Very rarely have I seen a book in which the circumstances surrounding its publication are as interesting as the stories contained within.
Because, most books, you can say things like: "it was on hiatus for a long while" or "the author had to retire to a remote location in order to get it written", but no... the "backstory" behind "Eine Frau in Berlin" could very easily be its own book, as it is filled to the brim with details that wouldn't be out of place in the most fantastic of tales, yet it was all real, which adds a layer of complexity to an already very unique work.
"Eine Frau in Berlin" was never intended to see the light of the day. Its whole purpose was giving its author an escape from all the madness surrounding her in the final days of the Third Reich, when the battle was clearly in lost in the eyes of everyone (minus some convinced fanatics that still believed in phantom formations and magistral reverses by the "all-mighty German Army"). Because it was written as an exercise of escapism rather than a cohesive narrative experience, the texts are largely not embellished and present facts as they were, which all the gruesome and uncomfortable details that the vengeful occupation of the Red Army carried left intact.
Its author kept the journal updated between April 20th and June 22nd, 1945 and mostly wrote it among the fallen bombs and ever-closing sounds of battle coming from the East, which necessarily involved a lot of "secret writing" (it would have been foolish not to do so, as the German authorities were looking hard for any signs of defeatism and the Red Army would never allow such an account of their atrocities on the German population existing). Because of all of the above, many names were changed and the final manuscript was kept light on personal details... and even though the author had to be chased by a friend with connections on the editorial world to finally allow the book to be published, she chose to do it anonymously.
When the final product finally saw the light of day in Germany, it was received like a wounded seal in a pond full of sharks, with the press (and the public at large) quickly dismissing it as a fake, gruesome exaggeration of the painful events that transpired in their city and drawing unfair comparisons to a known falsification: "Letzte Brief aus Stalingrad" ("Last Letters from Stalingrad"), a book that "compiled" lost mail sent by members of the doomed VI Army at the Volga. This was the battle cry of a city not ready to face the traumatic events that once took place within its borders.
All of the above left a permanent bitter taste on the author's mouth and she ultimately demanded that a second edition of her book should not be printed in Germany for as long as she lived, which is why the edition I read through is dated 2005, despite the original run coming out in the sixties.
As for who our mysterious "Frau" was, a lot of research has led me to believe that the journal was written by Marta Hillers, a well-travelled and respected German journalist that resided in Berlin for most of 1945.
It is extremely unfair that such a brave and honest account of the events was given such an unceremonious reception, but at least something precious came out of it... because this was published with no name attached to it, it became the story of a gender, not of a person and not of a city. Every women in Berlin suffered similar destinies as the ones described here by Hillers, and so it could be taken as a flag from which all the females on the city could take cover. This was not Art Spiegelman's "Maus", nor it was Gerald Green's "Holocaust". This was a general account told from the first person perspective and so it packed a much heavier punch than both of those, read and told from the third person. There's something eerily beautiful about reading through someone's inner thoughts and process them as your own. This is the ultimate triumph of literature on the face of tragedy and we are all much richer for it.
The journal was updated between April 20th and June 22nd, 1945. It was mostly written in times of great danger and anxiety, with the passage of time only being signaled by the fallen bombs, visits to the humid shelters and, ultimately, by measuring the sounds coming from a front that was drawing closer and closer each night.
One of the things that's best described here is the slow but constant descent into hell of the German society as a whole; with the first entries talking about failures on the electrical infrastructure of the city and how most of the press had stopped existing (with the exception of the Panzerbar, a glorified leaflet that promised better times at the same time that ordered its readers to read it and pass it on, to save paper). The following entries take a long time examining the need to save the meagre rations still provided by the Reich, of hiding them behind cravises and fake walls and to keep them close at all times, quoting robbery and the lack of any available law-enforcement on the besieged city.
A lot of time and writing are devoted to the rumours that got feverishly discussed and spread inside the maddening shelter environments. A hot topic always being what to expect under Russian rule, with refugees quoting how the vengeful Red Army razed and raped everything that stood in their path, promptly driving more than one shelter-dweller insane.
