A Woman in Berlin

SUNDAY, 22 APRIL 1945, 2A.M.

I was upstairs in bed, dozing away as the wind blew through the shattered panes. I had a brick at my feet that had taken hours to warm over a tiny gas flame. Around 8 p.m. Frau Lehmann knocked on the door. ‘Come on down, the alarms are out, no sirens any more. Everybody else is already in the basement.’

A breakneck rush down the stairs. I was scared to death when my heel got caught on the edge of a step. I barely managed to grab hold of the railing in time. My knees went weak, but I went on, heart pounding, slowly groping my way through the pitch-dark passage. Finally I found the lever to the basement door.

Our cave looked different. Everybody was bedded down. There were pillows everywhere, eiderdowns, deckchairs. I just managed to squeeze my way to my usual spot. The radio’s dead: no signal, not even from the airport. The kerosene lantern is flickering dimly. A cluster of bombs, then things go quiet. Siegismund shows up, still waving his flag, claiming that the tide’s about to turn – even as Curtainman Schmidt is muttering something about Russians in Bernau and Zossen. We stay put, the hours crawl by, we listen to the artillery thudding away, sometimes far off, sometimes quite close.

The pharmacist’s widow turns to me. ‘You’d better not go back to that fourth-floor apartment of yours,’ she warns. She offers to let me spend the night in her apartment on the first floor. We clamber up the back stairs – formerly designated ‘for servants and deliveries’ – a narrow spiral staircase. The glass shards crunch underfoot, wind whistles through the open windows. She shows me to a small room next to the kitchen, a couch by the door welcomes me in and grants me two hours of sleep under an unfamiliar-smelling woollen blanket. Until sometime around midnight, when bombs start hitting nearby and we take refuge back in the basement. Long, miserable hours in the middle of the night. Right now I’m too tired to go on writing, down here.

Next morning, a little before 10 a.m., upstairs in the attic apartment. We stuck it out in the basement until about 4 a.m. Then I climbed up here, warmed some turnip soup on what gas there was, peeled a couple of potatoes, boiled my last egg – it was practically liquid when I ate it – and dabbed on the last drops of cologne. It’s strange to be doing all these things for the last time, at least for the foreseeable future, until further notice, for what’s sure to be a long time. Where am I supposed to come up with another egg? Or more perfume? I treat myself to these pleasures deliberately, consciously, reverently. After that I crawled into bed with all my clothes on, slept in fits and starts, uneasy dreams. Now I have to run, do shopping.

Back in the attic, 2 p.m. Torrents of rain outside. No more newspapers. Even so, people queued up right on time at the distribution centre; apparently some leaflet or extra edition had run an announcement. News is now spread by word of mouth, and every new item gets quickly passed around.

They’re handing out what are officially called advance rations – meat, sausage, processed foods, sugar, canned goods and ersatz coffee. I took my place in line and waited in the rain for two hours before finally getting 250 grams of coarse-ground grain, 250 grams of oatmeal, 2 pounds of sugar, 100 grams of coffee substitute and a can of kohlrabi. There still isn’t any meat or sausage or real coffee. A crowd is milling about the corner butcher’s, an endless queue on both sides, people standing four abreast in the pouring rain. What a mess! My line was abuzz with rumours: we’ve just surrendered Köpenick, they’ve taken Wünsdorf, the Russians are already at the Teltow canal. The women seem to have reached an unspoken agreement – all of a sudden no one is bringing up ‘that subject’.

Talking in the queue, I find myself coming down a level both in the way I speak and in what I say, immersing myself in the general emotion – though this always leaves me feeling a little grubby and disgusting. And yet I don’t want to fence myself off, I want to give myself over to this communal sense of humanity; I want to be part of it, to experience it. There’s a split between my aloofness, the desire to keep my private life to myself, and the urge to be like everyone else, to belong to the nation, to abide and suffer history together.

What else can I do? I have to sit it out and wait. Our days are accented with flak and artillery fire. Now and then I wish it were all over. These are strange times – history experienced first hand, the stuff of tales yet untold and songs unsung. But seen up close, history is much more troublesome – nothing but burdens and fears.

