A Woman in Berlin

by Marta Hillers

  Herr Pauli is sounding an optimistic note of late, talks about a rapid economic upswing, about Germany’s being brought into world commerce, about true democracy and a spa cure in Bad Oeynhausen he’d like to treat himself to very soon. When repeating what I’d gleaned from Nikolai, I poured a little water in his wine, he turned genuinely irate, forbidding me to speak of things I know nothing about. I sensed that his anger went beyond this silly incident, that he’s simply fed up with me. He used to have the widow all to himself, taking care of him day and night. I’m a nuisance.

  After dinner – pea soup, and I ate to stock up – Pauli calmed down and peace was restored. The widow even insisted I take a second helping. I can sense my star is on the rise again, thanks to Nikolai. Should that bother me? Should I hold my apartment mates to some specific moral standard? I won’t. Homo homini lupus. It’s true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives. At most I can imagine a mother going hungry to keep her children fed – but that’s probably because mothers feel their children as their own flesh and blood. On the other hand, look how many mothers have been sentenced in recent years for selling their children’s milk coupons, or bartering them for cigarettes? Hunger brings the wolf out in us. I’m waiting for the first moment in my life when I tear a piece of bread out of the hands of someone weaker. There are times when I think such a moment could never come. I can picture myself getting weaker and weaker, shrinking away, no longer having the strength to rob anyone. Strange thoughts to have on a full stomach and with a new Russian provider waiting in the wings.

  The news in the stairwell is that they’ve ferreted out a former Nazi party boss in our building, a Reichsamtsleiter or something like that – I don’t know the Nazi rankings very well. I saw the men in the basement quite often, and I remember the blonde woman who had been reassigned and whom no one really knew, always holding hands with the man identified as her lodger, whom nobody knew either – two turtle doves, the cock being the boss in question. He didn’t look like anything special, sitting around in his shabby clothes, and the few times he spoke he sounded stupid. That’s what you call a good disguise.

  I’d just like to know how word got out. It wasn’t his mistress who’d denounced him; according to the bookselling wife she’s howling pathetically in her fourth-floor apartment, where she managed to come through untouched except for two Ivans the first night. She doesn’t dare go out any more, she’s afraid they’ll take her away as well. They came for him in a military vehicle.

  We have mixed feelings, talking about this. A bit of schadenfreude cannot be denied. The Nazis were too pompous and subjected the people to too many harassments, especially in the last few years, so it’s right they should atone for the general defeat. Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one to turn in these former martinets. Maybe it would be different if they’d actually beaten me or killed someone close to me. But what’s playing out now is not so much grand revenge as petty malice, for the most part: that man looked down on me, his wife snapped her ‘Heil Hitler’ at my wife, besides he earned more, smoked thicker cigars, so I’ll bring him down a peg, shut him up along with his old woman…

  Incidentally I learned in the stairwell that next Sunday is Pentecost.

  FRIDAY, 18 MAY 1945

  Up early to get water and look for wood. Slowly but surely I’m developing a real eye for firewood; I hardly miss a piece. I keep finding new places that haven’t been combed over – in basements, ruins, abandoned barracks. Around noon Fräulein Behn brought us our new ration cards. For the time being the widow, Pauli and I belong to the fifth and lowest category – ‘others’. Here are the allotments listed on my card: 300 grams of bread, 400 grams of potatoes, 20 grams of meat, 7 grams of fat, 30 grams of food items (semolina, barley, rolled oats, etc.) and 15 grams of sugar. On top of that there’s a monthly allowance of 100 grams of coffee substitute, 400 grams of salt, 20 grams of real tea and 25 grams of coffee beans. By comparison, heavy labourers in Group I, which also includes ‘well-known artists’, technicians, factory managers, pastors, school principals, epidemiologists and epidemiological nurses, receive 600 grams of bread daily, 100 grams of meat, 30 grams of fat and 60 grams of food items, with a monthly ration of 100 grams of coffee beans. In the middle are Group II (blue-collar workers) and Group III (white-collar workers), with 500 and 400 grams of bread per day, respectively. Only potatoes are distributed with democratic equality to all stomachs. Second-string intelligentsia are supposed to be in Group II. Maybe I can sneak in there.

