A Woman in Berlin

MONDAY, 23 APRIL 1945, 9 A.M.

The night was amazingly quiet, with hardly any flak. We have a new resident, the husband of the woman who was bombed out of her home in Adlershof and who moved in here with her mother. He showed up very quietly, still in uniform; an hour later he was wearing civilian clothes. How could he get away with it? No one’s even noticed, or else they don’t care. Anyway no one’s saying anything. A hard-boiled soldier from the front, he still looks pretty strong. We’re happy to have him.

Deserting suddenly seems like a perfectly understandable thing to do – a good idea, in fact. I can’t help thinking of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans standing their ground at Thermopylae, and falling in battle as their law demanded. We learned about them in school, we were taught to admire their heroism. And I’m sure that if you looked hard enough you could find three hundred German soldiers willing to do the same. But not three million. The larger the force and the more random its composition, the less chance of its members opting for textbook heroism. We women find it senseless to begin with; that’s just the way we are – reasonable, practical, opportunistic. We prefer our men alive.

Towards midnight I was so tired I almost fell off my chair (where am I supposed to come up with a bed?), so I staggered up the glass-strewn stairs and made my way to the first floor and the widow’s couch, where I slept until nearly 6 a.m. Afterwards I was surprised to learn there’d been a series of bombs. I slept right through it.

There were rolls at the baker’s, the last ones. My last ration cards for bread, too. No new cards in sight. No decrees and no news, either. Nothing. Not a soul cares about us any more. We’re suddenly mere individuals, no longer members of the tribe, the German Nation. Old ties are broken; friendships don’t extend further than three buildings away. There’s only the group of us, huddled in the cave, a clan, just like in prehistoric times. The horizon has shrunk to three hundred paces.

At the baker’s I heard the Russians were in Weissensee and Rangsdorf. How many times have I gone swimming at the lake at Rangsdorf? ‘The Russians in Rangsdorf…’ I say it out loud, just to try it out, but it doesn’t sound right. Today the eastern sky was burning red with the constant fires.

Back from getting coal, 1 p.m. Heading south I could feel I was literally marching towards the front. They’ve already closed off the S-Balm tunnel. The people standing outside said a soldier had been hanged at the other end, in his underwear, a sign with the word ‘traitor’ around his neck. His body was dangling so close to the ground you could spin him around by the legs. The person who said this had seen it himself he’d chased off the street kids who’d been amusing themselves.

Berliner Strasse looked desolate, half torn-up and barricaded off. Queues in front of the stores. Blank faces amid the flak. Trucks were rolling into town. Filthy figures in shabby bandages trudged alongside, their bodies sprayed with dirt, their faces empty. A baggage train of hay carts, grey-haired men on the boxes. Volkssturm units are posted at the barricade, in motley uniforms hastily pieced together. You see very young boys, baby faces peeping out beneath oversized steel helmets; it’s frightening to hear their high-pitched voices. They’re fifteen years old at the most, standing there looking so skinny and small in their billowing uniform tunics.

Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming. Where do you draw the line? When their voices break? Because that’s what really gets me the most, thinking about these little boys: their voices, so high, so bright. Up to now being a soldier meant being a man. And being a man means being able to father a child. Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness.

No one was at the publishing house. The building was completely abandoned, the basement full of coal. The woman relocated to our building had a problem and plied me with questions about what to do. Her oldest daughter is the mother of an eight-week-old infant; it seems that yesterday she stopped giving milk, so that all of a sudden she can no longer nurse her baby, and the little one has been bawling. Everyone’s worried how the mother will pull the child through, now that there’s no more cow’s milk. I suggested to the young mother that eating some wild vegetables might help bring on her milk. Together we bent over the grass in the garden, which was soaked through with rain, and pulled up the young nettle shoots alongside the wall, using handkerchiefs to protect our hands. Then dandelions, the few we could find smell of plants and soil, primrose, red hawthorn, spring. But the flak keeps yapping away.