Tomorrow I’ll go and look for nettles and get some coal. Small as it is, our new stock of provisions will keep us from starving. I fret over it the way rich people worry about their money. The food could be bombed or stolen, eaten by mice or looted by the enemy. Finally I have crammed everything into one more box for the basement. I can still carry all my earthly possessions up and down the stairs with hardly any effort.

Late evening, twilight. I paid Frau Golz another visit. Her husband was there, too, sitting in his coat and scarf, since the room was cold and gusty. They were both quiet, depressed. They don’t understand the world any more. We hardly spoke. Outside the building we could hear a constant, tinny rattle, punctuated by the drum-like flak. As if someone were beating a gigantic carpet that hung all the way down from the sky.

The courtyards echo the sound of the gunfire. For the first time I understand the phrase ‘thunder of cannon’, which until now has always sounded like a hollow cliché, such as ‘courage of a lion’ or ‘manly chest’. But thunder is an apt description.

Showers and storms outside. I stood in the doorway and watched some soldiers pass by our building, listlessly dragging their feet. Some were limping. Mute, each man to himself, they trudged along, out of step, towards the city. Stubbly chins and sunken cheeks, their backs weighed down with gear.

‘What’s going on?’ I shout. ‘Where are you headed?’

At first no one answers. Then someone mutters something I can’t make out. Then someone else mumbles something, but the words are dear enough: ‘Führer, command! And we will follow, even unto death.’

They all seem so miserable, so little like men any more. The only thing they inspire is pity, no hope or expectation. They already look defeated, captured. They stare past us blindly, impassively, as we stand on the kerb. They’re obviously not too concerned about us, us Volk or civilians or Berliners or whatever we are. Now we’re nothing but a burden. And I don’t sense they’re the least ashamed of how bedraggled they look, how ragged. They’re too tired to care, too apathetic. They’re all fought out. I can’t bear watching them any more.

The walls are marked with chalk, by now smeared and running, evidently directing the soldiers to specific assembly points. Two cardboard placards are tacked onto the maple tree across the street, announcements, neatly penned by hand, in blue and red letters, with the names ‘Hitler’ and ‘Goebbels’ on them. One warns against surrender and threatens hanging and shooting. The other, addressed ‘To the People of Berlin’, warns against seditious foreigners and calls on all men to fight. Nobody pays any attention. The handwriting looks pathetic and inconsequential, like something whispered.

Yes, we’ve been spoiled by technology. We can’t accept doing without loudspeakers or rotary presses. Handwritten placards and whispered proclamations just don’t carry the same weight. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. In the old days one man’s call to arms was enough to set off an uprising – a few hand-printed leaflets, ninety-five theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. But today we need more, we need bigger and better, wider repercussions, mass-produced by machines and multiplied exponentially. A woman reading the placards summed it up nicely: ‘Well, just look what those two have come to.’

In the basement, 10 p.m. After my evening soup I allowed myself a little rest in the bed upstairs before trotting back down. The full assembly had already gathered. There was less shelling today, and there has been no air raid yet, though this is the time they usually come. Nervous merriment. All sorts of stories making the rounds. Frau W. pipes up, ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead’. The joke seems not very appropriate to her mourning crêpe. Next comes Fräulein Behn: ‘Let’s be honest for once. None of us is still a virgin, right?’ No one says anything; I wonder who among us might be. Probably the concierge’s younger daughter; she’s only sixteen and ever since her older sister went astray they keep her under close guard. If I’m any judge of young girls’ faces, then eighteen-year-old Stinchen with the Hamburg ‘s’ slumbering away over there is another. As for the girl who looks like a young man, I have my doubts. But she could be a special case.

We have a new woman in the basement: up to now she’s been going to the public bunker six blocks away, which is supposed to be secure. She lives by herself in her apartment, but I don’t know yet whether she’s abandoned, widowed or divorced. She has a patch of weeping eczema over her left cheek. She tells us, at first in a whisper but then out loud, that she’s secured her wedding ring to her pants. ‘If they get that far then the ring won’t matter much anyway.’ General laughter. Still, her weeping eczema might prove just the thing that saves her. Which is worth something these days.