A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. “With bald honesty and brutal lyricism” (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the … hunger and then by the Russians. “Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject–the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
A Woman in Berlin stands as “one of the essential books for understanding war and life” (A. S. Byatt, author of Possession).
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I’ve never read a book like this.
A WOMAN IN BERLIN is a war diary, but one of war brought within a city of hungry, desperate and unprotected women and children. It’s April 1945 and the Third Reich is gasping its last. The Americans are invading from the west. The Russians are invading from the east. It’s the Russians who take Berlin.
It’s a diary of the everyday. The difficulty fetching water. The exhaustion. The rumours. The bombings. The author and the other women exchange fatalistic gossip at the water pumps. They’ll probably all be raped. Those who have teenage daughters are hiding them in crawl spaces. The author is alone, with no one to hide her and keep her alive through the invasion. She speaks a little Russian thanks to her travels.
In powerfully descriptive and sharp prose, she records the anti-aircraft guns rolling into the city and the streams of well-fed and energetic Russian soldiers. She and the others in her building hide at first in the basement, unsure whether they’re about to be liberated or killed.
Her first rape occurs in the blink of an eye. She emerges from the basement to check whether the soldiers are gone–and two of them grab her. The basement door where the others are hiding thuds closed behind her. No one comes to help her.
I felt so much anger reading this book.
She describes burning Nazi propaganda and copies of Mein Kampf to cook food, and using Nazi literature to clean up excrement. One of the most painful moments is a passage describing a Jewish woman who survived the Third Reich sheltering secretly with her husband, only to be gang-raped by her liberators and her husband shot and killed.
It was published anonymously in 1954, whereupon it caused a huge scandal. So much so that the author refused to allow its publication again in her lifetime. She passed away in 2001. From Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the publisher of the 2003 German edition:
“German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths… German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rapes; 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.”
In order that she not repeatedly be gang-raped and starved, she found first one Russian officer, and then a second when the other seemed like he was being transferred, and invited them into her home. I imagine this didn’t endear her to her detractors, either.
Toward the end of the book, the author muses on the instructions from the Nazi party that German soldiers should leave all alcohol stores intact, so that the Russian soldiers would get drunk and it would slow their progress. She deplores the fact that the men left them all not only at the mercy of enemy soldiers, but drunk enemy soldiers. The alcohol only made everything worse for them.
The author was the exact age that I am now. Childless, an educated writer who is interested in politics and has travelled. It was easy to slip into her shoes as she navigated her bombed-out, terrifying existence.
Her body might be at the mercy of those around her, but she alternately welcomes numbness and self-reflection in order to survive.
“At times I think I could survive anything on earth, as long as it came from without and not from some devious trick of my own heart.”
A profoundly affecting book.
Fascinating book, left me with several questions, but a very real, in the minute description of what it must have been like at the end of a long war, as the loosing city. Definitely recommend this book
Memoir of a German woman stuck in postwar Berlin as the Russians came in and took their revenge.
THis book was incredible. It was so well written an with such honesty. Reading and living the days of agony these women went through. I pray that we will never let a Hitler type person rule a country again. Stop the hate before it takes hold.
Makes you realuze what women went through after the war and their amazing resilience. Horrors perpetrated from both sides.
The descriptive choices don’t work for this book. The strength, guts and determination required for survival are so calmly put forth by Anonymous just compelled reading her account. I surmise the challenges – too simple a term – were and still are experienced in any war zone.
A Woman in Berlin is the heroically unflinching, anonymous journal of a German woman who survived numerous rapes & starvation (alongside thousands) after the 1945 Soviet invasion. I’ve avoided it for years thinking it would be too painful to read, but ultimately it speaks to the undying hope and resilience of the human spirit.
One of the best books that have come across my eyes in the last few years. Human nature in dramatic pills, survival and adaptation to the spoils of war. Couldn’t stop reading
It’s the memoir of a German woman during the war. While there are lots of memoirs and fictional stories about the Jewish side of WWII, I have never before read a memoir of what life was like for the German women when the Russian soldiers marched into Germany.
A powerful but bleak read — here are eight weeks of diary entries (April 20 – June 22, 1945) by a German woman (Journalist Marta Hillers) living in Berlin, just before and after the end of World War II. It is a dark tale of mass rape (by conquering Soviet soldiers), starvation, widespread lawlessness, and human desperation.
I think those of us who live in the U.S. often forget how lucky we were that our mainland was not bombed during World War II. Because this book certainly paints a savage portrait of how the end of the war looked in areas that were — where shortages were already widespread before the war’s end, and where the end of the war actually unleashed a new kind of brutality that made life even more difficult. It’s certainly not the image most of us have of crowds gathering in New York’s Time Square, people kissing strangers and throwing confetti.
In essence, Berlin in 1945 was in chaos. Scrounging for food, everyday, was the universal preoccupation. Services were non-existent. No jobs, government, banks, running water, electricity, mass transit, or news media. Heavily damaged buildings forced people to randomly seek shelter with neighbors or friends, only to be suddenly kicked out if food ran short. Information was so scarce that no one had any idea what was happening from day to day.
Hardly ANY women (young or old) escaped rape. It was so pervasive, with some women were attacked multiple times a day. So often that many began to accept it as just another regular feature of daily life.
The lesson I took away is that when society’s civilizing rules are stripped away and people are forced to struggle everyday for their very survival, there is an opportunity to see both the worst and best humans under stress will do. At one moment, you find yourself warmed by an unexpected act of kindness or generosity. The next, you witness people ransacking their neighbor’s meager possessions or stealing food from family members. And you will find yourself celebrating even the small victories — when boards are nailed up to keep soldiers from spontaneously entering a damaged apartment, when flowing water returns to a faucet, when a public bus means someone doesn’t have to walk 12 miles to work.
This book has an interesting history. It was first published anonymously in 1954 in the US and the translated into seven languages — all editions with reasonable success. But when published in Germany, in 1959, the book was reviled. German readers were horrified at the pragmatic descriptions of German women accepting Soviet lovers, to ensure protection and steady supplies of food. And they accused the author of besmirching the honor of both German women AND German men (who obviously were unable to protect their women). The book was so criticized that the author refused to have another edition published in her lifetime. But when Hillers died in 2001, the book WAS republished under her name and won widespread critical acclaim, even in Germany.
If you a student of World War II or interested in the subject of war and how it impacts us humans — you should definitely read this one. Just understand going in, that you probably will find it hard going.
I enjoyed “A Woman in Berlin” very much. Marie Simon was a woman of strength and character. Her survival was a blessing for the world.
I did not always value the translation of this book. There were passages which made no sense.
Really enjoyed the book. It was truly an amazing account of Berlin as the Russian army took the city in 1945. Harrowing and realistic.
A non-fiction account, in diary form, of the fall of Berlin told by an anonymous woman,( who was apparently a writer/editor before the war). The writing is superb, and the diary entires are unemotional, and unflinching as the author describes the horror of war, especailly as it impacts women, who quickly, tragically become the spoils of war. I’ve read a great number of WWII books, biographies, diaries and memoirs, but this unflinching, riveting diary was a first for me. An important work, it should be taught in history and women’s studies programs.
I have always had difficulty understanding how one of the most sophisticated and cultured people in the world became the third Reich. Reading the stories of individuals and their sufferings under the Reich have made me understand how precarious civilization is. This book gives me insight into the day to day results of the third Reich’s insanity.
Very tragic story of what happened to women in Berlin as WW2 ended. I’m so sorry people rejected this book when it was first published. May the author rest in peace.