A Woman in Berlin

MONDAY, 7 MAY 1945

It’s still cool, but clearing, a little ray of sunlight. Another restless night – the major woke several times and kept me up with his groaning. His knee is supposed to be getting better, but it still hurts when he bumps it. Despite that, he didn’t let me rest much. Among other things he talked about the drink-and-be-merry sisters who moved into the abandoned apartment on the ground floor. Apparently they’re very popular with the Russian officers, who call them Anya and Liza. I saw one of them on the stairs: very pretty, dressed in black and white, tall and delicate. As he reported their goings-on, the major looked uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed. He himself had been invited into the apartment that morning, in broad daylight – and found the girls in bed with two men. Laughing, they invited him to join in – an offer that continued to shock the proper middle-class major as he was telling me the story. Apparently a prime attraction for the soldiers is the one sister’s very cute three-year-old son, who can already babble a few words of Russian, according to the major, and whom the male guests pamper as best they can.

Moving right along – the new day. It’s so strange living without papers or calendars, clocks or monthly accounting. A timeless time, which slips by like water, its passing measured only by the comings and goings of men in their foreign uniforms.

Occasionally I’m amazed at how determined I am to capture this timeless time. This is actually my second attempt to carry on a conversation with myself in writing. My first was as a schoolgirl; we were fifteen or sixteen, wore wine-red school berets and talked endlessly about God and the world (sometimes about boys as well, but very condescendingly). In the middle of the school year our history teacher had a stroke and was replaced with someone who had just finished her training, a snub-nosed novice who exploded into our class. She brazenly contradicted our patriotic history book by calling Frederick the Great an adventurer, a gambler, and praised Friedrich Ebert, the Social Democrat whom our former teacher had enjoyed deriding as a mere ‘saddler’s apprentice’. After making these audacious declarations she would flash her black eyes, lift her hands and appeal to us, ‘Girls, you better go and change the world. It needs it!’

We liked that. Because we didn’t think much of the world of 1930 either. In fact, we emphatically rejected it. Everything was so muddled, so full of barriers and obstacles. Unemployment was in the millions, and we were constantly told that practically all the professions we aspired to had no prospects, that the world wasn’t waiting for us in any way.

By chance elections to the Reichstag were being held then. The ten or fifteen largest parties convened assemblies every evening, and we would march over in little groups, spurred on by our teacher. We worked our way from the National Socialists through the Centrists and the Democrats to the Social Democrats and Communists, raising our arms in the Hitler salute with the Nazis and letting ourselves be addressed as ‘comrade’ by the Communists. That’s when I started my first diary, out of a desire to form my own opinion. For nine days, I believe, I faithfully wrote down the gist of what the speakers had said – along with my youthful rebuttals. On the tenth day I gave up, although my notebook still had many blank pages left. I couldn’t find my way out of the political undergrowth. It was the same for my friends. Each party, we felt, was partly right. But they all engaged in disreputable tactics – horse-trading, we called it – the haggling, the lobbying, the jostling for power. No party seemed dean. None stuck uncompromisingly to their principles. Today I think we probably should have founded a party of sixteen-year-olds just to satisfy our moral demands. Whatever grows older, grows dirtier.

Monday around noon we had a visitor. Not from the building and not from next door, but from distant Wilmersdorf, a district in the west of the city, two hours from here by foot. A girl named Frieda, whom the widow had heard of but never met.

Thereby hangs a tale, which begins with the widow’s nephew who was a medical student once upon a time. One night he was assigned to air-raid duty at his university. A young female medical student was assigned as well, and their joint watch produced a pregnancy and a shotgun wedding. The bride was nineteen and the groom twenty-one. Then the war machine snatched him and sent him off to the front, and no one knows where he is. His wife, however, who is now in her eighth month, moved in with a girlfriend, the Frieda now sitting on our kitchen chair and bringing us news from the outside world.

The widow’s first question: And you, did they also…?’

