Anonymous: A Woman In Berlin

[Bjorn]

There's a famous picture from the end of WWII, depicting a Red Army soldier hoisting the Soviet flag over the Reichstag with a Berlin laid in ruins in the background. Most official versions of the picture are retouched to hide the fact that the soldier's arm is adorned with several plundered wristwatches.

That image comes to mind when I read this; not the forgery, but the double edge, the fleeting difference between liberating and defeating. A Woman in Berlin is a diary written by an anonymous woman during the fall and occupation of Berlin, between April and June of 1945. She's part of the people who lost, but decides not to lose herself, even in the face of homelessness, hunger and repeated rape. She will survive, and she does, thanks to her intelligence, luck, limited knowledge of Russian and a blank refusal to let her emotions get the better of her... it's a horrifyingly objective and sober tale. For instance, there's her calm acceptance of the fact that the Russians will take their pay in the form of rape, so she'll simply have to limit her own exposure to it by becoming some Russian's private concubine.

It's going to take a wolf to keep the other wolves at bay. An officer, as high up as possible, commendant, general, whatever I can get.

I lived in Germany in 1995, during the 50 year anniversary of what was officially dubbed the "liberation", and many Germans ? especially those with roots East of the Elbe ? had trouble celebrating. Which should in no way be taken to mean that they missed the Nazis, just that... losing a war is never painless, and the Soviet army especially were not exactly kind to the people they "liberated". Granted, that's hardly surprising considering what the Germans had done to them just a few years earlier. The official instructions of the Red Army was to go easy on the Germans; in practice, many followed the words of the writer Ilja Ehrenburg ? "violate the German women's racial pride"; it's a sad irony that a war that started because of the ridiculous notion of racial purity probably led to more mixed children than any other. Provided the women survived, that is.

But what A Woman in Berlin, just like Joachim Fest's Downfall and the movie version thereof, does so well is to illuminate that a war is never as easy as the good versus the evil; good people will be hurt on both sides, and when the big questions are settled with bombs, it's the ordinary people who get to pay the price. 60 years later Germany still has some trouble facing up to its past, but in 1945 those thoughts were still unthinkable ? it was just an issue of surviving day to day in the ruins of civilization, and not until the end of the book when the situation starts to slowly return to something resembling normality can you allow yourself to actually feel and reflect again.

Parallels to Anne Frank are tempting, but yet there's a huge difference; this is an adult woman writing, who can't allow herself to feel sorry for hersel, hate her enemies or pity those who suffer around her. When you read Anne Frank, you're spared her actual physical suffering since it ends before she's captured; that's roughly where A Woman in Berlin begins, and the knowledge that the writer survived ? though hardly unscathed ? does not in any way make it less devastating. Even if it shares the same problem as most unedited diaries in that it has some passages which are less interesting than others, it's still a very sharp note from that gray zone where all ideologies, strategies, nationalities, races and all abstract concepts fade into the background and there are just human beings fighting to survive. 4/5

 

[Eric]

Re: Anonymous: A Woman in Berlin

I watched the Szpilman story, the Polański film "The Pianist" the other day on Flemish TV, and after all the horrors of the German troops destroying the ghetto, there are two surprises. The first is "the Good Nazi" who gave Szpilman a coat and food, and the second is the briefest of clips of a Russian soldier pushing that same Nazi (who later died in Russian captivity in 1952) back onto the ground.

So, while we must never forget the atrocities committed by the Nazis during WWII, nor must we get all sentimental about Russian communism, which was the same sort of hell, complete with cattle trucks to the camps as, for instance, Estonians experienced in 1941 and 1949, during the two bouts of deportation of "kulaks". Two wrongs don't make a right.

Which is why the GDR fascinates me. Those poor sods first had to cope with Nazi indoctrination, then, after the GDR was founded, with all the turncoat bureaucrats who were suddenly more Communist than the Russians.

Let me say clearly that I am not going to be reading Jenny Erpenbeck's much lauded novel. And for a very good reason. Her father and grandfather were members of the most ?lite end of the GDR nomenklatura, rocket scientists, actors, whatever. All working in Russia for years on end. Only na?ve Western readers will praise her descriptions of nasty Chilean or Argentinian generals, and do some complicated extrapolation to the GDR. While the GDR existed, she was a poor little rich girl. Now she's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Western book prize juries. No thank-you.