But way before the first Russian boots walked across the streets of Berlin, other things kept its miserable inhabitants busy: constant interruptions on the water, gas and electrical supplies turned existence into a much bigger chore than it ever was, as it demanded that people stood in line for hours in order to fill one or two buckets of water and to get increasingly smaller rations. These queues provided extremely fertile grounds for the rumours to spread and ended up devastating the morale of the civilians much more effectively than a million propaganda leaflets.
It didn't take long for this system to collapse entirely and force people to loot and ransack every available building in order to get fed (even if it demanded taking from their own neighbors). The situation got to a boiling point when an abandoned barrack of the Volkstrum was found to be filled to the roof with potatoes and other edibles, which caused an stampede and more than one fistfight to happen, as every person wanted to get back home with something to calm their stomachs with.
Mrs Hillers starts describing her first experiences with soldiers of the Red Army shortly after this event... and these are not easy to read.
Because she travelled so much, she had some basic knowledge of the Russian language and that allowed her to get in touch with the advancing Red Army as it camped in her neighborhood. I consider these first interactions to be brilliant, because they gave her --and everyone else-- a false sense of security, as the Russian soldiers she came in contact with seemed to be delighted with the idea that a German could speak their own language so freely. It wasn't until later than the magnitude of her mistake became evident, as she realized far too late that she had been speaking with the "elite" of the invading force: the cavalry units, the cooks, the scouts, the translators... anyone other than the foot soldiers, really.
When the regular troops found their way to the demolished part of the city our Frau lived in, all hell broke loose.
The Russian soldiers were described as being "possessed" and "unstoppable", regularly ambushing women (or groups of women) and forcing them to the nearest room for a quick section of "fun" at gunpoint. Some of the soldiers quietly left goods behind, as a primitive form of "payment" for their unwilling partners, while others tried to offer said goods in advance to anyone who could either find them a girl or wanted to follow them to a dark alley. A reduced --but still great-- number of those took pleasure out of humiliating and assaulting their victims even further, doing things like emptying a jar of mermelade in a teenage girl's hair after taking her virginity away.
All of this convinced the "Frau" to start taking an active role on all of this, and quickly try to "win over" an officer to keep the pack away. It should be noted that this was done only after a complaint was formally raised to --and quickly dismissed by-- the chief of district.
By the time the first "officer" (actually, a giant soldier named Petka) was lured in, about half of the neighborhood had been raped by the Russians and those girls who managed to avoid this fate were quickly hidden by their relatives in makeshift passages and bomb craters. Furthermore, the constant movements by the Red Army deeper and deeper into Germany meant that a lot of times, the "officers" were redeployed and not heard from again, which meant that a new provider needed to be "recruited". The author wittingly called this exchange of sex for rations as "bed-eating" and quickly dismissed it as a mere necessity to guarantee one's survival.
The ensuing parade of uniforms that found its way into the little apartment block was colorful in its blackness. Most of the soldiers that occupied the chairs and couches of the devastated house were happy to share their rations with the Frau and her two roommates (a sickly old men named Pauli and the widow of a soldier lost in the Eastern Front) and considered the act of sharing what they had as a mere act of greatness expected from the victor of a huge battle with the people they conquered. Most didn't expect anything for their generosity and often offered to help doing chores for the inhabitants as a way of paying for their right to sleep under their roof.
Some were even very intellectual and seems that the author grew a genuine appreciation for them.
The vast majority, however, only had one thing in mind and became a pain to deal with.
When the Russian government issued an order indicating that civilian houses were off-limits for anyone in uniform, the soldiers invented other ways to satisfy their lust.
As soon as working schedules started being issued, the Russians took the opportunity to try and convince any women they could find to do them "favors" in exchange for laxer jobs or extra rations. The diary makes no mention of anyone accepting said offerings.
But for as bad as they seemed to have been with pretty much anyone, the book mentions quite a few times how the Russians had a fascination with children and often took time to play with any they could find, to sing lullabies to them and even to teach them some words in Cyrillic. The soldiers didn't rape any mother of small children or future mother, either.
