A Woman in Berlin

AFTERWORD BY THE GERMAN EDITOR

It is perhaps no accident that an extraordinary work like A Woman in Berlin had a history that is no less amazing; first published in 1953, the book disappeared from view, lingering in obscurity for decades before it slowly re-emerged, was reissued, and then became an international phenomenon – a full half-century after it was written. While we cannot know whether the author kept the diary with eventual publication in mind, it’s clear that the ‘private scribblings’ she jotted down in three notebooks (and on a few hastily added slips of paper) served primarily to help her maintain a remnant of sanity in a world of havoc and moral breakdown. The earliest entries were literally notes from the underground, recorded in a basement where the author sought shelter from air raids, artillery fire, looters – and ultimately rape by the victorious Russians. With nothing but a pencil stub, writing by candlelight since Berlin had no electricity, she recorded her observations. Months later, when a more permanent order was restored, she was able to copy and edit her notes, on 121 pages of grey war-issue paper.

The author chose to remain anonymous, and I feel bound to respect her wish, responsible as I am for the reissue of her text. What may be said, however, is that the woman who wrote this book was not an amateur but an experienced journalist. This is made dear in the diary itself when the author alludes to several trips abroad as a roving reporter. On one occasion, she actually travelled to the Soviet Union, where she picked up a basic knowledge of Russian. We may surmise that she continued working for a publishing firm or for various periodicals after Hitler came to power: up until 1943-44 a number of magazines managed to avoid direct involvement in the relentless propaganda demanded by Joseph Goebbels.

It is likely that through her professional contacts the author met Kurt W. Marek, a journalist and critic who facilitated publication of the diary. An editor at one of the first newspapers to appear in the new German state, he went on to work for Rowohlt, a major Hamburg publishing house. It was to Marek that the author entrusted her manuscript, taking care to change the names of people in the book and eliminate certain revealing details. In 1954 Marek succeeded in placing the book with a publisher in the United States, where he had settled. Thus A Woman in Berlin first appeared in English, and then in Norwegian, Italian, Danish, Japanese, Spanish, French and Finnish.

It took five more years for the German original to find a publisher and, even then, Kossodo was not in Germany but in Switzerland. But German readers were obviously not ready to face some uncomfortable truths, and the book was met with hostility and silence. One of the few critics who reviewed it complained about what he called the author’s “shameless immorality” German women were not supposed to talk about the reality of rape; and German men preferred not to be seen as impotent onlookers when the victorious Russians claimed their spoils of war. The author’s attitude was an aggravating factor: devoid of self-pity, with a clear-eyed view of her compatriots’ behavior before and after the Nazi regime’s collapse, everything she wrote flew in the face of the reigning post-war complacency and amnesia. No wonder then that the book was quickly relegated to obscurity.

By the seventies, the political climate in Germany had become more receptive and photocopies of the text, which had long been out of print, began to circulate in Berlin. They were read by the radical students of 1968 and taken up by the burgeoning women’s movement. By 1985 when I started my own publishing venture, I thought it was high time to reprint A Woman in Berlin, but the project turned out to be fraught with difficulty. The anonymous author could not be traced, the original publisher had disappeared, and it was not clear who held the copyright. Kurt Marek had died in 1971. On a hunch, I contacted his widow, Hannelore, who knew the identity of the author. She also knew that the diarist did not wish to see her book reprinted in Germany while she was alive – an understandable reaction given the dismal way it was originally received.

In 2001, Ms Marek told me that the author had died and her book could now reappear. By then, Germany and Europe had undergone fundamental changes and all manner of repressed memories were re-emerging. It was now possible to raise issues that had long been taboo. Subjects like the widespread collaboration in France, the Netherlands, and elsewhere; anti-Semitism in Poland; the saturation bombing of civilian populations; ethnic cleansing in post-war Europe – which for many years had been dwarfed by the German act of genocide – were now legitimate areas of inquiry. These are, of course, complex and morally ambiguous topics, easily exploited by revisionists of all stripes; nonetheless, they belong on the historical agenda and deserve level-headed discussion. And it is in this context that A Woman in Berlin ought to be read.