>>REVIEW
A WOMAN IN BERLIN: EIGHT WEEKS IN THE CONQUERED CITY
Anonymous
Metropolitan Books, 261 pp.
On April 16, 1945, vibrations felt across the city of Berlin were so strong that telephones began to ring of their own accord and pictures fell from their hooks. The Second World War was reaching its conclusion and Allied forces were moving through Europe to crush the Nazi regime. The Russian army that was sweeping through Germany was still 60 miles away, but Berliners knew that the realities of a Soviet offensive would soon be their daily experience. Hiding in the basement of her apartment building and writing by candlelight, an anonymous young journalist kept a record of her life during this time, and the lives of those around her.
The diary covers a significant two months in the war’s chronology, including Hitler’s suicide and the surrender of remaining Nazi sympathizers in addition to the Soviet occupation. Although surrounded by physical and emotional upheaval, the nameless narrator’s writing is surprisingly unsentimental. When an outpouring of anguished feeling would be understood and even expected, she instead coolly brings her ravaged apartment building and its inhabitants to life as they struggle to survive without food, water and heat in the rubble of the formerly elegant city.
With a skilled journalistic eye, she takes note of meals that often consisted of rotting potatoes or nettles, the ghostly faces of fellow basement-dwellers listening for invading soldiers and children’s graves dug in family gardens. Even more noteworthy are her intelligent reflections on the indignity to which all women in this conquered city were subject – mass rapes, regardless of age or infirmity; one of the war’s most shameful and controversial aspects that has only recently begun to be discussed openly. The diarist was not immune to these attacks and she wearily observes that she lives in strange times – "history experienced first-hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs yet unsung. But seen up close, history is much more troublesome, nothing but burdens and fears." But equally as memorable is her edgy humour. She describes the Russians who begin to arrive on her street, noting that they are "wheeling freshly stolen bicycles," and that they look very much like monkeys in the zoo, "crashing into trees and laughing with pleasure." These observations reveal true courage – that of an ordinary person surviving the unimaginable with decency and intelligence intact.
A Woman in Berlin is a unique and compelling work, providing an often-unrecorded female perspective on history. In a year that marks the 60th anniversary of the war’s end, it is heartening that such accounts are taking their place as a recognized part of the historical experience. |
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