Outside of the constant threat of dealing with "Ivan" all the time, life moved slowly in the dead shell of Berlin.
At no point it is mentioned that anything even remotely resembling normal life occurred in the former German capital. Granted, this is hardly surprising to read when the last entry is dated just a little over a month after the formal end of hostilities, but these signs surely contributed to make life even heavier to those on the losing side. Just seeing that the tram and some buses were starting to be put back in service was a great source of optimism for the dirty and demoralized citizens of the international city of Berlin.
Other than that, the book mentions quite a few incidents that were, sadly, not out of the ordinary.
A refugee from Konigsberg brandishing a gun in front of a three Russian soldiers that quickly triggered a man-hunt which end is never stated (but not too hard to imagine). Robberies and black-market deals among the workers hired by the Russians to get the city back in shape; the execution of small vengeances by regular citizens against members of the Nazi party (mostly in the form of anonimous denounces to the occupation forces) and the isolation of this group by pretty much everyone else.
I really don't wanna go into much more detail than this, though, because this book is seriously impressive (in fact, I consider it a must for everyone even remotely interested in World War II) and keep trying to describe the events that are so passionately told within is pages would be a disservice for it, so I'll stop the review here.
I'll say this, however... this book has made me want to campaign for something that I like to call: "Germans on Germany" (that is, World War 2 told from the perspective of the German people) because years of propaganda and the Hollywood approach to things have left us with an awfully incomplete picture of the events that transpired in Europe between 1939 and 1945. Works like Dogs, do you want to live forever?, Das Boot and Stalingrad (1993) show us that, senseless as it was, World War 2 also left a mark on the German people and they suffered just as much as everyone else with every new move that the Nazis made. I think it is time we start trying to learn about history from all sides.
Simply put, I consider the fact that "Eine Frau in Berlin" isn't as celebrated as, say, the Diary of Anna Frank to be an insult to history and our ability to understand it.
I hope we can finally move forward and close the wounds that have been scarring hearts and ideologies for close to a century now, through knowledge and impartially.
A book like this one sets us in the right path, but it is ultimately up to us to take it.
Because, most books, you can say things like: "it was on hiatus for a long while" or "the author had to retire to a remote location in order to get it written", but no... the "backstory" behind "Eine Frau in Berlin" could very easily be its own book, as it is filled to the brim with details that wouldn't be out of place in the most fantastic of tales, yet it was all real, which adds a layer of complexity to an already very unique work.
"Eine Frau in Berlin" was never intended to see the light of the day. Its whole purpose was giving its author an escape from all the madness surrounding her in the final days of the Third Reich, when the battle was clearly in lost in the eyes of everyone (minus some convinced fanatics that still believed in phantom formations and magistral reverses by the "all-mighty German Army"). Because it was written as an exercise of escapism rather than a cohesive narrative experience, the texts are largely not embellished and present facts as they were, which all the gruesome and uncomfortable details that the vengeful occupation of the Red Army carried left intact.
Its author kept the journal updated between April 20th and June 22nd, 1945 and mostly wrote it among the fallen bombs and ever-closing sounds of battle coming from the East, which necessarily involved a lot of "secret writing" (it would have been foolish not to do so, as the German authorities were looking hard for any signs of defeatism and the Red Army would never allow such an account of their atrocities on the German population existing). Because of all of the above, many names were changed and the final manuscript was kept light on personal details... and even though the author had to be chased by a friend with connections on the editorial world to finally allow the book to be published, she chose to do it anonymously.
When the final product finally saw the light of day in Germany, it was received like a wounded seal in a pond full of sharks, with the press (and the public at large) quickly dismissing it as a fake, gruesome exaggeration of the painful events that transpired in their city and drawing unfair comparisons to a known falsification: "Letzte Brief aus Stalingrad" ("Last Letters from Stalingrad"), a book that "compiled" lost mail sent by members of the doomed VI Army at the Volga. This was the battle cry of a city not ready to face the traumatic events that once took place within its borders.
All of the above left a permanent bitter taste on the author's mouth and she ultimately demanded that a second edition of her book should not be printed in Germany for as long as she lived, which is why the edition I read through is dated 2005, despite the original run coming out in the sixties.
