Marta Hillers: A Woman in Berlin

The images are often striking. For example, the author describes young soldiers ‘wearing their cartridge belts like some barbaric adornment’. One might even suspect the felicity of its construction. All the main themes of the book are evoked in the first entry for 20 April. The civilians trapped in Berlin are deprived of meaningful news, yet they know that information on the western front, where the Americans have just reached the line of the Elbe, is by then irrelevant. ‘Our fate is rolling in from the east,’ she writes. ‘It will transform the climate, like another Ice Age.’ Yet ‘no one uses the word “Russians” any more. It refuses to pass our lips.’ She also notes that attitudes towards possessions have completely changed. People ‘no longer distinguish clearly between their own property and that of others.’ She finds a love letter written to a previous tenant. ‘A passionate love letter, which I flushed down the toilet. (Most of the time we still have water.) Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food.’ In the queue at the bakery that morning she had heard rumours of the Red Army reducing the population of Silesia to starvation. She also realizes that the lack of electricity and gas has reduced modern conveniences from lights, cookers and hotwater boilers to useless objects. At this moment we’re marching backwards in time. Cave-dwellers.’ Soon, they are all looting stores and shops as the imminent Soviet onslaught and collapse of Nazi power leaves society disintegrating into communities based on each building.

The author’s character comes through clearly in her writing. In contrast to the totally closed mind of Nazi Gleichschaltung, she was liberal and open-minded. She disliked the mindless xenophobia of the regime as much as its military machismo. In her twenties, she had travelled around Europe and had even visited the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. This was to prove vital once the Red Army arrived. Everyone in the apartment building came to her, expecting to be saved from the depredations of usually drunken soldiers. This put her in the front line. Apart from the bravery and resilience she demonstrated, her account reveals the close relationship between an enquiring mind and intellectual honesty. It is this quality which makes the diary so impressive and so important.

The author is a brilliant observer of her fellow members of the basement ‘clan’, the strange community transferred from life above ground in their apartments to a troglodyte existence in their communal air-raid shelter. They have buckets and every other form of receptacle filled with water ready to put out a fire, yet, if the building above them were to burn, such precautions would make little difference.

But the biggest fear is what will happen when the Russians arrive. One ‘young man in grey trousers and horn-rimmed glasses’, turns out on closer inspection to be a woman, hoping to save herself from the attention of Red Army soldiers. Other young women try to make themselves appear old and dirty in the vain hope of repelling lust.

Still, the black humour of Berliners resurfaces from time to time. Before Christmas, they had joked about that season’s presents: ‘Give something useful, give a coffin.’ The other witticism, soon out of date as the Soviet armies surrounded Berlin, was that optimists were learning English and pessimists learning Russian.

Deference to the Nazi regime collapses along with an administration that can no longer protect its subjects. Ration cards may still be stamped, but only out of bureaucratic habit. Although a few diehards proclaim their confidence in Hitler, even they no longer speak of the Führer any more. They refer simply to ‘he’ and ‘him’. The propaganda ministry’s promises of victory and a bright future fool nobody, yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. The diarist is more realistic. She glimpses a few German soldiers. ‘That was the first time I saw real front-line men – all of them old. The carts were pulled by Polish ponies, darkcoated in the rain. The only other freight they’re hauling is hay. Doesn’t look much like a Blitzkrieg any more.’

She is always intrigued by paradox. ‘These are strange times,’ she writes. ‘History experienced first hand, the stuff for tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen up close, history is vexing – nothing but burdens and fears. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal.’

The only physical description of herself is: ‘a pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter coat’, yet she is meticulous in recording her feelings out of an almost forensic curiosity ‘I’ve had to cope with my fear of death. The symptoms are always the same. First, the sweating beads up my hairline, then I feel something boring into my spine, my throat gets scratchy, my mouth goes dry, my heart starts to skip. My eyes are fixed on the chair leg opposite, memorizing every turned bulge and curve. It would be nice to be able to pray.’ Her reason for writing all this is quite simple. ‘It does me good, takes my mind off things.’ She also thinks of showing her account to her erstwhile fiancé, Gerd, ‘if he comes back’.

One of the most important aspects of this diary is the careful and honest reflections on rape in war. Just before the Red Army arrives, Frau W. jokes in the cellar: ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.’ The diarist looks around at the other women and girls, wondering who is a virgin and who is not. Soon afterwards, when somebody in the cellar ventures that perhaps the Red Army soldiers are not so bad after all, a refugee from East Prussia screams: ‘They’ll find out all right.’ The cellar falls silent. They realize that the horrors she has witnessed and probably experienced were not just the ravings of the propaganda ministry.

The diarist notes how their language has coarsened. ‘The word “shit” rolls easily off the tongue. It’s even said with satisfaction, as if by doing so we could expel our inner refuse. We debase our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.’

When the Red Army reaches their street on 27 April, they know that the moment of truth has arrived. ‘My stomach was fluttering,’ she wrote after seeing her first Russians through the window ‘I felt the way I had as a schoolgirl just before a maths exam – anxious and uneasy, wishing that it was already over.’ At first, things do not appear too bad. The soldiers in the street are playing with bicycles they have found, trying to learn to ride them. She is asked if she has a husband. It becomes a constant refrain. If she says she has, they ask where he is. If she says no, they ask if she wants a Russian husband, ‘followed by crude flirting’.

According to a pattern, which almost all first-hand accounts confirm, the soldiers’ first interest is in looting watches. Most had five or six strapped round each forearm. But once the evening came and they had drunk their ration of vodka, the ‘hunting parties’ began. The diarist manages to save the baker’s wife from rape in the cellar by fetching an officer who persuades them to leave. He evidently has little authority to prevent such, acts, and immediately after his departure, the diarist is seized by the same men. The whole subject of mass rape in war is hugely controversial. Some social historians argue that rape is a strategy of war and that the act itself is one of violence, not sex. Neither of these theories are supported by events in Germany in 1945. There have indeed been cases of rape being used as a terror tactic in war – the Spanish Civil War and Bosnia are two clear examples. But no document from the Soviet archives indicates anything of the sort in 1945, Stalin was merely amused by the idea of Red Army soldiers having ‘some fun’ after a hard war. Meanwhile, loyal Communists and commissars were taken aback and embarrassed by the mass rapes. One commissar wrote that the Soviet propaganda of hatred had clearly not worked as intended. It should have instilled in Soviet soldiers a sense of disgust at the idea of having sex with a German woman.

Читать дальше