  You can sense that all this has had a calming effect. Everyone is sitting and studying their ration cards. We’re being governed again; those in power are providing for us. I’m amazed we’re supposed to get as much as we are, but I doubt it will be possible to distribute the rations punctually according to schedule. The widow is happy about the real coffee beans and promises to drink to Stalin’s health with the first cup.

  This afternoon I took a walk to the town hall, together with the woman from Hamburg and her daughter Stinchen, on whose account she had asked me to accompany them. It seems that Stinchen was a leader of some kind in the League of German Girls and is afraid of possible reprisals, which I’m supposed to ward off by speaking Russian. The widow joined us as well.

  On the way we saw many people back on the street, hustling and bustling about – even a lot of men, though women there are still dearly in the majority. I even spotted one woman wearing a hat, the first I’ve seen in a long time.

  Some guards had been posted outside a few of the banks I inspected with the sub lieutenant. Generally this meant two Russians with raised weapons. Definitely not the best way to attract customers.

  Once again the town hall was like a beehive. We stood in the pitch-dark corridor and waited, surrounded by talk, the subject: pregnancy.

  Yes, that’s one topic of interest to every one of us they managed to-get their hands on.

  ‘They say every second woman is pregnant,’ claims one voice.

  To which another voice, a shrill one, replies, ‘Even if that’s true – surely for that you could go to anyone and have it taken care of.’

  ‘I heard that Stalin decreed that any woman with a Russian child gets counted as Group number I,’ says a third voice.

  General laughter. ‘Does that mean that for group number I you’d…?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I’d sooner do something to myself.’ The widow poked me in the dark, trying to catch sight of my face. I didn’t want her to see me. I don’t want to think about that. This time next week I’ll know better.

  ‘Have you been to the hospital?’ The question went down the line.

  ‘No, what for?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard? They’ve set up an examination station for women who were raped. Everybody has to go. On account of venereal diseases.’

  Another poke. I don’t know yet, I feel clean, I want to wait and see.

  Everything went smoothly with Stinchen, of course: nobody asked about her glorious past. That’s another joke, the idea of punishing minors for participating in things with the complete approval of their parents, teachers and leaders. If our forebears once burned children as witches, and I’ve read that they did, it was at least because they thought the children had been possessed by grown-up devils, who were inhabiting them, using them as a mouthpiece. It’s hard to define at what age our western notion of responsibility for one’s actions begins to apply.

  A woman from the building next door walked back home with us. She told us about a lady in a neighbouring apartment who had drunk and slept with the same Russian several times. Her husband, a clerk who’d been discharged from the Wehrmacht because of a heart condition, shot her from behind while she was at the kitchen stove, then took his pistol and shot himself in the mouth, leaving behind their only child, a girl of seven. ‘I’ve been keeping her at my son’s place for all this time,’ the woman explained. ‘I’d like to keep her for good. And I’m sure my husband will approve when he comes back. He always wanted a gir
l as well as a boy.’ The neighbours wrapped the parents in woollen blankets and quickly buried them in the courtyard, along with the pistol. ‘Good thing there were no Russians in the building,’ says the woman. No doubt there would have been a ruckus over the banned weapon.

  We stood for a while in front of the graves on the grassy mound. The woman from Hamburg maintains that everything was bound to turn out this way – but if Hitler had been finished off on 20 July 1944, he would have kept some of his aura. Many people would have gone on believing in the dead man. Is he really dead now? Has he fled by plane? Escaped in a U-boat? There are all sorts of rumours, but no one is paying them much attention.

