146 of 153 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Woman in Berlin rings true., September 13, 2005
This review is from: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City--A Diary (Hardcover)
As a navy officer and as a special consultant to OMGUS (The U.S. Military Government High Command in Berlin) I arrived hard on the heels of the days described by the author. Conversant in German I was able to talk at length with many Berliners-all levels of society-about their experiences during the period covered by the book. I can therefore endorse this publication for it's veracity and excellent portrails of the people and of the conditions under which they struggled to survive.
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80 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
World War II From A Woman's Perspective, August 15, 2005
This review is from: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City--A Diary (Hardcover)
Most of the literature on World War II is written by men on the military ascepts of the conflict (see Winston Churchill's "The Second World War" or Stephen Ambrose's "D-Day"). This is a reprint of a classic memoir of a woman's survival in the wreckage of a fallen Berlin from fifty years ago.
The anonymous writer writes grippingly of the brutal Russian occupation of Berlin in the late spring of 1945. Her first person account of the repeated rapes by the Russians and the choices that a woman needed to make in the chaos of war in order to live is chilling. The building ruins, the hunger, the lack of sanitation of a ruined capital are all here. "A Woman in Berlin" is a powerful book and will make the reader wonder how far they would go to survive if they were in a similiar situation.
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57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bearing witness by bearing & besting brutality, January 6, 2006
This review is from: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City--A Diary (Hardcover)
It's unsettling to have to rate this profound diary of a woman's agony. It is what it is, independent by its very existence from any criteria except that which preserves truth. I waited a long time to read this; I was #20 in the library hold list. Meanwhile, before I obtained a copy, I had read the assertion in a letter to the NYTBR questioning the authenticity of the diary. The letter-writer (among others, including a Toronto reviewer) claims the woman was the Berlin journalist Marta Hiller (1911-2001) and how only her death allowed the new translation to be undertaken after an agreement had been made to keep her identity a secret while she was alive. How this would in any way diminish the journal's veracity remained unclear after I had read the letter-writer's argument. I mention these details because, for me, rather than detracting from the power of this diary, they for me confirm that a real woman lived through these two months and not a frustrated novelist or determined forger. By the way, at one point, she claims she's thirty, when in fact she was thirty-four! Perhaps this all-too-stereotypical "white lie" only confirms its truth!
Philip Boehm in his forward verifies that tests have been made that prove that the journal was written at the time. Reading it, while it does bear the well-designed "arc" of a cohesive narrative that begins on Hitler's last birthday and ends as the author meets again her fiance Gerd, I hazard that this only shows that a professional did indeed write the diary and, as is evident from the details that demonstrate her education and observational skills, that she--as the preface explains--polished her initial reactions as she worked on them every day or two and filled her notebook.
Perhaps some skeptics might challenge the author on grounds that the storyline seems too pat, too neat, too structured. But I think this only strengthens this document of a sophisticated woman's successful attempt to survive brutality with cleverness, resiliance, and wit. It's as if she began the diary as a commitment to remind herself of her ability to remain "human" as the Russians advanced and the threat of rape became reality and no longer rumor. She writes with an eye to the future, and in one passage in the margin detailing one woman's latest coupling notes "for future novelists" as she deftly parodies purple passionate prose! These touches of gallows humor do much to alleviate an otherwise grim chronicle, and to me all the more support that a fully human and real survivor (in the fundamental sense of a word all too lately too often speciously claimed), and not a calculated counterfeiter, created this eyewitness account.
Women come out generally better than men. Again, I think that this supports the fact that a fully-rounded, ethically complicated, determinedly clever, and defiant if careful young woman created this diary. Without this journal as a factor in her resistance to violence and an antidote to the degradation it records, I wonder if she could have borne the cruelty she did in such an ultimately defiant and truly feminist method of overcoming the male urge to destroy with the female's imperative to sustain a recognizably human and unflinchingly honest life within such bestial horror.
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