A Woman in Berlin
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A Woman in Berlin
Marta Hillers
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. Spare, unpredictable, minutely observed, and utterly free of self-pity (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity as well as their cravenness. And with bald honesty and brutal lyricism (Elle), she tells of the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject. A Woman in Berlin is, to quote A. S. Byatt, essential, and a classic of war literature.
Anonymous
A WOMAN IN BERLIN
Diary 20 April 1945 to 22 June 1945
Introduction by
ANTONY BEEVOR
Afterword by
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
Translated from the German by
PHILIP BOEHM
INTRODUCTION
In the early hours of 16 April 1945, civilians in the eastern quarters of Berlin were awoken by a distant rolling thunder. The vibrations were so strong that telephones began to ring on their own and pictures fell from their hooks. Women emerged slowly from their apartments and exchanged meaningful looks with neighbours. They hardly needed to speak. The long-awaited Soviet offensive had at last begun sixty miles to their east.
One and a half million Red Army soldiers of Marshal Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front were bursting out from the bridgeheads on the west bank of the river Oder. Facing them were the desperate scrapings of the embattled Third Reich: mainly boys from the Hitler Youth, old men from the Volkssturm, groups of cadets from Luftwaffe military schools and a stiffening of veterans and SS. They had little ammunition, hardly any shells for their artillery and insufficient fuel for their few remaining armoured vehicles. Yet Goebbels, the Reich commissar for the defence of Berlin as well as minister of propaganda, had declared that the line of the Oder was a wall on which the Asiatic hordes’ would smash themselves. Surrender was out of the question. Himmler had just issued orders that any German male found in a house displaying a white flag be shot. The propaganda ministry organized graffiti squads, dressed as ordinary Germans, to paint slogans such as: ‘We will never surrender!’ and ‘Protect our women and children from the Red beasts!’
The argument for fighting on was largely based on Goebbels’s own horror propaganda of enemy atrocities, which for once turned out to be no exaggeration. In the autumn of 1944, Soviet troops had made their first foray into East Prussia, laying waste to the village of Nemmersdorf before being repulsed by a German counter-attack. Goebbels had rushed forward camera teams to film the corpses of women and girls who had been raped and murdered by drunken Red Army soldiers. The images on the Nazi newsreels had been so appalling that many women presumed they were part of a gross exaggeration by the ‘Promi’, the propaganda ministry. But then, in late January and early February, after the main Soviet assault on East Prussia and Silesia, refugees passing through Berlin recounted stories of rape, looting and murder on a terrifying scale. Yet many Berlin women, while certain that such things happened in the countryside and isolated communities, refused to believe that mass rape was possible in the public view of a capital city. Others, increasingly nervous, began rapidly to instruct young daughters in the facts of life just in case the worst happened.
Berlin at the time contained just over two million civilians, of whom the large majority were women and children. It was typical of the crazed irresponsibility of the Nazi regime at this time that Hitler rejected any idea of evacuating them while there was still time. He openly disbelieved the military commander of Berlin who told him that there were 120,000 babies and infants left in the city and no provisions for a supply of milk. Consciously or unconsciously, Hitler appears to have imitated Stalin’s refusal to allow the evacuation of civilians from Stalingrad in order to force his troops to defend the city more bravely.
This diary written by a 34-year-old journalist, begins on Friday 20 April, four days after the opening bombardment. It was Hitler’s birthday. Nazi flags were raised over ruined edifices in the centre of the city, where US Air Force Flying Fortresses by day and RAF Lancasters by night had destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings. Signs erected in Hitler’s honour proclaimed: ‘The Fighting City of Berlin Greets the Führer’. Even Hitler’s military staff had no idea how close the fighting was. Soviet tank armies had now smashed their way through the German defences and were starting to encircle the city. The first shells from long-range artillery would land in the city’s northern suburbs that evening.
The diary, which filled two exercise books and a clothbound notebook, continues for just over two months until 22 June. This period covers the bombardment, the brief streetfighting in most districts, Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, the surrender of the last pockets of resistance on 2 May and then the occupation of the city by the conquerors.
This diary was first published anonymously in 1954 in an English translation in the United States and in Britain in 1955 by Secker & Warburg. A German language edition followed five years later in Geneva, and was highly controversial in Germany. Some accused it of ‘besmirching the honour of German women’. Rape and sexual collaboration for survival were taboo subjects in that post-war period, when men firmly reasserted their authority.
In 2003, A Woman in Berlin was republished in a new edition in Germany by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s most distinguished men of letters, in his Die Andere Bibliothek series for Eichborn and who adds the Afterword to this edition. It subsequently emerged that the decision to republish followed the death of the anonymous author in June 2001 at the age of ninety. She had not wanted another edition during her lifetime after the storm it had provoked. A few months after its republication, however, Jens Bisky, a prominent journalist and critic, claimed that he had discovered the identity of the anonymous diarist and named her as Marta Hiller. Enzensberger was furious and accused Bisky of ‘Skandaljournalismus’. Though other journalists agree with Bisky and feel certain that Marta Hiller is the author, the only person to know for sure is Hannelore Marek, literary executor of the estate, who has at no point confirmed it. Bisky also cast certain doubts over the authenticity of the work, but Walter Kempowski, one of the most experienced editors of personal documents from the period, testified that he had examined all the original documents and the first typescript and was convinced that they were completely genuine.