  The woman with eczema came over in the evening, bearing sad news. She’d walked all the way to Lützowplatz to look up her boss, a lawyer for whom she had spent years taking down court statements. Because he was married to a Jewish woman, and refused to divorce her, he had had to endure a great deal, especially in recent years, when he could hardly find a crust of bread. For months the couple had been looking forward to the liberation of Berlin, spending entire nights huddled by the radio, listening to the foreign broadcasts. Then when the first Russians broke into the basement and went after the women, there was a scuffle. Shots were fired. One bullet ricocheted off the wall and hit the man in the hip. His wife threw herself at the Russians, begging them to help, in German. Whereupon they took her into the hallway, three men on top of her, as she kept howling and screaming: ‘But I’m Jewish, I’m Jewish.’ In the meantime her husband bled to death. They buried him in the front garden. His wife has fled, no one knows where. Writing this sends shivers down my spine. No one could invent a story like this: it’s life at its most cruel – mad blind circumstance. The woman with eczema was crying, her tears catching on her crusted skin. She said, ‘If only it were over, this poor bit of life.’

  SATURDAY, 19 MAY 1945

  We exist without newspapers and with no sense of time, following the sun, like plants. After fetching water and wood I went shopping. The first things I got using the new ration cards were groats, pork and sugar. The groats are full of husks, the sugar is lumpy, since it got wet, and the meat is stiff with salt. But it’s food nevertheless, and we’re happy with it. ‘I’m curious whether your Nikolai’s going to show up tomorrow,’ the widow said as I was putting the bags and packages on the table.

  In the afternoon we celebrated with a great housecleaning, set in motion when the widow cried out, ‘Look at that!’ And lo and behold, water was dripping out of the tap, genuine, thick drops of water trickling out of pipes that had been dry for such a long time. We opened the valves all the way and a strong stream came shooting out, first brown, but soon bright and clear. No more water shortages! An end to the ceaseless fetching! At least for us on the second floor – we found out later, those living higher than the third floor aren’t so blessed. But even they can now get their water down in our own courtyard, or else from those below them. I should note, however, that our vaunted community, the communal sense forged by national identity and living in the same building and sharing an air-raid shelter, is gradually eroding. In fine urban fashion everyone is locking themselves within their four walls and carefully choosing the people they mix with.

  Our cleaning performance was first-rate – we turned our apartment inside out. I kept looking at the water, couldn’t get enough of it, kept fiddling with the tap. So what if it ran dry towards evening? We’d already filled the tub to the rim.

  It’s a strange feeling now, to have these technological wonders, these achievements of the modern age, reinstated one by one. I’m already looking forward to the day we get electricity back.

  In the meantime, while we were hard at it, the blonde who’d been relocated here and whose high-ranking Nazi lover was taken away two days ago came by for a visit, and subjected me to a tabloid tale of love and fidelity: ‘He told me that our love was nothing like he’d ever experienced. He said it must be the greatest love ever.’ Maybe that really is how the greatest love ever talks. But to me it sounded atrocious, as if her lines had been lifted from a cheap film or romance. She sat lamenting while I scrubbed the floor. ‘Where could he possibly be? What could they do to him?’ I don’t know. Anyway, she didn’t dwell very long on that, and soon turned the subject to herself. ‘You think they’ll come for me as well? Maybe I should get out of here? But where should I go?’

  ‘Nonsense! They haven’t posted any announcements saying party members have to report.’ Then I asked, ‘Do you know who squealed on him?’

  She shrugged. ‘I assume it was his wife. She was evacuated to Schwiebus with their children, but she’s bound to have come back to Berlin, to the house they have in Tretow. So she probably heard from the neighbours that he’d often been out there with me to pick things up.’

  ‘Did you know his wife?’

  A little bit. I used to be his secretary.’

  A typical example of what Berliners jokingly call a ‘refugee camp’, a sheltering bed for husbands who’d been ordered to evacuate their women and children – and were all too happy to comply. Of course, plenty of stories are also being told about the husbandless evacuees, the ‘Mu-Kis’ – for Mutter-und-Kind-Verschickten, mothers and children sent away, about lovers climbing through windows and lots of racy goings-on. You can’t just transplant the average human with impunity, given all his moral weaknesses. The familiar worlds of kith and kin, of neighbourhood, of polished furniture and hours chock full of activity serve as a strong moral corset. It seems perfectly plausible to me that the enraged wife turned her husband in – maybe because she assumed his companion would be punished as well.

