A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary [Paperback]

Anonymous (Author), Philip Boehm (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: July 11, 2006

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
 
For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

A Woman in Berlin stands as "one of the essential books for understanding war and life" (A. S. Byatt, author of Possession).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Anonymous, then a 34-year-old journalist, started this eight-week diary in April 1945, when the Russians were invading Berlin and the city's mostly female population was heading to its cellars to wait out the bombing. Anyone who was able looted abandoned buildings for food of any kind. Soon the Russians were everywhere; liquored-up Russian soldiers raped women indiscriminately. After being raped herself, Anonymous decided to "find a single wolf to keep away the pack." Thanks to a small series of Russian officers, she was better fed and better protected at night. Her story illustrates the horror war brings to the lives of women when the battles are waged near a home front (rather than a traditional battlefield). In retrospect, she advises women victimized by mass rape to talk to each other about it. Once the war was officially over, the real starvation began; by the time the author's soldier boyfriend returned to Berlin, she was too hungry and hurt to deal with him. When the radio reported concentration camp horrors, she was pained but unable to quite take it in. The author, who died in 2001, has a fierce, uncompromising voice, and her book should become a classic of war literature. First published in 1954, it was probably too dark for postwar readers, German or Allied. Now, after witnessing Bosnia and Darfur, maybe we are finally ready. New translation includes previously untranslated portions. (Aug. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

The author of this diary was a 34-year-old journalist, now deceased, who consistently refused to reveal her identity publicly. She spoke some Russian and seemed liberal in outlook. Her chronicle was first published in 1953; after remaining dormant, it was republished 50 years later in Germany. This stunning account covers the period from late April to mid-June 1945, beginning with the massive Soviet bombardment of Berlin and ending with the opening weeks of the Soviet occupation. The author is a keen observer of the ironies, even the absurdities, of a collapsing society, but this is a work of great power. At times, one can virtually smell the fear as people cower in basements as the bombardment intensifies. When Russian troops arrive, they are, at first, comically playful as they seem intent on accumulating watches and bicycles. Then the rapes begin and there are scenes of casual but horrifying brutality. The author recounts her own rape with an unsettling detachment. This is a devastating and rare glimpse at ordinary people who struggle to survive. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Picador (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426119
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426118
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #43,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #64 in Books > History > Europe > Germany

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

171 of 179 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Woman in Berlin rings true. September 13, 2005

By Milton E. Muelder

Format: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.

88 of 94 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars World War II From A Woman's Perspective August 15, 2005

By C. Hutton

Format: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.

69 of 77 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bearing witness by bearing & besting brutality January 6, 2006

By John L Murphy TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format: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.