No, Frieda is still unscathed – well, not entirely: some Russian pushed her against the wall of the basement, but had to run off and fight so he couldn’t take his full pleasure. It seems the soldiers reached the block where the two girls are living shortly before the surrender, and galloped through without setting up camp. The expectant mother had tapped her belly and said, ‘Baby’ and they didn’t touch her.

Frieda delivers her report and turns to us with blank, shiny eyes. I know that look, I saw it far too often in my mirror, back when I was living off nettles and porridge. And that’s the predicament the two women are in now, which is why Frieda took it upon herself to make the long, arduous journey here, through streets she says were completely silent and deserted. She asks if she could have some food for the widow’s niece by marriage and the child who is on the way. She tells us that the young woman spends the whole day flat on her back and gets dizzy at the slightest attempt to stand up. A nurse who looks after her occasionally explained that when a mother isn’t getting proper nourishment, the foetus sponges off her body’s calcium and blood and muscle tissue.

Together the widow and I look for what we feel we can give: some of the major’s butter and sugar, a tin of milk, a loaf of bread, a piece of bacon. Frieda is ecstatic. She herself looks pitiful, her legs are like sticks and her knees jut out like gnarled bumps. Even so, she’s quite cheerful and not afraid of the two-hour trip home. For our part, we’re happy to have this envoy from the distant district. We ask her to describe in detail the route she took, to tell us what she saw. We pet her and beam at this calflike, half-starved eighteen-year-old, who mentions that she once wanted to teach gymnastics. Well, there won’t be much demand for that any more, not here, not for the foreseeable future – people are happy not to have to make any extraneous movements – or at least the others are, the people going hungry. Right now this doesn’t apply to me, I still have my strength. The widow hits a sore point when she suggests to Frieda, ‘Well, my child, couldn’t you find some halfway nice Russian and give him a pretty smile? So that he’d bring you girls a little something to eat?’

Frieda gives a smile, a little foolishly, and says that there are hardly any Russians left on her block, otherwise… And she packs up the presents and stashes them in the shopping bag she brought along.

Her visit really bucks us up. So we’re not entirely cut off from the world – we, too, could risk hiking across town to see friends and acquaintances. Since Frieda came we’ve been planning and scheming, wondering whether we should take our chances. Herr Pauli is against the idea. He sees us both being nabbed and sent off somewhere to do forced labour, possibly to Siberia. We think of Frieda, who managed to do it, and keep on planning.

It’s late afternoon as I write this and I’ve just returned from my first big trip. It came about very unexpectedly. I was sitting at the window seat, even though you hardly see anyone on the street now except Russians and people getting water. And lo and behold, a Russian comes bicycling right up to our door – it’s the major.

I race downstairs. He has a sparkling new German man’s bicycle. I beg and plead: ‘Could I take it for a ride? Just for five minutes?’ The major stands on the kerb, shakes his head. He’s not sure what to do, he’s afraid that someone might steal the bike from me. At last I persuade him.

Sunshine. The weather turns warm in the twinkling of an eye. I pedal as fast as I can. The wind roars in my ears. I’m speeding because it makes me happy, after being so miserably cooped up all the time – and also because I want to prevent anyone stealing the bike. I race past blackened ruins. In this part of town the war ended one day earlier than where we are. You can see civilians sweeping the streets. Two women are pushing and pulling a mobile operating unit, probably recovered from the rubble sterile lamps ablaze. An old woman is lying on top under a woollen blanket, her face is white, but she’s still alive.

The farther south I ride the further the war recedes. Here you can even see whole groups of Germans standing around and chatting. People don’t dare do that where we live. There are even children outside, hollow-cheeked and unusually quiet. Women and men are digging around in the gardens. There are only a few isolated Russians. A Volkssturm barricade is still piled up in front of the tunnel. I dismount and push my bike through a gap in the barricade. Beyond the tunnel, on the lawn in front of the S-Balm station, there is a knee-high mound strewn with greenery, marked with three wooden posts painted bright red and affixed with small handwritten plaques – edged paper under glass. I read three Russian names and the dates of their death: 26 and 27 April, 1945.

