When it comes to WWII-era Germans, I have rather a callous attitude towards tales of their suffering at the hands of the Allies — Russians, Brits, Americans, whoever — because it’s easy to say, “They started it.”
But I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic over the past week or so, and especially since I read the appalling fates of the German women in captured Berlin at the hands of the barbarians Russian soldiers who were the first into the capital. Specifically, I refer here to the anonymous diary kept by one such woman, published under the title A Woman In Berlin. (The movie version can be viewed or purchased through Amazon Prime; I remember watching it several years ago, and be warned: it is seriously intense and violent.)
The text, though, is all the more remarkable because of the woman’s clear, almost dry depiction of the plight of all the women, and not just herself. (That does not in any way diminish the horror, by the way; I lost count of the times she was raped over the eight weeks of the story.)
Remember that there were very few men in Berlin at that stage of the war: they were all off fighting the Allied troops. So the women were largely unprotected against the marauding Soviet soldiers, and believe me, they took full advantage. Yet even then, there were some interesting asides: almost to a man, for instance, the soldiers wouldn’t rape a pregnant woman, or one with small children, or the very old women (although of course there were exceptions).
Now I know that women were very much supporters of Nazism — Orwell’s comment still resonates: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.” Indeed, I have no doubt that most of the women of Berlin were little different, in the 1930s and early -40s. And our storyteller also points out, with wry amusement, just how many of them suddenly claimed to have been opposed to the Nazi Party all along.
Still, that didn’t ameliorate their predicament at all.
The amazing thing about it all was how they survived, against all the odds. Our heroine, for example, very soon made the decision (after several rapes and narrow escapes) that if she was to escape being raped daily by multiple men, she could only survive by hooking up with a Soviet officer and becoming his girlfriend — still a precarious situation, but appallingly cold-blooded all the same. (She did it not just once, but several times, as officers were posted away or simply disappeared.)
Which brings me to the interesting part of all this.
When the dust had settled and the bullets no longer whistled through the streets, the Germans made a conscious decision to collectively forget all about their conquest and the conditions thereof. It was a societal repression of memory, a “Don’t talk about it” mentality that was, I suppose, one way of getting away from it. (It worked only too well, by the way, as an entire generation of Germans born after WWII were in large part ignorant of what had transpired, as the recent history had all but disappeared from German-language history books in primary- and secondary schools.)
The real hero of the story, by the way, is the publisher of A Woman In Berlin, who went to extraordinary lengths to validate that the diary wasn’t some concoction of fictional storytelling, and somehow managed to keep the woman’s identity a secret — despite German journalists of the time, who made a concerted effort to find it out so that they could denigrate her character and discredit the story. All of this was because the Germans wanted to airbrush the atrocities and more importantly, deny how the conquered women had come to terms with their situation. (Imagine the indignant: “No German woman would behave that way! Das ist unmöglich! “) It was seen as besmirching the female character, and was part of the head-in-the-sand approach to the events of 1945.
Despite all that, I have to admit to becoming impressed with the women — not just the author, but all the women — simply because in the absence of the men, they started to clean up and rebuild the huge, demolished city, starting with their bombed-out houses and apartments, cleaning the floors and walls, fixing doors and removing the rubble. There was little complaining, by the way, because they had the very German attitude that there was work to be done, and therefore they had to do it. (One can only wonder how today’s pampered princesses would cope, or rather not cope under the same circumstances.) And the author nicknamed herself the “Twelve Mile Woman” because that was how far she had to walk each day through the ruined city to work, just to earn the food ration book that would keep her from starving.
Anyway, the book is well worth the time — more so, I think, than the movie — and I recommend it unreservedly.
