Marta Hillers - A Woman in Berlin

What was I supposed to say to that? I crawled off in a corner to sulk. I couldn’t cry, it all seemed so senseless to me, so stupid.

Do you remember, Gerd? It was a Tuesday towards the end of August 1939, around ten in the morning. You called me at work and asked me to take the rest of the day off, to go on an outing with you. I was puzzled and asked why, what for. You mumbled something about having to leave and again insisted, ‘Come, please tome.’

So we went out to the Mark and roamed through the piney woods in the middle of a working day. It was hot. One could smell the resin. We wandered around a lake in the woods and came across whole clouds of butterflies. You identified them by name: common blues, brimstones, coppers, peacocks, swallowtails, and a whole gamut of others. One huge butterfly was sunning itself in the middle of the path, quivering slightly with outspread wings. You called it a mourning cloak – velvet brown with yellow and blue seams. And a little later, when we were resting on a tree trunk and you were playing with my fingers, so quietly, I asked you: ‘Do you have a draft notice in your pocket?’ You said, ‘Not in my pocket.’ But you had received it that morning, and we sensed it meant war. We spent the night in a remote forest inn. Three days later you were gone, and the war was here. We have both survived it. But is that a good thing for us?

I gave Gerd my diaries. (There are three notebooks full.) He sat down with them for a while and then returned them to me, saying he couldn’t find his way through my scribbling and the notes stuck inside with all the shorthand and abbreviations.

‘For example, what’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, pointing to ‘Schdg’.

I had to laugh. ‘ Schändung,’ of course – rape. He looked at me as if I were out of my mind, but said nothing more.

Yesterday he left again. He decided to go off with one of his anti-aircraft buddies, to visit that man’s parents in Pomerania. He said he’ll bring back some food. I don’t know if he’s coming back at all. It’s bad, but I feel relieved. I couldn’t bear his constant craving for alcohol and tobacco.

What else? Our publishing plans are stalled. We’re waiting for an official reply. The Hungarian is showing the first signs of growing tired. Lately he’s been talking about a political cabaret that absolutely ought to be started up right now. Nonetheless we continue working diligently on our programme and do what we can to combat our general sense of paralysis. I’m convinced that other little groups of people are starting to move here and there, but in this city of islands we know nothing about each other.

Politically things are slowly beginning to happen. The émigrés who came back from Moscow are making themselves felt; they have all the key positions. You can’t tell much from the newspapers, assuming you can even find one. I usually read the Rundschau on the board next to the cinema, where it’s stuck up with drawing pins for the general public. Our local district administration has a curious programme – apparently they’re trying to distance themselves from the Soviet economic system, they call themselves democratic and are endeavouring to get all ‘anti-fascists’ to come together.

For a week now it’s been rumoured that the southern parts of Berlin will be occupied by the Americans, and the western parts by the English. The widow, duly illuminated by Herr Pauli, thinks that an economic upswing is near at hand. I don’t know; I’m afraid it won’t matter much which of the Allies will be in charge, now that the victors have embraced so warmly at the Elbe. We’ll wait and see. I’m not so easily shaken any more.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m not suffering more because of the rift with Gerd, who used to mean everything to me. Maybe hunger always dulls emotions. I have so much to do. I have to find a flint lighter for the stove; the matches are all gone. I have to mop up the rain puddles in the apartment. The roof is leaking again; they merely patched it up with a few old boards. I have to run around and look for some greens along the street kerbs, and queue for groats. I don’t have feeding time for my soul.

Yesterday I experienced something comic: a cart stopped outside our house, with an old horse in front, nothing but skin and bones. Four-year-old Lutz Lehmann came walking up holding his mother’s hand, stopped beside the cart and asked, in a dreamy voice, ‘Mutti, can we eat the horse?’

God knows what we’ll all end up eating. I think I’m far from any life-threatening extreme, but I don’t really know how far. I only know that I want to survive – against all sense and reason, just like an animal.

Does Gerd still think of me?

Maybe we’ll find our way back to each other yet.

It is perhaps no accident that an extraordinary work like A Woman in Berlin had a history that is no less amazing; first published in 1953, the book disappeared from view, lingering in obscurity for decades before it slowly re-emerged, was reissued, and then became an international phenomenon – a full half-century after it was written. 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 three notebooks (and on 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. 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. Months later, when a more permanent order was restored, she was able to copy and edit her notes, on 121 pages of grey war-issue paper.

The author chose to remain anonymous, and I feel bound to respect her wish, responsible as I am for the reissue of her text. What may be said, however, is that the woman who wrote this book was not an amateur but an experienced journalist. This is made dear in the diary itself when the author alludes to several trips abroad as a roving reporter. On one occasion, she actually travelled to the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. We may surmise that she continued working for a publishing firm or for various periodicals after Hitler came to power: up until 1943-44 a number of magazines managed to avoid direct involvement in the relentless propaganda demanded by Joseph Goebbels.

It is likely that through her professional contacts the author met Kurt W. Marek, a journalist and critic who facilitated publication of the diary. An editor at one of the first newspapers to appear in the new German state, he went on to work for Rowohlt, a major Hamburg publishing house. It was to Marek that the author entrusted her manuscript, taking care to change the names of people in the book and eliminate certain revealing details. In 1954 Marek succeeded in placing the book with a publisher in the United States, where he had settled. Thus A Woman in Berlin first appeared in English, and then in Norwegian, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Spanish, French and Finnish.

It took five more years for the German original to find a publisher and, even then, 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 hostility and silence. One of the few critics who reviewed it complained about what he called 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 victorious Russians claimed their spoils of war. The author’s attitude was an aggravating factor: devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriots’ behavior before and after the Nazi regime’s collapse, everything she wrote flew in the face of the reigning post-war complacency and amnesia. No wonder then that the book was quickly relegated to obscurity.