Eine Frau in Berlin. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945

April-May, 1945 Berlin-A Perilous Place For A Woman!, April 22, 2009 By Bernie Weisz "a historian specializing in the Vietnam War (Pembroke Pines,Florida) E mail:BernWei1@aol.com Written originally for Amazon.com April 22, 2009 This review is from: A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (Paperback) The Diary "A Woman In Berlin 8 weeks In The Conquered City" was written by an anonymous author for obvious reasons. I like to use actual quotes that the author used to explain the meaning of this book, as this truly conveys without any "subjective idiosyncratic coloring" what the writer is actually trying to say. Basically, this anonymous author, kept a written diary for 8 weeks in 1945, as Berlin, Germany fell to the approaching Communist Russian Army from the East. The first entry was recorded on Friday, April 20th, 1945 and the final one came on Thursday, June 14th, 1945. Quite a bit of history occurred during these 8 weeks, of which the most significant was the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30th, 1945 and the subsequent unconditional surrender of Germany to both the Allies and the Soviets. This woman was alone in Berlin at the time and kept a daily record of her and her neighbor's experiences in an attempt to both keep her sanity and record the plight of millions of Germans who expected the wrath and revenge of the oncoming Soviets. With what I called "gallows humor", the anonymous author describes in detail her conditions in a ravaged apartment building and how it's little group of residents struggled to get by amongst falling Soviet shells, death and rubble, with severe conditions such as no food, heat and water. The author also describes vividly how her fellow apartment dwellers displayed character traits ranging from chivalry and protectionism to cravenness and corruption, depraved first by hunger and then by the Russians. The reader will in shocking and vivid detail find out about the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city were unequivocally subjected to, i.e. the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age, social class or infirmity. To give the author credit, she did maintain throughout this book her resilience, decency, and fierce will to come through Berlin's trial until normalcy and safety returned somewhat. This book was first published 8 years after Germany's surrender (1953), but with public sentiment to put the specter of the war behind the public's view, it quickly disappeared from libraries and bookstores, lingering in obscurity for decades before it slowly reemerged. After it's reissuance, it became an international phenomenon over half a century after it was written. The book's forward describes the amazing way this diary was written: "The author, a woman in Berlin, took meticulous note of everything that happened to her as well as her neighbors from late April to mid-June 1945-a time when Germany was defeated, Hitler committed suicide, and Berlin was occupied by the Red Army. While we cannot know whether the author kept the diary with eventual publication in mind, it's clear that the "private scribblings" she jotted down in 3 notebooks (and a few hastily added slips of paper) served primarily to help her maintain a remnant of sanity in a world of havoc and moral breakdown. Crimes of War 2.0: What the Public Should Know (Revised and Expanded) The earliest entries were literally notes from the underground, recorded in a basement where the author sought shelter from air raids, artillery fire, looters, and ultimately rape by the victorious Russians. With nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity, she recorded her observations, which were at first severely limited by her confinement in the basement and dearth of information. In the absence of newspapers, radio, and telephones, rumor was the sole source of news about the outside world. As a semblence of normalicy returned to the city, the author expanded her view, and began reporting on the life of her building, then of her street, then on the forced labor she had to perform and her encounters in other neighborhoods. Beginning in July, 1945, when a more permanent order was restored, she was able to copy the contents of her three notebooks on a typewriter". Ther result was this book I am reviewing. While it is obvious that the author was an experienced journalist prior to the war (her verbiage, syntax and ideation is not of an amateur), she mentions in the diary that before the war she had made several trips abroad as a reporter and had visited the Soviet Union, where she picked up a rudimentary knowledge of speaking Russian. This might have saved her life in dealing with the various Soviet soldiers she dealt with, was pillaged sexually by, and eventually turned the tables on by manipulating these Russians with "sex for food". Because of the multiple rapes, it is understood that this author choose to remain anonymous. However, the individual that translated this from German into English, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, wrote this interesting forward to his translation. Mr. Enzensberger wrote that the anonymous author: "met Kurt W. Marek, a journalist and critic who facilitated the publication of the diary. An editor at one of the first newspapers to appear in the new German state, he went to work for "Rowohlt", a major Hamburg publishing house. It was to Marek that the author entrusted her manuscript, agreeing to change the names of people in the book and eliminate certain revealing details. In 1954 Marek placed this version of the book with a publisher in the United States, where he had settled. Thus, "A Woman in Berlin" first appeared in English (in an earlier translation) and then in 7 other languages. It took more than 5 years for the German original to find a publisher and even then that company, "Helmut Kossodo" was not in Germany but in Switzerland. But German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths, and the book was met with either hostility or silence. One of the few critics who reviewed it complained about the author's "shameless immorality". German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rape; and German men preferred not to be seen as impotent onlookers when the Russians claimed the spoils of war. Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 According to the best estimates, more than 100,000 women were raped after the conquest of Berlin. The author's attitude was an aggravating factor:devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriot's behavior before and after the Nazi regime's collapse. Her book flew in the face of the reigning postwar compacency and amnesia. No wonder the diary was quickly relegated to obscurity. By the 1970's, the political climate had become more receptive, and photocopies of the text, which had long been out of print, began to circulate in Berlin among the radical students of 1968 and the burgeoning women's movement. By 1985, when I started my own publishing venture, I thought it was time to reprint "A Woman in Berlin", but the project turned out to be fraught with difficulty. The author could not be traced, the original publisher had disappeared, and it was not clear who held the copyright. Kurt Marek had died in 1971. On a hunch I contacted his widow, Hannelore, who knew the identity of the author. She also knew that the diarist did not wish to see her book reprinted while she was alive-an understandable reaction given the dismal way it was originally received. In 2001, Ms. Marek told me that the author had died and her book could now reappear. By then, Germany and Europe had undergone fundamental changes and all manner of repressed memories were reemerging. It was now possible to publish the diary in it's full, complete form for the first time and restore passages that had previously been excluded, either to avoid touching on delicate matters or to protect the privacy of people still