As for who our mysterious "Frau" was, a lot of research has led me to believe that the journal was written by Marta Hillers, a well-travelled and respected German journalist that resided in Berlin for most of 1945.
It is extremely unfair that such a brave and honest account of the events was given such an unceremonious reception, but at least something precious came out of it... because this was published with no name attached to it, it became the story of a gender, not of a person and not of a city. Every women in Berlin suffered similar destinies as the ones described here by Hillers, and so it could be taken as a flag from which all the females on the city could take cover. This was not Art Spiegelman's "Maus", nor it was Gerald Green's "Holocaust". This was a general account told from the first person perspective and so it packed a much heavier punch than both of those, read and told from the third person. There's something eerily beautiful about reading through someone's inner thoughts and process them as your own. This is the ultimate triumph of literature on the face of tragedy and we are all much richer for it.
The journal was updated between April 20th and June 22nd, 1945. It was mostly written in times of great danger and anxiety, with the passage of time only being signaled by the fallen bombs, visits to the humid shelters and, ultimately, by measuring the sounds coming from a front that was drawing closer and closer each night.
One of the things that's best described here is the slow but constant descent into hell of the German society as a whole; with the first entries talking about failures on the electrical infrastructure of the city and how most of the press had stopped existing (with the exception of the Panzerbar, a glorified leaflet that promised better times at the same time that ordered its readers to read it and pass it on, to save paper). The following entries take a long time examining the need to save the meagre rations still provided by the Reich, of hiding them behind cravises and fake walls and to keep them close at all times, quoting robbery and the lack of any available law-enforcement on the besieged city.
A lot of time and writing are devoted to the rumours that got feverishly discussed and spread inside the maddening shelter environments. A hot topic always being what to expect under Russian rule, with refugees quoting how the vengeful Red Army razed and raped everything that stood in their path, promptly driving more than one shelter-dweller insane.
But way before the first Russian boots walked across the streets of Berlin, other things kept its miserable inhabitants busy: constant interruptions on the water, gas and electrical supplies turned existence into a much bigger chore than it ever was, as it demanded that people stood in line for hours in order to fill one or two buckets of water and to get increasingly smaller rations. These queues provided extremely fertile grounds for the rumours to spread and ended up devastating the morale of the civilians much more effectively than a million propaganda leaflets.
It didn't take long for this system to collapse entirely and force people to loot and ransack every available building in order to get fed (even if it demanded taking from their own neighbors). The situation got to a boiling point when an abandoned barrack of the Volkstrum was found to be filled to the roof with potatoes and other edibles, which caused an stampede and more than one fistfight to happen, as every person wanted to get back home with something to calm their stomachs with.
Mrs Hillers starts describing her first experiences with soldiers of the Red Army shortly after this event... and these are not easy to read.
Because she travelled so much, she had some basic knowledge of the Russian language and that allowed her to get in touch with the advancing Red Army as it camped in her neighborhood. I consider these first interactions to be brilliant, because they gave her --and everyone else-- a false sense of security, as the Russian soldiers she came in contact with seemed to be delighted with the idea that a German could speak their own language so freely. It wasn't until later than the magnitude of her mistake became evident, as she realized far too late that she had been speaking with the "elite" of the invading force: the cavalry units, the cooks, the scouts, the translators... anyone other than the foot soldiers, really.
When the regular troops found their way to the demolished part of the city our Frau lived in, all hell broke loose.
The Russian soldiers were described as being "possessed" and "unstoppable", regularly ambushing women (or groups of women) and forcing them to the nearest room for a quick section of "fun" at gunpoint. Some of the soldiers quietly left goods behind, as a primitive form of "payment" for their unwilling partners, while others tried to offer said goods in advance to anyone who could either find them a girl or wanted to follow them to a dark alley. A reduced --but still great-- number of those took pleasure out of humiliating and assaulting their victims even further, doing things like emptying a jar of mermelade in a teenage girl's hair after taking her virginity away.