It was perhaps inevitable that doubts would be raised about this book, especially after the scandal over the fake Hitler Diaries. And the great bestseller of the 1950s, Last Letters from Stalingrad, was found to be fictitious over forty years after its first appearance. On reading the earlier edition of this diary for the first time in 1999, I instinctively compared my reactions to the Stalingrad letters, which I had read five years before. I had become uneasy about the supposed Stalingrad letters quite quickly. They were too good to be true. One, for example, milked the emotions with a letter about a German concert-pianist in Stalingrad whose fingers had been broken. As soon as I was able to compare the published collection with genuine last letters from Stalingrad in the German and Russian archives, I was certain that they were false. Yet any suspicions I felt obliged to raise about A Woman in Berlin were soon discarded. The truth lay in the mass of closely observed detail. The then anonymous diarist possessed an eye which was so consistent and original that even the most imaginative novelist would never have been able to reproduce her vision of events. Just as importantly, other accounts, both written and oral, which I accumulated during my own research into the events in Berlin, certainly seemed to indicate that there were no false notes. Of course, it is possible that some rewriting took place after the event, but that is true of almost every pub
lished diary.
One of the reasons for questioning the diary’s authenticity is its literary merit. The images are often striking. For example, the author describes young soldiers ‘wearing their cartridge belts like some barbaric adornment’. One might even suspect the felicity of its construction. All the main themes of the book are evoked in the first entry for 20 April. The civilians trapped in Berlin are deprived of meaningful news, yet they know that information on the western front, where the Americans have just reached the line of the Elbe, is by then irrelevant. ‘Our fate is rolling in from the east,’ she writes. ‘It will transform the climate, like another Ice Age.’ Yet ‘no one uses the word “Russians” any more. It refuses to pass our lips.’ She also notes that attitudes towards possessions have completely changed. People ‘no longer distinguish clearly between their own property and that of others.’ She finds a love letter written to a previous tenant. ‘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.’ In the queue at the bakery that morning she had heard rumours of the Red Army reducing the population of Silesia to starvation. She also realizes that the lack of electricity and gas has reduced modern conveniences from lights, cookers and hotwater boilers to useless objects. At this moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave-dwellers.’ Soon, they are all looting stores and shops as the imminent Soviet onslaught and collapse of Nazi power leaves society disintegrating into communities based on each building.
The author’s character comes through clearly in her writing. In contrast to the totally closed mind of Nazi Gleichschaltung, she was liberal and open-minded. She disliked the mindless xenophobia of the regime as much as its military machismo. In her twenties, she had travelled around Europe and had even visited the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. This was to prove vital once the Red Army arrived. Everyone in the apartment building came to her, expecting to be saved from the depredations of usually drunken soldiers. This put her in the front line. Apart from the bravery and resilience she demonstrated, her account reveals the close relationship between an enquiring mind and intellectual honesty. It is this quality which makes the diary so impressive and so important.
The author is a brilliant observer of her fellow members of the basement ‘clan’, the strange community transferred from life above ground in their apartments to a troglodyte existence in their communal air-raid shelter. They have buckets and every other form of receptacle filled with water ready to put out a fire, yet, if the building above them were to burn, such precautions would make little difference.
But the biggest fear is what will happen when the Russians arrive. One ‘young man in grey trousers and horn-rimmed glasses’, turns out on closer inspection to be a woman, hoping to save herself from the attention of Red Army soldiers. Other young women try to make themselves appear old and dirty in the vain hope of repelling lust.
Still, the black humour of Berliners resurfaces from time to time. Before Christmas, they had joked about that season’s presents: ‘Give something useful, give a coffin.’ The other witticism, soon out of date as the Soviet armies surrounded Berlin, was that optimists were learning English and pessimists learning Russian.
Deference to the Nazi regime collapses along with an administration that can no longer protect its subjects. Ration cards may still be stamped, but only out of bureaucratic habit. Although a few diehards proclaim their confidence in Hitler, even they no longer speak of the Führer any more. They refer simply to ‘he’ and ‘him’. The propaganda ministry’s promises of victory and a bright future fool nobody, yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. The diarist is more realistic. She glimpses a few German soldiers. ‘That was the first time I saw real front-line men – all of them old. The carts were pulled by Polish ponies, darkcoated in the rain. The only other freight they’re hauling is hay. Doesn’t look much like a Blitzkrieg any more.’
She is always intrigued by paradox. ‘These are strange times,’ she writes. ‘History experienced first hand, the stuff for tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen up close, history is vexing – nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal.’
The only physical description of herself is: ‘a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat’, yet she is meticulous in recording her feelings out of an almost forensic curiosity ‘I’ve had to cope with my fear of death. The symptoms are always the same. First, the sweating beads up my hairline, then I feel something boring into my spine, my throat gets scratchy, my mouth goes dry, my heart starts to skip. My eyes are fixed on the chair leg opposite, memorizing every turned bulge and curve. It would be nice to be able to pray.’ Her reason for writing all this is quite simple. ‘It does me good, takes my mind off things.’ She also thinks of showing her account to her erstwhile fiancé, Gerd, ‘if he comes back’.
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 first-hand 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 the 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.