  ‘Ach, he was so delightful,’ she assured me, when I finally managed to steer her to the door. And she wiped away a tear.

  July 1945 [scribbled in the margin]: she was the first woman in the house to have an American: a cook, big belly, fat neck, the man keeps lugging packages up to her.

  PENTECOST, 20 MAY 1945

  A glorious day. From very early on our street echoed with the footsteps of countless people marching off to visit friends and relatives in other parts of the city. We lingered over breakfast until eleven in the morning – cake and a mix of real coffee and coffee substitute. The widow regaled us with all sorts of family anecdotes – her strong suit. Her clan is truly and bewilderingly droll: her father-in-law was married three times, with long periods of bachelordom in between; he outlived two of his wives. So there are children and grandchildren running around from all the marriages, aunts younger than their nieces, uncles sitting in the same schoolroom as their nephews. On top of that, the widow confesses, the last wife, who outlived him, married again, and her second husband is Jewish. To be sure, this Jewish stepfather-in-law died long before the Third Reich, but there he was, a blot on the family record. Today, however, the widow goes out of her way to mention him, to the point of boasting about him.

  After our midday meal I went up to the attic apartment, rummaged through the mountains of plaster and debris, carried buckets of rubbish downstairs, mopped the floors. I planted some chervil and borage in the rotting balcony boxes, that is to say, I made some shallow grooves and sprinkled in the brown grains and tiny black seeds that are supposed to become my kitchen garden. I have no idea what these herbs look like except for the pictures on the front of the packages the woman from Hamburg gave me, from some of her leftovers. Then I lay in the sun on the floor of the terrace. A full hour of deep contentment – followed by unease and restlessness. I feel something nagging at me, boring into me. I can’t go on living like a plant, I need to move, I have to act, start doing something. I feel as though I’ve been dealt a good hand of cards but don’t know whether I’ll be able to play them. And who am I playing with? The worst thing of all at the moment is our being so cut off.

  I went back down to the widow’s and found her absolutely jubilant. Suddenly and completely by accident she turned up her late husband’s pearl tie-pin – the one she’d stashed away and couldn’t find – in
the toe of a much darned sock. ‘How could I forget something like that?’ she wondered.

  Pentecost Sunday passed peacefully. From 8 p.m. on I waited for Nikolai the sub lieutenant, who’d asked me on Wednesday if he could drop by today. He didn’t show up, nor is it likely he ever will. Herr Pauli couldn’t resist the occasion to make a snide remark.

  MONDAY, 21 MAY 1945

  This Pentecost Monday didn’t feel much like a holiday at all. Hardly anyone is still employed. Berlin is on an extended vacation. While out for wood I stumbled on a notice calling on ‘cultural workers’ – artists – people in publishing, journalists, to report to the town hall today at eleven. We are to bring records of previous employment as well as samples of our work.

  Off I go. The queue on the second floor is unmistakable. Full-fledged artists in their stubbornly unconventional clothes, theatre girls next to elderly female painters lugging paintings smelling of oil. Here a mannish woman, there a womanly young man with long lashes, probably dancers. I stand in the middle listening to the talk on either side, about famous So-and-so who was supposedly hanged. Until a woman’s voice breaks in shrilly: ‘That’s not right at all! Haven’t you heard? It’s just come out that he was half Jewish.’ That might be true, too. Everywhere you look ‘non-Aryans’ who’d been kept hidden deep in the family tree are being spruced up and put on display.

  Registration was just a matter of form. An older woman with Jewish features took down our personal data in a thick notebook, giving each of us a certificate of registration, and that was that. Will anything come of this, some tip concerning work, some kind of assistance? Probably not.