A Woman in Berlin

This morning I wondered how many dead people I’ve seen in my life. The first was Herr Schermann. I was five at the time, he was seventy, silver-white hair on white silk, candles at his head, raised casket, the whole scene full of meaning. So death, then, was something solemn and beautiful. At least until 1928, when Hilde and Käte P. showed me their brother Hans who’d died the day before. He lay on the sofa like a bundle of rags, a blue scarf tied high around his chin, his knees bent – a piece of dirt, a nothing. Later came my own dead relatives, blue fingernails among the flowers and rosaries. Then the man in Paris who’d been run over and was lying in a pool of blood. And the frozen man on the Moskva river.

Dead people, yes, but I’ve never seen anyone actually die. I expect that won’t be long in coming. Not that I think it could happen to me. I’ve had so many narrow escapes; I feel I lead a charmed life. That’s probably the way most people feel. How else could they be in such high spirits, surrounded by so much death? What’s clear is that every threat to your life boosts your vitality. My own flame is stronger, I’m burning more fiercely than before the air raids. Each new day of life is a day of triumph. You’ve survived once again. You’re defiant. On one hand you stand taller, but at the same time your feet are planted more firmly on the ground. When the first bombs started to hit I remembered a verse from Horace, which I pencilled on the wall of my room.

Si fractus illabatur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinae.

Should Nature’s pillar’d frame give way,
that wreck would strike one fearless head.

Back then you could still write to people abroad. I quoted those lines in a letter to my friends the Ds in Stockholm, flexing my muscles – in part to make myself feel strong – by telling them how intense it was to live here amid all the danger. I felt a kind of forbearance writing that, as if I were an adult initiated into the deep secrets of life, speaking to innocent children in need of protection.

SUNDAY, 22 APRIL 1945, 2A.M.

I was upstairs in bed, dozing away as the wind blew through the shattered panes. I had a brick at my feet that had taken hours to warm over a tiny gas flame. Around 8 p.m. Frau Lehmann knocked on the door. ‘Come on down, the alarms are out, no sirens any more. Everybody else is already in the basement.’

A breakneck rush down the stairs. I was scared to death when my heel got caught on the edge of a step. I barely managed to grab hold of the railing in time. My knees went weak, but I went on, heart pounding, slowly groping my way through the pitch-dark passage. Finally I found the lever to the basement door.

Our cave looked different. Everybody was bedded down. There were pillows everywhere, eiderdowns, deckchairs. I just managed to squeeze my way to my usual spot. The radio’s dead: no signal, not even from the airport. The kerosene lantern is flickering dimly. A cluster of bombs, then things go quiet. Siegismund shows up, still waving his flag, claiming that the tide’s about to turn – even as Curtainman Schmidt is muttering something about Russians in Bernau and Zossen. We stay put, the hours crawl by, we listen to the artillery thudding away, sometimes far off, sometimes quite close.

The pharmacist’s widow turns to me. ‘You’d better not go back to that fourth-floor apartment of yours,’ she warns. She offers to let me spend the night in her apartment on the first floor. We clamber up the back stairs – formerly designated ‘for servants and deliveries’ – a narrow spiral staircase. The glass shards crunch underfoot, wind whistles through the open windows. She shows me to a small room next to the kitchen, a couch by the door welcomes me in and grants me two hours of sleep under an unfamiliar-smelling woollen blanket. Until sometime around midnight, when bombs start hitting nearby and we take refuge back in the basement. Long, miserable hours in the middle of the night. Right now I’m too tired to go on writing, down here.

Next morning, a little before 10 a.m., upstairs in the attic apartment. We stuck it out in the basement until about 4 a.m. Then I climbed up here, warmed some turnip soup on what gas there was, peeled a couple of potatoes, boiled my last egg – it was practically liquid when I ate it – and dabbed on the last drops of cologne. It’s strange to be doing all these things for the last time, at least for the foreseeable future, until further notice, for what’s sure to be a long time. Where am I supposed to come up with another egg? Or more perfume? I treat myself to these pleasures deliberately, consciously, reverently. After that I crawled into bed with all my clothes on, slept in fits and starts, uneasy dreams. Now I have to run, do shopping.