A Woman in Berlin

The distiller’s wife is peddling yet another rumour: von Ribbentrop and von Papen have just flown to Washington to negotiate with the Americans in person. No one answers her.

The basement is full of gloom. The kerosene lantern is smouldering. The phosphor rings painted at eye height on the beams so no one bumps into them in the dark give off a greenish glow. Our clan has increased: the book dealers have brought their canary. The cage is hanging off a joist, covered with a towel. Shelling outside and silence within. All dozing or asleep.

WEDNESDAY, 25 APRIL 1945, AFTERNOON

To recapitulate: around 1 a.m. I left the basement again to go up to the first floor and throw myself on the couch. All of a sudden there was a fierce air raid; the flak started raging. I simply lay there and waited, too sleepy to care. The windowpane is already broken and the wind is blowing in, along with the stench of fires. I felt an idiotic sense of security under the bedcovers, as if the sheets and blankets were made of iron – though they say bedding is extremely dangerous. Dr H. once told me how he’d had to treat a woman who’d been hit in bed; the bits of feather had lodged so deeply in her wounds he could barely remove them. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. That’s probably how soldiers sleep on the front, amid all the filth.

I got up at 7 a.m. and the day began with quaking walls. Now the fighting is moving in our direction. No more water, no gas. I waited for a minute that was halfway calm and raced up the four flights of stairs to my attic apartment. Like an animal backing into his lair I crept into one room at a time, always on the lookout, ready to beat a hasty retreat. I grabbed some bedclothes and toiletries and fled back downstairs to the first floor, to the widow. We get along well. These days you come to know people quickly.

Buckets in hand, I made my way to the pump, through the garden plots, which were in full bloom. The sun was beating down, very warm. A long line at the pump, everyone pulling for himself – the lever was squeaky and difficult to move. Then the fifteen-minutes walk back with splashing buckets. ‘We are all of us fine sumpter asses and she-asses.’ (Nietzsche, I think.) Outside Bolle’s they’re still shoving one another on account of the free butter. And in front of Meyer’s there’s an endless dark queue, all men; they’re selling liquor there, half a litre per ID card, anything they have.

Right away I turned round and made a second trip for more water. A sudden air raid on my way home, a column of smoke and dust rising over the patch of grass outside the cinema. Two men threw themselves flat on the ground, right in the gutter. Some women bolted for the nearest entranceway and ran down any stairs they could find, with me at their heels, into a completely unfamiliar basement that didn’t have a trace of light. And all the time I couldn’t let go of those buckets, otherwise they’d be stolen. A crowd inside the pitch-dark room, startled, very eerie. I heard a woman’s voice moaning: ‘My God, my God…’ And then things went quiet again.

Was she praying? I remember an event from about two years ago, see myself back in that hole, the most pitiful basement imaginable, under a one-storey cottage. A village of 3000, a place of no significance, but conveniently located on the way to the Ruhr Valley. A candle was burning in the dark, and the women (there were hardly any men) were reciting the rosary, the sorrowful mysteries, I can still hear their droning: ‘and for us was cruelly scourged…’ And then more: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, monotonous, muted, soothing, freeing, just like I imagine the ‘Om mani padme hum’ of the Tibetan prayer wheels. Only broken by the occasional hum of motors, and once by a series of bombs that set the candle flame shivering. And then they went on: ‘and for us carried his heavy cross.’ Back then I could literally feel the prayer spreading its coat of oil over the troubled faces, helping make things better. Since that time I haven’t been inside another shelter where people prayed. Here in Berlin, in this motley mix of five-storey tenements, you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of people willing to come together and say the Lord’s Prayer. Of course, people whisper prayers, perhaps more than it seems. And people do moan ‘My God, my God…’ But the woman moaning probably doesn’t understand what she’s really saying; she’s only grasping at empty phrases, repeating the words by rote, without meaning.

I never liked the proverb ‘Need teaches prayer’ – it sounds so haughty, like ‘Need teaches begging’. Prayers extorted by fear and need from the lips of people who never prayed when times were good are nothing more than pitiful begging.