A Woman in Berlin

MONDAY, 21 MAY 1945

This Pentecost Monday didn’t feel much like a holiday at all. Hardly anyone is still employed. Berlin is on an extended vacation. While out for wood I stumbled on a notice calling on ‘cultural workers’ – artists – people in publishing, journalists, to report to the town hall today at eleven. We are to bring records of previous employment as well as samples of our work.

Off I go. The queue on the second floor is unmistakable. Full-fledged artists in their stubbornly unconventional clothes, theatre girls next to elderly female painters lugging paintings smelling of oil. Here a mannish woman, there a womanly young man with long lashes, probably dancers. I stand in the middle listening to the talk on either side, about famous So-and-so who was supposedly hanged. Until a woman’s voice breaks in shrilly: ‘That’s not right at all! Haven’t you heard? It’s just come out that he was half Jewish.’ That might be true, too. Everywhere you look ‘non-Aryans’ who’d been kept hidden deep in the family tree are being spruced up and put on display.

Registration was just a matter of form. An older woman with Jewish features took down our personal data in a thick notebook, giving each of us a certificate of registration, and that was that. Will anything come of this, some tip concerning work, some kind of assistance? Probably not.

For our main meal the widow opened one of the jars of chicken she put up in 1942 and has anxiously guarded ever since. Chicken it was, but chicken with a taste of mothballs. For years the jar has been sitting in the basement between mothballed rugs; by now it was completely permeated with the smell of naphthalene. That gave us a laugh. Even the gluttonous Herr Pauli abstained. The widow managed to get down a few bites and left the rest to me. I came up with a method of holding my nose and swallowing. But for hours afterwards I was burping mothballs.

Around 3.30 p.m. I set off for Charlottenburg to visit Ilse R., who worked as a fashion photographer and as an editor for a women’s magazine until she married an engineer, a specialist in armaments and consequently someone they couldn’t snatch and send off to the front.

After a protracted exchange of goodbyes with the widow I started out. Long streets, desolate and dead. Inside the tunnel, where there used to be lamps both day and night, it was pitch-dark and smelled of excrement. My heart was pounding as I scurried through.

On towards Schöneberg. In a quarter of an hour I met only two people, both women, one barefoot, with varicose veins as thick as ropes. Everything looked so contorted and ghostly, possibly because of the sunglasses I’d put on because of the dust. A Russian woman in uniform with curly black hair was dancing on a wooden platform at the crossing, waving little red and yellow flags whenever a Russian car passed and giving a friendly greeting to the people inside. Her full breasts were dancing with her. A number of Germans carrying water buckets shyly squeezed their way past.

No end to the empty streets. Then, all of a sudden, a crowd of some twenty or thirty people, streaming out of a cinema, where, according to the hand-painted signs a Russian film called Chapaev was showing. I heard one man’s voice, half in a whisper, pronounce the film, ‘Absolute rubbish!’ The walls are covered with colourful posters, scribbled and scrawled by hand, advertising variety shows in various pubs. The artistes are the first on the scene.

Bicycles were literally clattering up and down the boulevard – on bare rims since there aren’t any tyres. This is a new and effective way to avoid Russian ‘confiscation’. Incidentally a number of Germans have recently been ‘finding bicycles of their own, since the Russians abandon the ones they’re riding at the first flat tyre, then look for new and better models.

Onward, through green residential streets. All was frozen, paralyzed. The entire district seems to have been scared into hiding. Now and then a young thing came mincing by, all dolled up. The widow heard at the baker’s that people are even dancing again, here and there.

My throat was dry with nervous excitement when I turned onto my friend’s street. When you haven’t seen each other for two months – and what months! – you have no way of knowing whether the buildings are still standing or whether the people inside are still alive.

The building was there, safe and sound but locked shut, no signs of life. I wandered around for nearly fifteen minutes, shouting and whistling, until at last I managed to slip inside with one of the tenants. The familiar name was still on the apartment door upstairs. I knocked and shouted and called my name. I heard a shout of joy and soon I was again embracing a woman with whom I had previously shaken hands at most. Her husband called out, ‘Imagine! She comes waltzing in here as if it were nothing at all!’

Ilse and I hastily exchange the first sentences: ‘How many times were you raped, Ilse?’ ‘Four, and you?’ ‘No idea, I had to work my way up the ranks, from supply train to major.’

