A Woman in Berlin

"I chose this because I think it really epitomises the vengeance that took place against Germans in Germany in the aftermath of the war. I don’t think there’s a better book than this – or perhaps Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel – to show what it must have felt like to be German in the summer of 1945. It’s quite a gruesome book. It’s written by a German housewife in Berlin when the Russians arrive in 1945 and she, like many of her countrywomen, really bore the brunt of Soviet brutality after the liberation of Berlin. She was repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers. She really doesn’t pull her punches and describes them graphically. She eventually manages to protect herself by getting together with a high-ranking Soviet officer – that was the only way she could prevent the junior soldiers from attacking her repeatedly. The really heart-rending part of the book is when her fiancé comes back and obviously finds her a changed woman and doesn’t know what’s wrong with her. She’s reluctant to tell him about what has happened because she doesn’t know how he would react. When she does, he can’t really handle it and ends up leaving her. So not only has she had this horrific experience but she is then abandoned by the man that she loves. “It’s written by a German housewife in Berlin when the Russians arrive in 1945 and she, like many of her countrywomen, really bore the brunt of Soviet brutality after the liberation of Berlin.” It’s a heart-rending book but at the same time it’s not depressing, miraculously. By the end you have such an amazing respect for this woman and the strength she has and the honesty with which she’s able to tell this terrible story that, in a bleak way, there’s something quite hopeful about it in the end. This was a subject that everybody knew about but nobody talked about for years and years. It wasn’t really until the 1990s that it could be talked about. There was a very influential German television documentary that was shown in the 1990s where women came forward for the first time to talk about their experiences. It was very controversial. All sorts of German academics came out and said this was a dangerous development and that once Germans started to think of themselves as being victims of the war they might lose sight of the fact that they were also the perpetrators of it. There is a sense of it being unspoken because of that. But there was also a complete double standard between the way men and women were allowed to talk about the war. It must have been incredibly painful for women who’d had that dreadful experience to be regarded as “soiled goods”. The book didn’t sell at all in Germany in the 1950s, while in Britain and the United States it sold modestly well. It wasn’t until 2005 that it became a bestseller."

"This book, A Woman in Berlin , is one of the great diaries of the whole war. Although it was published anonymously we do know the name of the woman who wrote it now. She was called Marta Hillers and she was an extremely intelligent journalist who had travelled quite a lot before the war and was certainly not a Nazi. She was extremely open-minded and it was her enquiring mind and observation which really showed the reality of the Soviet attack on Berlin in April 1945 through to the beginning of May. There is the whole question of the mass rapes by the Red Army. This is a very controversial subject, as I know only too well. Her account is so patently well observed of what was going on. There is no self-pity, even though she herself was raped on numerous occasions. Through her you see the reality of life and war for civilians in those sorts of circumstances. There is this need of unity, particularly among the women, in order to survive. They manage to surmount their appalling experiences by being able to talk to each other. And then, of course, they found their menfolk when they returned from the war simply couldn’t face up to the reality that they had not been able to protect their women. And one saw a fascinating but dismaying gender divide in that particular way. In many ways it was the women who were morally far stronger than the men. She describes how the role of the women is to support all these fragile men and basically massage their egos because otherwise they will go to pieces."