All of this convinced the "Frau" to start taking an active role on all of this, and quickly try to "win over" an officer to keep the pack away. It should be noted that this was done only after a complaint was formally raised to --and quickly dismissed by-- the chief of district.
By the time the first "officer" (actually, a giant soldier named Petka) was lured in, about half of the neighborhood had been raped by the Russians and those girls who managed to avoid this fate were quickly hidden by their relatives in makeshift passages and bomb craters. Furthermore, the constant movements by the Red Army deeper and deeper into Germany meant that a lot of times, the "officers" were redeployed and not heard from again, which meant that a new provider needed to be "recruited". The author wittingly called this exchange of sex for rations as "bed-eating" and quickly dismissed it as a mere necessity to guarantee one's survival.
The ensuing parade of uniforms that found its way into the little apartment block was colorful in its blackness. Most of the soldiers that occupied the chairs and couches of the devastated house were happy to share their rations with the Frau and her two roommates (a sickly old men named Pauli and the widow of a soldier lost in the Eastern Front) and considered the act of sharing what they had as a mere act of greatness expected from the victor of a huge battle with the people they conquered. Most didn't expect anything for their generosity and often offered to help doing chores for the inhabitants as a way of paying for their right to sleep under their roof.
Some were even very intellectual and seems that the author grew a genuine appreciation for them.
The vast majority, however, only had one thing in mind and became a pain to deal with.
When the Russian government issued an order indicating that civilian houses were off-limits for anyone in uniform, the soldiers invented other ways to satisfy their lust.
As soon as working schedules started being issued, the Russians took the opportunity to try and convince any women they could find to do them "favors" in exchange for laxer jobs or extra rations. The diary makes no mention of anyone accepting said offerings.
But for as bad as they seemed to have been with pretty much anyone, the book mentions quite a few times how the Russians had a fascination with children and often took time to play with any they could find, to sing lullabies to them and even to teach them some words in Cyrillic. The soldiers didn't rape any mother of small children or future mother, either.
Outside of the constant threat of dealing with "Ivan" all the time, life moved slowly in the dead shell of Berlin.
At no point it is mentioned that anything even remotely resembling normal life occurred in the former German capital. Granted, this is hardly surprising to read when the last entry is dated just a little over a month after the formal end of hostilities, but these signs surely contributed to make life even heavier to those on the losing side. Just seeing that the tram and some buses were starting to be put back in service was a great source of optimism for the dirty and demoralized citizens of the international city of Berlin.
Other than that, the book mentions quite a few incidents that were, sadly, not out of the ordinary.
A refugee from Konigsberg brandishing a gun in front of a three Russian soldiers that quickly triggered a man-hunt which end is never stated (but not too hard to imagine). Robberies and black-market deals among the workers hired by the Russians to get the city back in shape; the execution of small vengeances by regular citizens against members of the Nazi party (mostly in the form of anonimous denounces to the occupation forces) and the isolation of this group by pretty much everyone else.
I really don't wanna go into much more detail than this, though, because this book is seriously impressive (in fact, I consider it a must for everyone even remotely interested in World War II) and keep trying to describe the events that are so passionately told within is pages would be a disservice for it, so I'll stop the review here.
I'll say this, however... this book has made me want to campaign for something that I like to call: "Germans on Germany" (that is, World War 2 told from the perspective of the German people) because years of propaganda and the Hollywood approach to things have left us with an awfully incomplete picture of the events that transpired in Europe between 1939 and 1945. Works like Dogs, do you want to live forever?, Das Boot and Stalingrad (1993) show us that, senseless as it was, World War 2 also left a mark on the German people and they suffered just as much as everyone else with every new move that the Nazis made. I think it is time we start trying to learn about history from all sides.
Simply put, I consider the fact that "Eine Frau in Berlin" isn't as celebrated as, say, the Diary of Anna Frank to be an insult to history and our ability to understand it.
I hope we can finally move forward and close the wounds that have been scarring hearts and ideologies for close to a century now, through knowledge and impartially.
A book like this one sets us in the right path, but it is ultimately up to us to take it.
~~Powered by C8H10N4O2~~