We sit together in the kitchen, eating jam sandwiches and drinking real tea they fished out for the occasion, and exchange reports. Yes, we’ve all been through a lot. Ilse got it once in the basement, the other times on the second floor, in an empty apartment where they pushed her inside, using their rifle butts on her back. One of them wanted to keep his rifle with him when he lay down with her. That scared her, so she gestured to him to put his gun aside – which he did.

While Ilse and I discussed the subject, her husband stepped out, to visit their neighbour, as he put it, to get the latest news for me from a crystal set detector. As he left, use grimaced: ‘Yes, well, he can’t really bear to hear about that.’ Her husband is tormenting himself with reproach for staying in the basement and not doing a thing while the Ivans took their pleasure with his wife. During the first rape, down in the basement, he was even within hearing range. It must have been a strange feeling for him.

We took advantage of Herr R.’s absence for a little female gossip. Ilse is a worldly, discriminating woman, very stylish. She’s travelled all over the globe. So what’s her opinion of the Russian cavaliers?

‘Pathetic,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘No imagination whatsoever. Simple-minded and vulgar, every last one, from everything I’ve heard around the building. But perhaps you had better experiences with your officers.’

‘No, not in that regard.’

‘Maybe they have the latest in socialist planned economies, but when it comes to matters erotic they’re still with Adam and Eve. I told my husband that too, to cheer him up.’ Then she says with a wink, ‘with food so scarce a poor husband doesn’t count for much. Mine is already getting a complex about it; he thinks that the Red Army with all its ladykillers really has a chance with us women.’ We laughed and agreed that as normal suitors under normal conditions, ninety-nine out of a hundred of our worthy enemies wouldn’t have the slightest chance with us. At most this hundredth might be worth a try.

We gossiped that way for a while, taking our mocking revenge on everyone who had humiliated us.

The engineer really did bring some news back from the neighbour’s: evidently Berlin is to become an international city, for all the victors, and Leipzig will become the capital of the Russian areas. He also heard that Himmler has been caught. Still no confirmed news of Adolf. While Ilse seems very relaxed and manages to sneer at the recent state of affairs with ladylike superiority, her husband is dazed and distraught. His career has come to an end. They’re clearing out what’s left of his armaments factory. The Russians are hauling off the German machines. On my way over I saw several cargo trucks with huge wooden housings on top. Now I know what’s inside. Herr R. is afraid of social demotion, that he’ll have to start all over again as a labourer. He craves contact and news, worries about surviving, is frantically looking for some job where he can earn his bread once again. He’s applied at the hospital for something in central heating. He’s still stunned by the defeat. Once again it’s dear that the women are dealing with this better, we’re not so dizzy from the fall. Ilse and her husband are both learning Russian. Although reluctantly, he’s contemplating a move to Russia, since ‘they’ll be shipping all the means of production out of here’. He doesn’t believe that we Germans will be permitted to produce much worth mentioning in the foreseeable future; he also heard from the crystal-set neighbour that the whole country is to be converted into one great potato field. We’ll see.

Repeated goodbyes. After all, you never know when and whether you’ll see each other again. On my way back I dropped in on the widow’s shotgun-wed niece, the young mother-to-be, who’s living with her friend Frieda. She was lying on her back, looking very sweet, glowing from within. But her body was far too thin for her vaulted belly, which was literally jutting out. You can almost see the baby draining all the juices and all the strength from the mother’s body. Naturally no news of the father. He seems entirely forgotten amid the daily needs of finding food and fuel. Since there’s only one electric cooker in the apartment, which is useless at the moment, the girls have built a kind of brick oven on the balcony and feed it with laboriously gathered fir branches. It takes forever for them to cook their bit of gruel. Moreover, Frieda has to constantly tend the fire, fanning it and adding wood. The place smelled of resin, like at Christmas.

Then the long march back home. A poster in German and Russian proclaims the imminent opening of a ‘free market’. By whom? For whom? A ‘wall paper’ – a news-sheet posted on a wall – announces the new heads of the city – all unknown dignitaries, presumably repatriated Germans from Moscow Colourful troops of Italians stepping my way, singing, loaded down with trunks and bundles, evidently for the journey home. More bicyclists rattled past on bare rims. Schoneberg was more forlorn, and the ghost tunnel by the S-Balm was black and deserted. I was glad when it was behind me, when I saw the buildings on our block. I returned home as if from a big trip, and divvied up my news.

Tired feet, humid day. Now the evening brings rest and rain.