Another thing that should not be forgotten is that that paranoid and pathological, pock-marked ex-seminary student of a nutcase, Yosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Joseph Stalin (the surname "Dzhugashvili" no doubt comes from his penchant for gashing Jews...), was as anti-Semitic as any Nazi. What happened on the night of the 12th to 13th August 1952 in Moscow is symptomatic. Read all about it at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Murdered_Poets

Eight Yiddish poets shot on the same night. And Babel', Mandelstam, Pasternak suffered. Stalin didn't treat them too well, either.

But to return to the GDR, if you read German, there is a thorough book on the literature of that realm: "Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR" by Wolfgang Emmerich. It should have been translated into English long ago, as it gives a good overview of the whole ethos and the authors involved, set in a historical context. It's not so "klein"; there are 500 pages of text.

Germany still has one or two issues outstanding that still rankle. One is the fate of the deported Sudeten Germans around the edges of what was Czechoslovakia, the other of the East Prussian Germans from, for instance, the north of Poland, the Kaliningrad enclave (once K?nigsberg and hinterland) and the area around Memel / Klaipėda, now part of Lithuania. Poles were also deported from Ukraine and resettled in the areas the Germans were kicked out of around Poznań / Posen; plus the repopulation of Silesia, including Wrocław / Breslau, by ethnic Poles. Jews were not only kicked out of parts of Eastern Europe, but murdered. There has been much displacement of people(s). For most of this, the clocks can't be turned back. But gestures of apology are wise. Two, three, four wrongs still don't make a right.

 

[Stewart]

Re: Anonymous: A Woman in Berlin

I chanced upon a copy of this earlier today, bought it, and read the introduction on the bus home. It sounds like an interesting, if grim, read.

 

[pontalba]

Re: Anonymous: A Woman in Berlin

I think you'll find it not so gruesome, although the subject matter certainly is, the author doesn't capitalize on that fact. Her training as a reporter certainly stood her in good stead.

 

[Stewart]

Re: Anonymous: A Woman in Berlin

German war film A Woman in Berlin opens old wounds over Red Army rapes:

The gruff phrase “Komm Frau!” – Come, woman! – still sends shivers down the spines of elderly Germans. It was the command given by Russian soldiers as they prowled Berlin and other bombed-out postwar German cities, searching for women to rape.

The hidden horror of those months is about to be revealed in a new German film, A Woman in Berlin, that is likely to shock the nation, stir resentment against the Russians and provoke a debate about morality in war.
​

 

[Sybarite]

Rape has been used as a weapon of war for a very long time – and continues to be. Including by supposedly 'civilised' nations such as the US, particularly in Vietnam.

It makes hideous sense, given that rape is not about sex but about power. In the case of war, it has the 'advantage' not only of being an act of aggressive punishment, but also of leaving the genes of the aggressor in the local population.

For anyone interested in the question of suffering on all sides in war, WG Sebald wrote an excellent and thought-provoking essay in On the Natural History of Destruction.

 

[titania7]

Sybarite,
Thank you for the wise, to-the-point observations about rape.
Indeed, it is about power, not sex.

Sebald's essay sounds like a worthwhile, informative read. You mentioned
something I hadn't ever thought of, too--that is the depositing of the
victimizers' genes throughout the local population (via the act of rape).
Interesting concept.

~Titania

 

[shaunrandol]

Here's a pretty good review of this riveting book, from The Mantle:

In April 1945, one and a half million soldiers from Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov?s First Belorussian Front approached the eastern quarters of Berlin. The vibrations from their thunderous arrival filled the souls of Berlin?s civilians with terror. Women stood out in the streets without speaking to each another. Their husbands and children stayed indoors, knowing what was to come and dreading the inevitable. Also awaiting the Red Army soldiers were small groups of boys, seniors, cadets, and veterans. They were poorly armed and equipped with little to no fuel for the few armored vehicles left in the city. Though resentment hung like a weight from their hearts, surrender was not an option. Himmler had only recently declared that any German male found with a white flag should be immediately shot. The propaganda ministry, too, attempted to stimulate the courage and wrath of German?s remaining soldiers with slogans like ?We will never surrender!? and ?Protect our women and children from the Red beasts!?

One civilian in Berlin, a 34-year-old female journalist, kept a diary of the events she witnessed. She remained anonymous until after her death, a decision which led to widespread speculation at one point that the events recorded in her alleged diary were actually false. Historians from this period, however, have since verified the authenticity of the places, names, and occurrences in her work by placing it alongside other personal documents from the same time. All the events which she documented in her journal?mass rapes, suicides, and widespread starvation experienced by men, women, and children alike?actually happened.

Continue reading the review here