In the spring of 1945, a 33-year-old German woman took refuge in a former colleague’s attic apartment in Berlin. Here, she spent much of her time in the building’s basement with her fellow ‘cave dwellers’). Her own home had been bombed. The city was burning. While Hitler remained in his bunker, the Red Army advanced from the east and Berlin was falling to the Soviets.
Day of catastrophe
On 27 April, Soviet soldiers reached the woman’s apartment building. The day ‘began with silence’, the sky ‘bright and cloudless’. Yet it was ‘too quiet’; it was to become a ‘day of catastrophe’. Locked out of the basement by her neighbours, she was at the mercy of so-called liberators.
At first, the Soviets seemed ‘more interested in watches than in women’, with some sporting ‘five or six pieces’ that they ‘would constantly compare … with childlike, thief-like joy’. But they were to steal more than timepieces: one after another, the ‘Ivans’ forced themselves upon her. She later recorded that she was raped repeatedly.
But she did not cry. Instead, she wrote. For a week she had catalogued details of life in Berlin during the final days of the Second World War. Her diary, its author known for decades only as ‘Anonymous’, was to become one of the most influential records of mass sexual violence as a weapon of war: A Woman in Berlin.
Posterity and sanity
She began her diary on 20 April, identifying herself only as a ‘pale-faced blonde who always wore the same winter coat’. Her accounts were not those of an amateur scribbler: she was a Sorbonne-educated journalist who had travelled around Europe, including a visit to the Soviet Union. Up to 22 June she filled three notebooks with measured and detached prose, chronicling history as it happened.
In the Afterword to the 2006 version of A Woman in Berlin, Hans Magnus Enzensberger describes how the diarist wrote by candlelight, using a pencil stub. Documenting events was psychologically therapeutic: ‘It does me good. It takes my mind off things’.
Uncomfortable truths
The ‘things’ in question make A Woman in Berlin a difficult read. Its author is unsparing in her descriptions of daily degradations.
Against a backdrop of artillery shells, the horrors of everyday life became normalised: in the street, no one gives a ‘second glance’ to ‘a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead woman on top’. Even the language coarsened, with swear words ‘spoken with satisfaction, as if we could expel our inner refuse’.
Aside from the hardships of day-to-day survival, there was the constant reality of widespread sexual violation to contend with. Rapes ‘happened to women right and left’. The diarist observes that ‘men are forever traipsing … in and out of our rooms’. Many women were raped repeatedly, one twenty times in succession. Recalling this last incident in particular, made the diarist ‘gag … all over again’, admitting she could ‘barely write’ at the thought of it.
When it became clear that age afforded no defence, women took steps to protect the young. One woman doctor operated a ‘quarantine’ clinic under the guise of treating typhus, where the younger girls were secreted.
Experiencing and witnessing systemic rape exacted its psychological toll. The author speaks of being repulsed by her own skin and feeling so dirty that she didn’t want to touch anything. Some women were unable to bear the burden of such trauma and took their own lives.
Coping mechanisms
Amid repeated rapes, writing became a means of maintaining psychological control. Stripped of bodily autonomy, documenting reality became the diarist’s way of reclaiming some element of power over events. Indeed, the diary form itself can be interpreted as a form of resistance.
However, it rapidly became clear that survival would rest on more pragmatic tactics: ‘We women are … reasonable, practical, opportunistic’. To this end, she sought temporary protection, deciding that she needed ‘a single wolf to keep away the pack’. She presumes the Soviets are ‘as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles’. This strategy became known as ‘sleeping for food’, a trading of bodies for not only protection but for ‘bacon, butter, sugar, candles, canned meat’. This was, in some small way, a means of exerting control over one’s fate.
Despite its expedience, this strategy was freighted with emotional and psychological trauma. While the author acknowledges that placing herself at the service of her ‘wolf’, which she rationalises as exchange rather than rape, she confides that she’d be ‘overjoyed to get out of this line of work’. She speaks of psychologically distancing herself from her own body as an instinctive form of self-preservation.
A further coping mechanism was the camaraderie and ‘gallows humour’ the women developed. One even joked: ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead’, an acknowledgement that, in relative terms, things could have been worse.
The myth of ‘Man’
The men in the building were powerless to prevent the violation of female tenants. The author describes one occasion when she was raped by a Russian who forced open her mouth and ‘gob[bed]’ in it, then threw down a half packet of cigarettes as ‘payment’. All the while, tenant Herr Pauli, recently returned from the Volkssturm and now mainly bedridden, occupied the next room, offering nothing more than the theoretical comfort of a male presence.
The author re-evaluates her perception of men, who had ‘crumbled’ from their Nazi glorification to being ‘miserable and powerless’, the defeated ‘weaker sex’. Indeed, many of the German men in A Woman in Berlin are depicted as pitiable and ineffectual. Her friend’s husband, for instance, tortures himself over the memory of Russians raping his wife while he was ‘within hearing range’. When the diarist’s fiancé returns, he ‘grimaced in disgust’ after reading her work and described the female tenants as ‘a bunch of shameless bitches’.
In this context, the book’s initial reception in Germany is unsurprising. As noted by historian Antony Beevor in his introduction to the diary, ‘Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonoured their men, who were supposed to have defended them’.
Radioactive reception
Published anonymously in English in 1954 and in German in 1959 (via a Swiss publisher), A Woman in Berlin provoked fierce hostility. In West Germany, it was perceived as an affront to national honour. Critics accused the author of ‘besmirching the honour of German women’ (and, by extension, the men powerless to protect them). In East Germany, its criticism of Russian soldiers went against the official narrative of the Soviets as heroic liberators, making the book politically radioactive.
The notion of trading sex for food and protection was deemed a gross insult to manhood, portraying German men as powerless while depicting women as cold and calculating.
The backlash was so intense that the author refused to allow republication during her lifetime.
Authorship
In 2003, two years after the diarist’s death, A Woman in Berlin was republished, this time to great acclaim. And journalist Jens Bisky claimed to know the identity of its author: Marta Hillers.
Bisky further cast doubt on the authenticity of the diary, largely due to its literary merit. However, as Antony Beevor has pointed out, ‘It is possible that some rewriting took place after the event, but that is true of almost every published diary’.
In the end, the diary was perceived to be so detailed, original and consistent that its authenticity was in little doubt. The diary was later authenticated by German writer Walter Kempowski.
Corroboration
Between 1945 and 1948, it is estimated that 100,000 women in Berlin alone were raped by Red Army soldiers. This subject was treated as taboo in Germany for decades and remains so in Russia.
However, testimonies have emerged that correspond with Marta Hillers’s experiences. In one instance, a survivor recalls how the Soviets ‘poked here … all night … no less than twenty men’. In the same article, and in line with the survival strategy adopted by Marta Hillers, one young German girl pleads with a Soviet soldier: ‘ Stay here … You can do whatever you want with me, but only you!’
Legacy
In Berlin’s Treptower Park stands a memorial to the Soviet troops killed during the Battle of Berlin. Locals know it as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist in recognition of the Red Army’s treatment of Berlin’s women. Historians now treat Marta Hillers’s diary as a valuable primary source. Antony Beevor has described it as ‘one of the great diaries of the whole war’.
A Woman in Berlin forces its readers to confront not only the past but its parallels in contemporary conflicts. While motivations differ, the mass violation of women (including children and the aged) in war remains a constant. Its message endures: wartime sexual violence is not an aberration but a recurring reality.
