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

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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.

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.

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.

The soldiers of the Red army, on their way west in the spring of 1945, behaved like buffoons when they got to Berlin. They careened around on stolen bicycles and crashed into trees. And so the citizens of Berlin--most of them women and children--at first saw them as harmless and comical boys. But once they'd unearthed the stash of liquor Hitler had left behind (hoping it would lead to their drunken defeat by a weakened German army) they turned into rapists.

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, a record of those terrifying encounters, is the diary of a Berlin editor and journalist who never permitted her name to be associated with it during her lifetime. She didn't even hide behind a pseudonym. Her story of the first weeks of the Russian occupation and subsequent rape of 100,000 girls and women in Berlin has never been published under any name other than "Anonymous."

Which is this remarkable book's first irony, since anonymous is the last thing she is. "Autonomous" would be a much better name for her, for she is an independent and brave observer, a journalist who literally writes "notes from underground," sparing no one. Not the Russians, not the Germans, not herself.

"Anonymous," widely believed to have been the Berlin journalist Marta Hiller, was 34 years old in 1945 and lived to see the dawning of the 21st century (she died at ninety in 2001), and so rather than call her Anonymous, I'll refer to her as MH from now on.

Fair-haired enough to be mistaken for a Scandinavian, MH describes herself as an orphan, "a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat"and with the few Deutschmarks she has left in the final spring of the war she buys dried vegetables (Berliners call them "shredded wire") but she mainly subsists on bowls of porridge along with the nettles she finds in vacant lots and bombed gardens.

The Russian soldiers haven't had a home leave for four years, but not all of them are vengeful. And not all of them are rapists. Some of them even try to sweeten their longing for sex with the trappings of courtship. A proposition made to MH by a Russian lieutenant on behalf of an officer from Leningrad falls into this category: "Here is the major. He wants to ask you, citizen, if you find him pleasant." MH is apprehensive, but the lieutenant persists. "Can you love him?"

MH, who has been raped on several occasions by this time, is so disheartened by this question that she wants never to hear the words sex and love again. But when the major, cap in hand, comes into her bedroom later that evening and asks if he can spend the night with her, she barters her body for his protection.

After all, she has already been spared earlier rapes by a powerful Ukrainian officer, and it now looks like the major from Leningrad will become her new protector. As she has already written in the early pages of her diary, she needed to find "a single wolf to keep away the pack. An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage..."

Glances of contempt are aimed her way at the local pump, but she ignores them: she was starving when the Russians rescued her with black bread and herring, and her psychic salvation comes from not being raped anymore. As well as by taking secret notes.

As for the major, he introduces himself by placing all of his documents on her bed in a way that suggests that he too has been psychically wounded by war. He also speaks a sophisticated Russian: whole sentences go by without MH understanding a single word. And he's clearly taking pains to behave like a gentleman. He even jumps up to ask, "Is my company not pleasing? Do you despise me? Tell me frankly!"

Later, when MH cycles through the bombed city, she spots a customer in the half dark of a barber shop and "a man jumping around with a pair of scissors. The first sign of life in the city carcass." Her evocation of this scene, like her description of a clinic where the doctors have replaced the windows with "old x-rays of unidentified chests," has an eerie touch of the absurd, like images out of Kafka, as once again she's revealed to be a writer with the gifts of an extraordinary novelist.

The memoir's final entry is dated June 22, 1945, a few days after Gerd, MH's fiancé, turns up, an army deserter pulling a sled mounted on small wheels. At first things go well, but when he learns about the rapes he's disgusted and takes off for Pomerania to visit the parents of a friend, promising to return with food.

But MH doubts he'll be back. We also don't know how she spent the next fifty-six years of her life, and because she's been such an honest and irreverent and endearing witness, this is a deprivation. Even if, as some people have suggested, she has altered some of the facts. But even if she did, her story inspires great belief, and so I can't help wanting to know: Did she continue to write? Did she have children? Did Gerd ever come back? And would she even have wanted him to?


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Elisabeth Harvor first wrote this review for The National Post in Canada.

My mother was 10 years old when the Russians came into Berlin. She had told me stories of family friends she knew of who were raped repeatedly by the plundering Russians. Many ended their own life after.

This book really was an eye opener. Dread enters your stomach as you're reading the book especially before the approaching days of the Russians. Her power of observation of everything around her is gripping. A simply amazing read.

The last century was so fast-moving, so eventful -so strange and dense in colossal, nightmarish events -that it will be very difficult for future generations to get an accurate feel for it. Indeed, even for someone like me, who lived through half of it, I know that my knowledge and memories are too patchwork and too personal to allow for a deep understanding of the 20th Century, unless I keep working at expanding my knowledge of it. That is why records such as A Woman In Berlin are so important. Here is a rare, direct, honest account of momentous events from the heart of the greatest human conflagration of all time.

Anyone with simplistic notions of war -who still thinks it can be noble or just -should read this book. You might think that the fight against a murderous, genocidal regime led by a madman like Hitler could not help but be noble and just. This book documents how the rules and conventions of civilization break down under the onslaught of total war -what ordinary, desperate people will do when laws are no longer enforceable -how the victors can behave as badly as the villains they have vanquished. The author constantly comments on the atavism she sees around her 'We've gone back in time to pre-historic times.' -on how fast the most sophisticated of societies can devolve into barbarism.

