A Woman in Berlin - Philip Boehm (Translator), Anonymous (Author)

A friend passed this book on to me saying it was something I really should read. She knows how impassioned I can become about the morality of war, just or unjust. While this book makes no claim to being a historical chronicle it is by its very nature a testament of the innocent casualties of warfare and the moral ambiguities during times of conflict. I am no literary critic but would like to share my thoughts on this read.

The book ...
...by her own admission a journalist who had travelled to Russia before the war and spoke some of the language. Marta Hiller's literary executor refuses to comment but in academic circles it is widely believed the author is Marta.

This book was first published in England and America in translation in 1954. The German publication a few years later caused much outrage and was accused of 'besmirching the honour of German woman'. The author ... more

A friend passed this book on to me saying it was something I really should read. She knows how impassioned I can become about the morality of war, just or unjust. While this book makes no claim to being a historical chronicle it is by its very nature a testament of the innocent casualties of warfare and the moral ambiguities during times of conflict. I am no literary critic but would like to share my thoughts on this read.

The book was (and still is) published anonymously although it has been suggested that the author was in fact Marta Hiller who died in June 2001, aged 90. There is little in the text to identify her but the author was by her own admission a journalist who had travelled to Russia before the war and spoke some of the language. Marta Hiller's literary executor refuses to comment but in academic circles it is widely believed the author is Marta.

This book was first published in England and America in translation in 1954. The German publication a few years later caused much outrage and was accused of 'besmirching the honour of German woman'. The author was so distressed she refused to allow the book to be reprinted. This was of course a time when rape and sexual collaboration were unmentionable topics, particularly in post war Germany still coming to terms with the realisation of Nazi atrocities. However a shift in German consciousness meant that when republished in Germany in 2003 it was received with much critical acclaim; in fact it became a bestseller and in 2005 the film rights were sold for an undisclosed sum. It was translated again and re-published in the UK by Virago Press in 2005. This has a cover price of £7.99 for a soft back copy. When this book was republished there were questions as to its authenticity - maybe as a result of the fake Hitler diaries only a few years before or the detail of the writing; but it was precisely this detail which has led academics to vouch for its authenticity.

This is a remarkably frank and unselfconscious diary account by a 34 year old woman, translated from the original German by Philip Boehm. The book covers the short period of 20th April to 16th June 1945 when the Russian Red Army took Berlin. There is an introduction by Anthony Beevor (a well published historian and author) and a short after word by the editor Hans Magnus Enzensberger. While it is called a diary I feel the writer was not looking to record events for posterity but rather using it as a vehicle to release some of her emotions.

During the early part of the book the author describes how she is surviving in Berlin in an apartment block and then later in cellars to avoiding the allied bombing. Berlin is more or less cut off from the outside world and time is spent queuing for scarce food, picking nettles for soup, scrounging for coal or queuing to use the water pump. On one occasion while queuing for meat a Russian mortar explodes killing three people. The author describes how the queue reforms and sleeves are used to wipe the blood off the meat coupons. Times are hard but they are about to become unimaginably worse.

The arrival of the Red Army in Berlin heralds an orgy of rape. The author's first experience of this was when she was pulled from her cellar and gang raped while her neighbours barricaded the door. The betrayal by her friends seems to me almost as brutal as the attack itself. The second occasion she begs for it to be only one soldier. After the third rape the author makes the decision, that as an act of self preservation, she must find a senior office who would, in her words, keep the pack away. She makes the poignant observation that in desperate times, civilised habits are rapidly abandonded and she decides that to prostitute her self to one 'wolf' is preferable to becoming prey to all. This decision, while not entirely successful, provides her with basic necessities for survival; although she observes that unlike the German army the Russian army does not appear to have an educated office class.

With babies dying through lack of milk , children playing in the street with corpses, no transport system nor electricity she observes that they are returning to the habits of cavemen. Rape is talked of with dark humour; it is a shared experience, she observes, which is discussed by the women in terms that would have been unthinkable before the war. Mayhem is all around yet the author still manages to record in detail the trials of her daily existence.

The diary ends with the arrival of the allied troops. Her fiancé returns from the front but they are unable to resolve the differences that have grown between them. She gives him the diary to read and he accuses her of being a 'shameless bitch'; she did not consider herself a whore but rather that prostitution was the only way to acquire the essentials of candles or bacon. Survival was the highest principle. No doubt the anger he felt was fuelled by the feeling of being powerless to protect his women; after all he had experienced at the front he now felt emasculated.

In the introduction Beevor states that, while precise statistics will probably never be known, hospital statistics of the time suggest that in Berlin alone there were between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims (that is about 1 in 3). Also a shocking 10,000 women killed themselves rather than 'concede' to the Soviets. While this book gives some insight into the experience behind those numbers it would seem the bravery and stoicism displayed by the author in the face of such adversity was perhaps not typical of all women at that time.

This is a graphic and unflinching account written without a hint of self pity. In my opinion this is a gripping, detailed record of a short period of time often overlooked by conventional history books and as such should be regarded as an important social document.

Moral devastation caused by war is of course not unique to that period with many atrocities still happening in war torn territories across the world even today. The author's intimate, calm and dispassionate account of the times, while fighting for survival amidst the horror and inhumanity of war does not make for easy or comfortable bedtime reading but I would fully recommend this book.

As I have said my (lent to me) copy cost £7.99 from a local book store. While I advocate the use of small independent stores it is also available from Amazon for prices from £3.30. Alternatively it can be bought direct from the publisher at www.virago.co.uk/virago.
ISBN 1844081125

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. 

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