A Woman In Berlin

A Woman in Berlin is the extraordinary diary of an educated German woman living through the fall of Berlin in 1945, when Hitler’s promised thousand-year Reich reached its twelfth year and concluded beneath rubble, artillery fire and a sudden abundance of people claiming never to have been particularly keen on it.

Written between 20 April and 22 June 1945, the diary follows its unnamed author as the Red Army closes in and enters the city. Berlin’s grand imperial capital has become a landscape of ruined buildings, crowded cellars, broken water pipes and citizens trying to determine whether the next rumour contains useful information or merely a new variety of panic. Food is scarce, electricity intermittent and the government, having spent years issuing orders about Europe’s future, is no longer especially available for questions.

The author records the daily mechanics of survival with remarkable clarity: searching for water, salvaging food, exchanging news, avoiding shells and negotiating the rapidly changing rules of power. The old certainties disappear almost overnight. Nazi officials shed their uniforms, respectable neighbours become scavengers and cigarettes acquire a more convincing value than the Reichsmark. Ideology gives way to potatoes, because history may be written by the victors, but supper belongs to whoever can find an onion.

At the heart of the diary is the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers. The author herself is repeatedly assaulted and, recognising that random vulnerability offers no protection, seeks a relationship with a senior officer in the hope that one man’s claim may deter the others. She writes about this without theatricality or false consolation, observing both her own responses and those of the women around her as they develop grim, practical strategies for enduring what cannot be prevented. The understatement makes the horror more immediate: catastrophe has become another domestic problem to be discussed in the cellar between air raids.

Yet the account is not a simple arrangement of innocent Germans and monstrous invaders. The diarist is acutely conscious of what Germany has done across Europe and of the suffering inflicted in its name. She listens as Berliners revise their political biographies, distance themselves from the defeated regime and begin the national sport of having known all along. Her gaze is unsentimental in every direction, including towards herself. Victimhood does not erase responsibility, although responsibility does not make the victims’ suffering unreal.

Amid violence and deprivation, there are flashes of humour, solidarity and absurdity. Women share information, improvise meals and speak with a frankness that peacetime respectability would have forbidden. Men return from the front to discover that the women they left behind have survived experiences they cannot bear to hear about. The author’s intelligence, linguistic ability and cool observational manner give the diary the immediacy of lived history rather than history tidied afterwards by people who already know how it ends.

First published in English in the 1950s, A Woman in Berlin was initially controversial and appeared anonymously to protect its author. It is now recognised as one of the most important personal accounts of the end of the Second World War: a stark record of conquest seen not from a command bunker or military map, but from kitchens, basements and streets where civilians attempted to remain human after their institutions had comprehensively failed the test.

This 2006 Virago Press edition is in Good condition and comes fitted with a plastic protective sleeve, giving the cover an additional defensive layer that would have been rather more useful to Berlin in 1945. A compelling and deeply unsettling memoir for readers interested in women’s history, wartime diaries, the fall of Nazi Germany and what happens after the official histories have finished moving their arrows across the map.

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