It is truly remarkable that such a well-written journal could be kept under the most arduous and horrific of circumstances. I am reminded of the journals kept by the crew of The Endurance during Shackleton's ill-fated third journey to the Antarctic. The author is wholly unsentimental and lacking in self-pity, and yet compassionate and evocative in her descriptions of the devastation around her. Here are a couple of excerpts:

"After that I calculated that my period was over two weeks late, so I strode seven buildings down to where a woman doctor had hung out her shingle, though I'd never seen her before and didn't even know if she had started practicing again. Once inside I met a blonde woman, not much older than me, who received me in a wind-battered room. She'd replaced the window panes with old X-rays of unidentified chests. She refused to engage in small-talk and got right down to business. 'No,' she said after examining me, 'I don't see anything. Everything's all right.' 'But I'm so late. I've never had that before.' 'Do you have any idea how many women are experiencing the same thing? Including me. We're not getting enough to eat, so the body saves energy by not menstruating. You better see that you get a little meat on your bones. Then your cycle will get back to normal."

"On the way I had a new experience. Bodies were being exhumed from a grassy lawn, to be re-interred in a cemetery. One corpse was already lying on top of the debris -a long bundle wrapped in sailcloth and caked in loam. The man who was doing the digging, an older civilian, was wiping the sweat off with his shirtsleeves and fanning himself with his cap. It was the first time I had ever smelled a human corpse. The descriptions I've read always use the phrase 'sweetish odour', but that's far too vague, completely inadequate. The fumes are not so much an odour as something firmer, something thicker, a soupy vapour that collects in front of your face and nostrils, too mouldy and thick to breathe. It beats you back, as if with fists."

This journal was no doubt therapeutic for the author. And maybe more than that, perhaps it was a survival tool, helping to take her temporarily out of her terrible situation, even out of herself perhaps, allowing for a life-saving perspective (i.e. as bad as it is, this too will pass) and even retrospective humour (which was not possible at the moment of action). If you can remember (and a journal makes you thoroughly do so), it means that you have survived, and usually it also means that you expect to continue to do so. The author is incredibly resilient (she was starving and was raped multiple times). Is she able to write because she is resilient? Is she resilient because she has the discipline to write? Or is she writing because she is a journalist and that is what journalists do? Perhaps all three are true.

This book goes well with Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier in showing World War Two from the defeated German perspective. It documents the terror of the last days of German resistance as the Russians relentlessly advanced and the Allies carpet bombed the German capital. When would the enemy arrive? What would they be like? Would they be as bad as the stories being whispered by neighbours huddled in blacked out basements in the middle of the night? Then, almost anti-climactically, the Russians are there, and at first seem to be just soldiers, some of them friendly. But as the first day turns into night and the Russians begin drinking, the rapes began. No woman was safe, young or old. Many women were raped repeatedly, despite their attempts at hiding, or disguising themselves. Some women, like the author, coped and survived by making strategic choices. If you are going to be raped anyway, why not choose your ravisher from among the more decent and more powerful conquerors? Others chose a more drastic, permanent solution -suicide. There are many sad, sad stories in this book.

And yet A Woman In Berlin is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and of woman-kind in particular. Highly recommended.

From the perspective of one who was there shortly aftyer the events described, there is little doubt as to their accuracy.
Things about which nobody has discussed or dared to describe.
The "Victors" always prevall. Wonderful.

It's almost a shame that the author is anonymous. Her writing is incredible. I have researched rape in conflict for the past three years and her insight and bravery and humor has helped challenge me. She truly is a survivor. I highly recommend this book. Far from being as depressing as you might think it is, it is an important book to read to understand what it means to be human and caught in the middle of a war.

Written by an anonymous woman trapped in Berlin for eight weeks in 1945, this novel is a timely reminder of the effect of war on civilians, in this case, Berlin as it is being overrun by Soviet troops. Long inured to nightly bombings and midnight races to the basements of their destroyed buildings for shelter, the German citizens have managed to survive the worst of the war and their country's humiliation, anxious to return to some semblance of normalcy, but frightened by what awaits at the hands of the Russians. A mix of the elderly, the infirm, women and children, the only men remaining are debilitated or former troops trying to avoid capture. Their collective resources are few, rotten vegetables, rationed bread, threadbare clothing. Caught in a limbo of fear and vaguely hopeful expectations, the future is virtually nonexistent: "Nothing in this country belongs to us anymore, nothing but the moment at hand."

The protagonist, a still-attractive woman, has been living with a widow and an elderly man since her apartment was too badly damaged to offer shelter. Their joint efforts allow the trio to survive the worst of the hardships, until the arrival of their new oppressors. The women are the first targets, the elderly and children left to fend for themselves. Fueled by alcohol, the Russians stream through the streets of Berlin, barging into darkened basements, carrying out the females to shadowy staircases where resistance is futile. Silently the women endure, as does the protagonist, creating a semblance of safety: "Again I have to reflect on the consequences of being alone in the world, in the midst of fear and adversity."

With peace on the horizon, the woman must start a new life, one removed from the ugly realities she has endured, made stronger, but broken too, by the abuse and weeks of scrambling for food and shelter. The experience has changed her in ways impossible to articulate, stronger, yet irrevocably altered by these desperate days in Berlin: "I only know that I want to survive- against all sense and reason, just like an animal." A Woman in Berlin is a timely reminder of the human face of war, the anonymous victims left behind in the rubble, piecing lives together with what remains. Luan Gaines/2006.

'A Woman in Berlin' is a very rare book. How often do you stumble across an eye witness account that reads as if it is written for no one but the author herself? There seems to be no bias, no angle that is being worked, just a short and sharp account of what two months in the newly 'liberated' city of Berlin was like. It is a fascinating mixture of the brutal and the pragmatic. Choices are made with great calculation and speed. For instance, is it better to maintain an independence and subject yourself to the possibility of gang rape, or tie yourself to a higher ranking officer, but worry about how you will be seen by your fellow citizens? 'A Woman in Berlin' is a must read for anyone interested in the psychology of the survivor. It should take its place alongside the classic accounts of the Second World War, from Primo Levi's "If This is Man" to "The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer.