p.m. there was a series of three or four bombs. The air–raid siren started screaming. Apparently it has to be worked manually now. No light. Running downstairs in the dark, the way we've been doing ever since Tuesday. We slip and stumble. Somewhere a small hand–operated dynamo is whirring away, it casts giant shadows on the wall of the stairwell. Wind is blowing through the broken panes, rattling the blackout blinds. No one pulls them down any more –what's the point?