I filled a pack with hard coal and probably carried off fifty pounds. Yet even with the load I managed to overtake another troop of soldiers on my way back. I saw my first weapons in several days: two bazookas, one sub-machine gun, ammunition boxes. Young guys wearing their cartridge belts like some barbaric adornment.

A little before noon there was a burial on our street, or so I was told, the pharmacist’s widow had been there. A seventeen-year-old girl: grenade, shrapnel, leg amputated, bled to death. Her parents buried her in their garden behind some currant bushes. They used their old broom cupboard as a coffin.

So now we’re free to bury our dead wherever we wish, just as in ancient times. It makes me think of the time a huge Great Dane died in my old apartment building and wound up being buried in the garden. But what a scene beforehand – the landlord, the concierge, the other tenants, everybody fought against it. And now they bury a human being and nobody gives it a second thought; in fact, I think the parents find comfort in their daughter being so close. And I catch myself assigning graves in our own little bit of garden.

4 p.m. in the attic. I just had an amazing experience. I was visiting Frau Golz and started playing with the telephone, just for fun. To my amazement I could hear something, despite the fact the line has been dead for days. I dialled Gisela’s number and managed to get through to her, even though she lives an hour away in Berlin W. We were so eager to hear what the other had to say we couldn’t stop talking. It turns out her company has just collapsed. Her boss gave a rousing speech and then fled to the west, leaving the little people to fend for themselves. We’re completely forgotten, we strain our ears to the void. We are all alone.

Gisela told me she’s exactly as old as her father was when he fell at Verdun in the first world war – almost to the day. She never saw her father. Now she says that she can’t stop thinking about him, she talks with him in spirit, as if her time were coming, as if she was going to meet him soon. We never spoke about such things before; we would have been embarrassed to bare our hearts like that. Now the deepest layers are pushing to the surface. Farewell, Gisela. We’ve each lived our thirty years or so. Maybe we’ll see each other again some day, safe and sound.

Back in the cave, Monday, 8 p.m. Today the first artillery hit our corner. Whizzing, hissing, howling: uuueee. Flames flashing up. Terrified shouts in the courtyard. Stumbling downstairs, I could hear the shells landing right outside the cinema. The enemy is shooting at us. Incidentally, people say the Russians are sticking to the smaller guns. And we’re beginning to feel a little less terrified about the American carpet-bombing, since at least here in Berlin they’d wind up hitting Russians as well.

A new rumour floats around the basement, which the wife of the liquor distiller heard from a reliable, very secret source and announces with a heaving bosom: the Yanks and Tommies have quarrelled with Ivan and are thinking of joining with us to chase Ivan out of the country. Scornful laughter and heated discussion. The woman is offended and gets so angry she slips into her native Saxon dialect. She just returned yesterday to her apartment – and our basement – from their (somewhat small) distillery behind Moritzplatz, where she and her husband had been spending the nights, so she could hold the fort at home. Her husband stayed with the bottles and vats – and a redhead named Elvira, as everyone in the basement knows.

People are still taking care of business. Just before the shops closed I managed to get another 150 grams of coarse grain. Suddenly I heard excited screams around the corner, and the sound of running feet: a wagon was being unloaded near Bolle’s, barrels of butter – all rancid – were being carried into the building for distribution. One pound per person, and – here’s what’s frightening – for free! All you have to do is get your card stamped. Is this the first sign of panic or is it the voice of reason speaking from beyond the bureaucratic files? Right away people started crowding outside the shop door, pounding one another with umbrellas and fists. I joined in the pushing, too, for a few minutes, and in the process overheard talk of reserves, reinforcements and German tanks from somewhere – one woman claimed to have picked up something like that last night over the radio detector. Then I decided to let butter be butter, I didn’t want to get into a fistfight over it, at least not today. But maybe I’ll have to learn how soon.

Silent night. Distant pounding. Not a peep from the cave dwellers, not a word – they’re too exhausted. Only snoring and the short shallow breaths of the children.