A Woman in Berlin

More pertinent, Russian psychiatrists have written of the brutal ‘barracks eroticism’ created by Stalinist sexual repression during the 1930s (which may also explain why Soviet soldiers seemed to need to get drunk before attacking their victims). Most important, by the time the Red Army reached Berlin, eye-witness accounts and reports show that revenge and indiscriminate violence were no longer the primary factors. Red Army soldiers selected their victims more carefully, shining torches in the faces of women in air raid shelters and cellars to find the most attractive. A third stage then developed, which the diarist also describes, where German women developed informal agreements with a particular soldier or officer, who would protect them from other rapists and feed them in return for sexual compliance. A few of these relationships even developed into something deeper, much to the dismay of the Soviet authorities and the outrage of wives at home.

For obvious reasons it has never been possible to calculate the exact figure of the number of rape victims in 1945. A general estimate given is two million German women; this figure excludes Polish women and even Soviet women and girls brought to Germany for slave labour by the Wehrmacht. But the figures for Berlin are probably the most reliable in all of Germany – between 95,000 and 130,000, according to the two leading hospitals. These can hardly be inflated figures if one takes into account that at least a dozen women and girls were raped in the single medium-sized apartment block where the author lived. Some pockets in the city escaped completely, but not that many when one considers that over a million troops were either billeted in the city or passed through it. Most wanted what they saw as their share of loot in one form or another.

A number of victims, as the diary indicates, suffered grave psychological damage, but the author and the widow she comes to live with instinctively see the best means of self-preservation. ‘Slowly but surely we’re starting to view all the raping with a sense of humour,’ she writes. ‘Gallows humour.’ The widow jokes to everyone they meet about the compliment she was paid by one rapist who declared that she was much better than any Ukrainian woman. The author’s sense of humour is drier. She finally manages to wash her sheets. ‘They needed it,’ she notes, ‘after all those booted guests.’

Rape in war is a ‘collective experience’, she also observes, as opposed to in peacetime when it is individual. ‘Each woman helps the other, by speaking about it, airing her woes.’

But, as she soon found out the male half of the German population wanted the subject to be buried. ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men are changing,’ she writes as Hitler’s regime collapses. ‘We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man”. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.’ Her optimism proved sadly premature. The late 1940s and the 1950s, after the men returned from prison camps, were a sexually repressive era in which husbands reasserted their authority. Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonoured their men who were supposed to have defended them. It remained taboo until the late 1980s, when a younger generation of women started to encourage their mothers and grandmothers to speak about their experiences.

A Woman in Berlin is a war diary unlike any other. This is a victim’s eye view, a woman’s perspective of a terrifying onslaught on a civilian population. Yet her account is characterized by its courage, its stunning intellectual honesty and its uncommon powers of observation and perception. This book is one of the most important personal accounts ever written about the effects of war and defeat. It is also one of the most revealing pieces of social history imaginable.

Antony Beevor 2004

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE