A Woman in Berlin

SATURDAY, 12 MAY 1945

This morning the entire community of tenants – as we are again officially called – gathered in the back garden, which I had at one point pictured as a cemetery. We were there to dig, all right, but only a pit for the building’s garbage, which was towering over the bins. People were eager to work and had funny things to say. Everyone felt relieved, happy to be able to do something useful. It’s so strange that no one has to go ‘to work’ any more, that we’re all on a kind of leave, that the married couples are with each other from dawn to dusk.

After that I mopped the living room, scrubbed away all the Russian spittle and boot polish and swept the last crumbs of horse manure off the floor. That left me good and hungry. We still have peas and flour. The widow has rendered what she could from the rancid leftovers of Herr Pauli’s Volkssturmbutter and uses it as fat.

The apartment was sparkling when our guests arrived from Schönberg. They’d come together, even though Gisela had never met the widow’s friends. All three were cleaned up, neatly dressed and their hair nicely done. They took the same route we did and saw the same thing – that is hardly anyone except the occasional Russian, only silence and desolation. We showed them lavish hospitality: thin coffee and bread with a little fat for all of them!

I took Gisela into the living room for a chat. I wanted to know what she was thinking of doing. Her predictions were dire. She sees her world, the western world steeped in art and culture, as disappearing – and it’s the only world she finds worthy. She feels she’s too tired to start all over. She doesn’t think that a discriminating individual will have any room to breathe, let alone do any kind of intellectual work. No, she’s not thinking of taking Veronal or some other poison. She intends to stick it out, even if she has little courage and less joy. She spoke of trying to find ‘the divine’ within her soul, wanting to be reconciled with her innermost self and finding salvation there. She’s undernourished, has dark shadows under her eyes, and will have to go on being hungry, along with the two girls she’s taken in, whom I think she’s feeding out of her own portion. Her small store of peas and beans and oats was stolen from of her basement – by Germans, before the Russians invaded. Homo homini lupus. (Man is a wolf to man.) As she left I gave her two cigars that I quietly lifted from the major’s box, which Herr Pauli has already half consumed. After all, I’m the one responsible for that gift, not Pauli; I deserve my share. Gisela can trade them for something to eat.

In the evening I went to get water. Our pump is a fine piece of work. The shaft is broken and the lever, which has come undone many times, has been lashed on cumbersomely with yards of wire and string. Three people have to hold the structure up while two pump. This collective effort is now taken for granted; no one says a thing. Afterwards both my buckets are full of floating splinters and shavings from the pump. We have to strain the water. I’m once again amazed at the fact that ‘they’ went to such efforts to build barricades that proved useless but didn’t give the slightest thought to ensuring we had a few decent water stations for the siege. After all, they put cities to siege, so they had to have known. Probably anyone in a position of power who’d talked about pump scoundrel.

A quiet evening. For the first time in three weeks opened a book – Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line. But I had a hard time finding my way into it, I’m too full of images myself.