A Woman in Berlin

This translation, like every other, must reckon with certain challenges. Local terrain familiar to the author is foreign to us: streets and districts, outlying towns, and even the specific architecture of apartment buildings, which in Berlin are frequently built around a courtyard, with shops at street level, below the residences. In conveying this topography I have tried to make it as accessible as possible while preserving a sense of place. Most names of places and streets have been kept in German (Müncheberg, Berliner Strasse), although a few (Landwehr Canal instead of Landwehrkanal) have been anglicized for clarity. The district Rathaus is identified once as a town hall and remains “Rathaus.” Most military terms have been rendered with the UK equivalent (sub lieutenant), although some Nazi-era formations have been kept in German (Schutzpolizei, Volkssturm.) Schnaps is a generic word for certain distilled spirits and has been variously translated as “liquor,” “brandy,” or “vodka,” depending on the context. Russian words have been transliterated, with any necessary translations provided in the text.

Philip Boehm

This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war.

FRIDAY, 20 APRIL 1945, 4 P.M.

It’s true: the war is rolling towards Berlin. What was yesterday a distant rumble has now become a constant roar. We breathe the din; our ears are deafened to all but the heaviest guns. We’ve long given up trying to figure out where they are positioned. We are ringed in by barrels, and the circle is growing smaller by the hour.

Now and then whole hours pass in eerie silence. Then, all of a sudden, you remember that it’s spring. Clouds of lilac perfume drift over from untended gardens and go wafting through the charred ruins of apartment houses. Outside the cinema, the acacia stump is foaming over with green. The gardeners must have snatched a few minutes between sirens to dig at their allotment plots, because there’s freshly turned earth around the garden sheds up and down Berliner Strasse. Only the birds seem suspicious of this particular April: there’s not a single sparrow nesting in the gutters of our roof.

A little before three o’clock the newspaper wagon drove up to the kiosk. Two dozen people were already waiting for the deliveryman, who immediately vanished in a flurry of hands and coins. Gerda, the concierge’s daughter, managed to grab a few ‘evening editions’, and let me have one. It’s not a real paper any more, just a kind of news-sheet printed on two sides and damp on both. The first thing I read as I went on my way was the Wehrmacht report. New place names: Müncheberg, Seelow, Buchholz – they sound awfully close, like from somewhere in the Brandenburg Mark. I barely glanced at the news from the western front. What does it matter to us now? Our fate is rolling in from the east and it will transform the climate, like another Ice Age. People ask why, tormenting themselves with pointless questions. But I just want to focus on today, the task at hand.

Little groups milling around the kiosk, people with pasty faces, murmuring.

‘Impossible, who would have thought it would come to this?’

‘There’s not one of us here didn’t have at least a shred of hope.’

‘Nothing the likes of us can do about it.’

The talk turns to western Germany: ‘They’ve got it good. For them it’s over and done with.’ No one uses the word ‘Russians’ any more. It refuses to pass our lips.

Back in the attic apartment. I can’t really call it a home; I no longer have a home. Not that the furnished room I was bombed out of was really mine either. All the same, I’d filled it with six years of my life. With my books and pictures and the hundreds of things you accumulate along the way. My starfish from that last peacetime summer on Norderney. The kilim Gerd brought me from Persia. My dented alarm clock. Photos, old letters, my zither, coins from twelve different countries, a piece of knitting that I’d started. All the souvenirs, the old skins and shells – the residue and warm debris of lived-in years.