As is always a good sign, I managed to steam through this book in 3 days, despite the fact that I’ve been working full time at the moment. Seriously, I found this book difficult to put down, and one of those occasions when you are truly sad to finish it. Compounding this is the fact that we get no subsequent biographical information of the author (although I both respect and understand her right to choose this). I’ve tried not to give too much away as to events of the book.
The author – then a 34-year-old journalist – started this eight-week diary in April 1945, as the Russians were encircling Berlin and the city's (mostly female) inhabitants was heading to its cellars to wait out the fighting. The scarcity of food meant that anyone able-bodied took to looting buildings for food of any kind. However, soon the Red Army arrived and soldiers were everywhere. With an astonishing degree of bluntness, she describes the plundering of her neighbourhood when Berlin was conquered and Soviet soldiers moved through the city, and the subsequent mass rape of women of all ages, attacking them alone or gang-raping them in stairwells, cellars, on the streets. It is an element of warfare that generally passes unspoken.
For this alone, A Woman in Berlin truly is a remarkable and important book. It is at once so deeply and utterly a personal story, but also universal, evoking not only the rapes of countless German women in 1945, but perhaps also the rape of every anonymous woman throughout the history of warfare, and engages at a personal level with the repugnant notion of women as the ‘spoils of war’.
Unlike most other voices from that period, the author does not shy away from the events around her: she reflects, asks questions and refuses to look away. When first published in German, in the reconstruction years of the 1950s, it defied the post-war silence and all it concealed: guilt, blame, lies, defensiveness, denial.
I cannot even begin to imagine the courage it must have taken to agree to publication at this point. The survival urge – physically and emotionally – is at the core of her writing. Her perspective is imbued with a proud dignity and stubbornness, a black sense of humour and the capacity to find tiny moments of joy in the bleakness surrounding her: the scent of lilacs, a tree stump "foaming over with green."
Focusing on the moment – as if in conversation with herself – A Woman in Berlin achieves what most historical narratives fail at: a sense of both immediacy and enormity. This voice is irreverent and insightful, focused and without a trace of self-pity and hypocrisy.
I’m gushing! Truly, I cannot recommend this highly enough. Although the events seem momentously bleak, the text itself is a engaging and fascinating journey, and not at all as miserable and uninviting as it sounds.
Read it. Think about it. Talk about it. There’s not much more to say.
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