A Woman in Berlin

WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE 1945

A day to myself. The widow and I went out to look for nettles and orache, and roamed through the professor’s ruined garden, now run wild. Even if I did receive permission to tend the garden, I would be too late. Strangers’ have broken off whole branches of the cherry tree, picking the cherries just barely turned gold. Nothing will ripen here; hungry people will harvest everything before its time.

Cold, storms and rain. The tram drove down our street again for the first time. I jumped on right away, just for the ride, but once on board I realized that it would be a good time to go to the town hall and ask whether we really could expect pay for our week’s labour for the Russians. It turned out my name was indeed on the list, along with all the others, with every workday neatly recorded. They’d even entered the amounts to be withheld for tax. I am to be paid. 56 marks – though not until there’s money in the coffers again. The clerk asked me to check again next week. At any rate they’re keeping the books and adding amounts and collecting the money, so I’m bound to get something.

While I waited in the rain for the tram to take me back, I spoke with two refugees, a married couple. They’d been travelling for eighteen days from Czech territory and had bad things to report. The man told how the Czech at the border was stripping Germans of their shirts and hitting them with dogwhips. ‘We can’t complain,’ his wife said, wearily, ‘We brought it on ourselves.’ Apparently all the roads from the east are swarming with refugees.

On the way home I saw people coming out of a cinema. I immediately got off and went into the half-empty auditorium for the next showing. A Russian film, entitled At Six p.m. After the War. A strange feeling, after all the pulp-novels I’ve been living, to sit in the audience and watch a film.

There were still soldiers in the audience, alongside several dozen Germans, mostly children. Hardly any women, though – they’re still reluctant to venture into dark places with all the uniforms. But none of the men paid any attention to us civilians, they were all watching the screen and laughing diligently. I devoured the film, which was bursting with salt-of-the-earth characters: sturdy women, healthy men. It was a talking movie, in Russian – I understood quite a bit, since it takes place among simple people. The film had a happy end – victory fireworks over the turrets of Moscow, though it was apparently filmed in 1944. Our leaders never risked anything like that, for all their promises of future triumphs.

Once again I feel oppressed by our German disaster. I came out of the cinema deeply saddened, but help myself by summoning things that dull my emotions. Like that bit of Shakespeare I jotted in my notebook, back then in Paris, when I discovered Spengler and felt so dejected by his Decline of the West. ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Losing two world wars hits damned deep.