A Woman in Berlin

FRIDAY, 18 MAY 1945

Up early to get water and look for wood. Slowly but surely I’m developing a real eye for firewood; I hardly miss a piece. I keep finding new places that haven’t been combed over – in basements, ruins, abandoned barracks. Around noon Fräulein Behn brought us our new ration cards. For the time being the widow, Pauli and I belong to the fifth and lowest category – ‘others’. Here are the allotments listed on my card: 300 grams of bread, 400 grams of potatoes, 20 grams of meat, 7 grams of fat, 30 grams of food items (semolina, barley, rolled oats, etc.) and 15 grams of sugar. On top of that there’s a monthly allowance of 100 grams of coffee substitute, 400 grams of salt, 20 grams of real tea and 25 grams of coffee beans. By comparison, heavy labourers in Group I, which also includes ‘well-known artists’, technicians, factory managers, pastors, school principals, epidemiologists and epidemiological nurses, receive 600 grams of bread daily, 100 grams of meat, 30 grams of fat and 60 grams of food items, with a monthly ration of 100 grams of coffee beans. In the middle are Group II (blue-collar workers) and Group III (white-collar workers), with 500 and 400 grams of bread per day, respectively. Only potatoes are distributed with democratic equality to all stomachs. Second-string intelligentsia are supposed to be in Group II. Maybe I can sneak in there.

You can sense that all this has had a calming effect. Everyone is sitting and studying their ration cards. We’re being governed again; those in power are providing for us. I’m amazed we’re supposed to get as much as we are, but I doubt it will be possible to distribute the rations punctually according to schedule. The widow is happy about the real coffee beans and promises to drink to Stalin’s health with the first cup.

This afternoon I took a walk to the town hall, together with the woman from Hamburg and her daughter Stinchen, on whose account she had asked me to accompany them. It seems that Stinchen was a leader of some kind in the League of German Girls and is afraid of possible reprisals, which I’m supposed to ward off by speaking Russian. The widow joined us as well.

On the way we saw many people back on the street, hustling and bustling about – even a lot of men, though women there are still dearly in the majority. I even spotted one woman wearing a hat, the first I’ve seen in a long time.

Some guards had been posted outside a few of the banks I inspected with the sub lieutenant. Generally this meant two Russians with raised weapons. Definitely not the best way to attract customers.

Once again the town hall was like a beehive. We stood in the pitch-dark corridor and waited, surrounded by talk, the subject: pregnancy.

Yes, that’s one topic of interest to every one of us they managed to-get their hands on.

‘They say every second woman is pregnant,’ claims one voice.

To which another voice, a shrill one, replies, ‘Even if that’s true – surely for that you could go to anyone and have it taken care of.’

‘I heard that Stalin decreed that any woman with a Russian child gets counted as Group number I,’ says a third voice.

General laughter. ‘Does that mean that for group number I you’d…?’

‘Absolutely not. I’d sooner do something to myself.’ The widow poked me in the dark, trying to catch sight of my face. I didn’t want her to see me. I don’t want to think about that. This time next week I’ll know better.

‘Have you been to the hospital?’ The question went down the line.

‘No, what for?’

‘Haven’t you heard? They’ve set up an examination station for women who were raped. Everybody has to go. On account of venereal diseases.’

Another poke. I don’t know yet, I feel clean, I want to wait and see.

Everything went smoothly with Stinchen, of course: nobody asked about her glorious past. That’s another joke, the idea of punishing minors for participating in things with the complete approval of their parents, teachers and leaders. If our forebears once burned children as witches, and I’ve read that they did, it was at least because they thought the children had been possessed by grown-up devils, who were inhabiting them, using them as a mouthpiece. It’s hard to define at what age our western notion of responsibility for one’s actions begins to apply.

A woman from the building next door walked back home with us. She told us about a lady in a neighbouring apartment who had drunk and slept with the same Russian several times. Her husband, a clerk who’d been discharged from the Wehrmacht because of a heart condition, shot her from behind while she was at the kitchen stove, then took his pistol and shot himself in the mouth, leaving behind their only child, a girl of seven. ‘I’ve been keeping her at my son’s place for all this time,’ the woman explained. ‘I’d like to keep her for good. And I’m sure my husband will approve when he comes back. He always wanted a girl as well as a boy.’ The neighbours wrapped the parents in woollen blankets and quickly buried them in the courtyard, along with the pistol. ‘Good thing there were no Russians in the building,’ says the woman. No doubt there would have been a ruckus over the banned weapon.

We stood for a while in front of the graves on the grassy mound. The woman from Hamburg maintains that everything was bound to turn out this way – but if Hitler had been finished off on 20 July 1944, he would have kept some of his aura. Many people would have gone on believing in the dead man. Is he really dead now? Has he fled by plane? Escaped in a U-boat? There are all sorts of rumours, but no one is paying them much attention.

The woman with eczema came over in the evening, bearing sad news. She’d walked all the way to Lützowplatz to look up her boss, a lawyer for whom she had spent years taking down court statements. Because he was married to a Jewish woman, and refused to divorce her, he had had to endure a great deal, especially in recent years, when he could hardly find a crust of bread. For months the couple had been looking forward to the liberation of Berlin, spending entire nights huddled by the radio, listening to the foreign broadcasts. Then when the first Russians broke into the basement and went after the women, there was a scuffle. Shots were fired. One bullet ricocheted off the wall and hit the man in the hip. His wife threw herself at the Russians, begging them to help, in German. Whereupon they took her into the hallway, three men on top of her, as she kept howling and screaming: ‘But I’m Jewish, I’m Jewish.’ In the meantime her husband bled to death. They buried him in the front garden. His wife has fled, no one knows where. Writing this sends shivers down my spine. No one could invent a story like this: it’s life at its most cruel – mad blind circumstance. The woman with eczema was crying, her tears catching on her crusted skin. She said, ‘If only it were over, this poor bit of life.’