I stand there a long time. As far as I can remember this is the first Russian grave I’ve seen so close. During my travels there I caught only fleeting glimpses of graveyards, weathered plaques, bent crosses, the oppressive neglect of poor village life. Our papers were always reporting on how the Russians hide their war dead as a disgrace, how they bury them in mass unmarked graves and stamp down the earth to render the spot invisible. This can’t be true. These posts and plaques are obviously standard-issue supply. They’re mass-produced according to a pattern, with a white star on top – coarse, cheap and thoroughly ugly, but at the same time utterly conspicuous, glaring red, garish and impossible to miss. They must put them up in their country, too. Which means that they, too, practise their own cult of graves, their own hero-veneration, though officially their ideology rejects any resurrection of the flesh. If the plaques were just there to mark the grave for future reburial, a simple sign with the name or number would suffice. They could save themselves a lot of red paint and star-cutting. But no, they envelope their dead soldiers in an aura of red, and sacrifice both work and good wood to provide them with an aureole, however paltry it may be.

I pedal on, as fast as I can, and soon see the former manor house where my firm was last housed. I wonder about the family on the ground floor, if the little baby made it through the milkless time.

No children, no young mother – none of them are there. Finally, after much knocking and shouting, an elderly man appears, unshaven and wearing an undershirt. It takes me a while to recognize him as the authorised representative of our former publishing house, someone who was always immaculately groomed from cuff to collar – now in a dirty state of decline. He recognizes me, but doesn’t show the least bit of feeling. Grumpily he tells me how he and his wife snuck over here when their apartment was hit on the last day of the war. The place was deserted, all the furniture carried off, whether by Germans or Russians, he can’t say – presumably both. Inside, the building is ransacked, wrecked, and reeks of human excrement and urine. Even so, there’s still a mountain of coal in the basement. I scrounge around for an empty carton, and pack it full of briquettes, much to the man’s displeasure, but the coal is no more his than it is mine. The idea of helping me doesn’t occur to him. With effort I haul the box over to the bike and tie it onto the luggage rack with my belt and a bit of string I find lying around.

Back home, on the double. I race up the street, this time past endless rows of soldiers hunched on the kerb. Typical frontline men, tired, grimy, dusty, with stubbly chins and dirty faces. I’ve never seen Russians like this before. It dawns on me that we’ve been dealing with elite troops: artillery, signal corps, freshly washed and clean-shaven. The lowliest types we’ve ever seen are the supply-train men, who might have smelled of horses but weren’t nearly as battle-worn as these soldiers, who are far too exhausted to pay attention to me or my bike. They barely glance up, it’s clear they’re at the end of a forced march.

Quickly, quickly, there’s our corner. The old police barracks is swarming with automobiles, that hum with a deep, satisfied drone – they smell of real petrol. The German cars never smelled like that

Gasping for breath, I proudly carry the bike upstairs, along with my load of coal. This time it’s the major who comes running down towards me. He’s all agitated, imagining his bike stolen and me who-knows-where. Meanwhile the Uzbek has drifted in as well. Right away the widow sends him to the pump with two buckets to get water for us. He trots off good-naturedly; he’s become like part of the family.

I’m sun-drunk and exhilarated from riding fast. I feel more cheerful than I have in weeks, practically elated. On top of that the major has brought some Tokay wine. We drink it; I feel good, cosy as a cat. The major stayed till 5 p.m.; after he left I felt rotten. I cried.

[Weeks later, scribbled in the margin, to be used by novelists: For three heartbeats her body became one with the unfamiliar body on top of her. Her nails dug into the stranger’s hair, she heard the cries coming from her own throat and the stranger’s voice whispering words she couldn’t understand. Fifteen minutes later she was all alone. The sunlight fell through the shattered panes in broad swathes. She stretched, enjoying the heaviness in her limbs, and brushed the tousled fringe back from her forehead. Suddenly she felt, with uncanny precision, a different hand burrowing into her hair, the hand of her lover, perhaps long dead. She felt something swelling, churning, erupting inside her. Tears came streaming out of her eyes. She tossed about, beat her fists against the cushions, bit her hands and arms until they bloomed red and blue with tiny tooth marks. She howled into the pillow and wanted to die.]