A Woman in Berlin

THURSDAY, 17 MAY 1945

Up early to get water at the new hydrant. There’s a newspaper hanging in a shop window, the Tägliche Runclschau, printed by the Red Army for ‘the population of Berlin’. We’re no longer a people, only a population, present and accounted for but representative of nothing. This same linguistic differentiation – Bevölkerung as opposed to Volk – occurs in other languages too, as in the French peuple and population. Reading about the victory celebrations in Moscow, Belgrade, Warsaw, leaves a bitter taste. They say Count Schwerin-Krosigk has addressed the German people, called on them to face facts. Of course, we women have been doing that for a long time. But who knows what will happen once the generals and gauleiters and holders of the Knight’s Cross start doing the same? I’d be curious to know just how high the suicide rate in Germany is at the moment.

Herr Pauli is sounding an optimistic note of late, talks about a rapid economic upswing, about Germany’s being brought into world commerce, about true democracy and a spa cure in Bad Oeynhausen he’d like to treat himself to very soon. When repeating what I’d gleaned from Nikolai, I poured a little water in his wine, he turned genuinely irate, forbidding me to speak of things I know nothing about. I sensed that his anger went beyond this silly incident, that he’s simply fed up with me. He used to have the widow all to himself, taking care of him day and night. I’m a nuisance.

After dinner – pea soup, and I ate to stock up – Pauli calmed down and peace was restored. The widow even insisted I take a second helping. I can sense my star is on the rise again, thanks to Nikolai. Should that bother me? Should I hold my apartment mates to some specific moral standard? I won’t. Homo homini lupus. It’s true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives. At most I can imagine a mother going hungry to keep her children fed – but that’s probably because mothers feel their children as their own flesh and blood. On the other hand, look how many mothers have been sentenced in recent years for selling their children’s milk coupons, or bartering them for cigarettes? Hunger brings the wolf out in us. I’m waiting for the first moment in my life when I tear a piece of bread out of the hands of someone weaker. There are times when I think such a moment could never come. I can picture myself getting weaker and weaker, shrinking away, no longer having the strength to rob anyone. Strange thoughts to have on a full stomach and with a new Russian provider waiting in the wings.

The news in the stairwell is that they’ve ferreted out a former Nazi party boss in our building, a Reichsamtsleiter or something like that – I don’t know the Nazi rankings very well. I saw the men in the basement quite often, and I remember the blonde woman who had been reassigned and whom no one really knew, always holding hands with the man identified as her lodger, whom nobody knew either – two turtle doves, the cock being the boss in question. He didn’t look like anything special, sitting around in his shabby clothes, and the few times he spoke he sounded stupid. That’s what you call a good disguise.

I’d just like to know how word got out. It wasn’t his mistress who’d denounced him; according to the bookselling wife she’s howling pathetically in her fourth-floor apartment, where she managed to come through untouched except for two Ivans the first night. She doesn’t dare go out any more, she’s afraid they’ll take her away as well. They came for him in a military vehicle.

We have mixed feelings, talking about this. A bit of schadenfreude cannot be denied. The Nazis were too pompous and subjected the people to too many harassments, especially in the last few years, so it’s right they should atone for the general defeat. Still, I wouldn’t want to be the one to turn in these former martinets. Maybe it would be different if they’d actually beaten me or killed someone close to me. But what’s playing out now is not so much grand revenge as petty malice, for the most part: that man looked down on me, his wife snapped her ‘Heil Hitler’ at my wife, besides he earned more, smoked thicker cigars, so I’ll bring him down a peg, shut him up along with his old woman…

Incidentally I learned in the stairwell that next Sunday is Pentecost.