Seeing as the recent crop of genre fiction novels have not been terribly interesting to me, I’ve been venturing out to read a more diverse selection of books, especially non-fictional ones. This one is a memoir by a woman who was living in Berlin during the time it fell and was captured by the advancing Red Army in 1945. It’s a short book and covers a relatively short period of time from April to June 1945. But it’s packed full of detail as witnessed by a woman who is both exceptionally erudite and brutally honest in recording her experiences. The author was anonymous when the memoir was originally published but after her death, her identity has since been revealed to be Marta Hillers, a German journalist.
The book consists of diary entries in which the narrator describes what happens day by day as the war draws to a close, though she skips some days and sometimes combines them into a single entry. She lives in an attic apartment that belongs to someone else as her own place has been bombed. However she often spends time in the apartment of a pharmacist’s widow on the second floor as the attic is drafty and full of holes. Also there is an injured German man Herr Pauli who the widow takes care of. She spends most of her time worrying about food, taking shelter in the basement during air raids and standing in line for meagre rations that are being distributed. When the Red Army finally arrives, they set themselves up in the street right outside her building. At first things are deceptively calm, but then the Russian soldiers barge into the buildings looking for loot, alcohol and women. As the narrator speaks some Russian, she tries to mediate with them and to find a commander who would protect the women. It doesn’t work and when the soldiers target her personally, her fellow Germans shut the basement door to keep her out. After she has been raped several more times by different soldiers, she decides that she needs to find a Russian officer to protect her from the rest of the pack. This works to some extent especially as the officers also bring her much needed food and supplies but they never stay long and so she has to cultivate relationships with new ones.
The rapes and sexual assaults are the most shocking part of this narrative for most people and there is certainly a lot of it here, so much so that the women speak frankly to one another about their experiences and joke about it. The narrator never describes the rapes in graphic terms but it is always clear when it happens and how much she suffers from them as she cries and vomits afterwards. Yet the true horror is how quickly she comes to see it as a new normal and perhaps a necessary evil. The food and supplies they provide in exchange for sex is very welcome, especially after the period of penury they suffered during the final days of the Nazi regime and she eventually comes to see her relationship with a particularly courteous and kindly Russian major as a consensual one. As she observes, even the widow and Herr Pauli are appreciative of the gifts brought by the officers, knowing perfectly well how she earned them. In fact, they are more worried when her paramours fail to arrive and ask after the state of her relationship with them. The narrator admits that she has become a prostitute while noting that this would have been impossible to contemplate under normal circumstances during peacetime.
There is so much more to this book than the rapes however as it is packed full of detail about the daily life of civilians on the losing side of a war. Their world shrinks as they become barely aware of anything that is going beyond their street and their sole concern is searching for food. They spend hours everyday standing in the queue for water from the one manual pump everyone must share. She writes about the distinct cultures that develops spontaneously inside each bomb shelter, how in one they may keep buckets of water around in case of fire while in another they may be fearful of splinters and so keep their heads protected. Then there are all of her perceptive observations of both the Russians and the Germans themselves. She notes that barricading the doors or pretending to be overweight is a poor defense against Russian rapists. But they are deterred by stairs and the presence of babies and young children in the room. As for the Germans, she wryly points out those who hid the Jewish members of their family tree during the Nazi regime were quick to trot them out as if that fact would assuage the Russians. The book is a veritable gold mine full of such insights and the narrator with her education and experience of living overseas is an keen observer of human nature.
This book was poorly received by the German public when it was first published. As the narrator herself writes here, the reaction of the German men to the occupation was very different to that of the women. The women never downplay the horror and pain of the repeated sexual assaults but they do acknowledge that they happened and start speaking openly about them. After the widow herself is raped, the narrator notes how she keeps repeating the sick joke told to her that her vagina is tighter than that of Ukrainian women. By contrast, the men seem to prefer to forget that it ever happened and hate talking about it. As the narrator puts it, the men have been emasculated by their failure in their traditional role of protecting their women and the last thing they want is to be reminded of it. There’s no romanticism and little self-pity in this memoir which only adds to its value. I was also astounded that after the chaos and wildness of the first few days, how quickly a relative order was imposed by the Russian occupiers. The narrator herself is put to work clearing rubble and the Moscow authorities were organized enough to secure the banks and ship out valuable machinery back to Russia. The narrator writes that such is the fate of the loser and they only have themselves to blame.
To me, this was book was especially fascinating in that we usually get so little of the perspective of German civilians when it comes to World War 2, compared to accounts of the Holocaust and the stories of the soldiers who participated in the fighting. Here it is clear that the narrator is no supporter of the Nazi regime and knew nothing of the concentration camps. Yet she is of course still a law-abiding citizen of Germany and went along with the orders and directives of her government, highlighting in fact how eager the Germans usually are to obey clear rules. I’d also consider this a feminist perspective ahead of her time as the fall of Germany has turned the tables on who the stronger sex is. I learned more from this book than I’d expected and practically every page of it is affecting and interesting. That’s why it gets my highest recommendation.