A Woman in Berlin

WEDNESDAY, 25 APRIL 1945, AFTERNOON

To recapitulate: around 1 a.m. I left the basement again to go up to the first floor and throw myself on the couch. All of a sudden there was a fierce air raid; the flak started raging. I simply lay there and waited, too sleepy to care. The windowpane is already broken and the wind is blowing in, along with the stench of fires. I felt an idiotic sense of security under the bedcovers, as if the sheets and blankets were made of iron – though they say bedding is extremely dangerous. Dr H. once told me how he’d had to treat a woman who’d been hit in bed; the bits of feather had lodged so deeply in her wounds he could barely remove them. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. That’s probably how soldiers sleep on the front, amid all the filth.

I got up at 7 a.m. and the day began with quaking walls. Now the fighting is moving in our direction. No more water, no gas. I waited for a minute that was halfway calm and raced up the four flights of stairs to my attic apartment. Like an animal backing into his lair I crept into one room at a time, always on the lookout, ready to beat a hasty retreat. I grabbed some bedclothes and toiletries and fled back downstairs to the first floor, to the widow. We get along well. These days you come to know people quickly.

Buckets in hand, I made my way to the pump, through the garden plots, which were in full bloom. The sun was beating down, very warm. A long line at the pump, everyone pulling for himself – the lever was squeaky and difficult to move. Then the fifteen-minutes walk back with splashing buckets. ‘We are all of us fine sumpter asses and she-asses.’ (Nietzsche, I think.) Outside Bolle’s they’re still shoving one another on account of the free butter. And in front of Meyer’s there’s an endless dark queue, all men; they’re selling liquor there, half a litre per ID card, anything they have.

Right away I turned round and made a second trip for more water. A sudden air raid on my way home, a column of smoke and dust rising over the patch of grass outside the cinema. Two men threw themselves flat on the ground, right in the gutter. Some women bolted for the nearest entranceway and ran down any stairs they could find, with me at their heels, into a completely unfamiliar basement that didn’t have a trace of light. And all the time I couldn’t let go of those buckets, otherwise they’d be stolen. A crowd inside the pitch-dark room, startled, very eerie. I heard a woman’s voice moaning: ‘My God, my God…’ And then things went quiet again.

Was she praying? I remember an event from about two years ago, see myself back in that hole, the most pitiful basement imaginable, under a one-storey cottage. A village of 3000, a place of no significance, but conveniently located on the way to the Ruhr Valley. A candle was burning in the dark, and the women (there were hardly any men) were reciting the rosary, the sorrowful mysteries, I can still hear their droning: ‘and for us was cruelly scourged…’ And then more: the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, monotonous, muted, soothing, freeing, just like I imagine the ‘Om mani padme hum’ of the Tibetan prayer wheels. Only broken by the occasional hum of motors, and once by a series of bombs that set the candle flame shivering. And then they went on: ‘and for us carried his heavy cross.’ Back then I could literally feel the prayer spreading its coat of oil over the troubled faces, helping make things better. Since that time I haven’t been inside another shelter where people prayed. Here in Berlin, in this motley mix of five-storey tenements, you’d be hard-pressed to find a group of people willing to come together and say the Lord’s Prayer. Of course, people whisper prayers, perhaps more than it seems. And people do moan ‘My God, my God…’ But the woman moaning probably doesn’t understand what she’s really saying; she’s only grasping at empty phrases, repeating the words by rote, without meaning.

I never liked the proverb ‘Need teaches prayer’ – it sounds so haughty, like ‘Need teaches begging’. Prayers extorted by fear and need from the lips of people who never prayed when times were good are nothing more than pitiful begging.

There is no proverb that says ‘Happiness teaches prayer’, but a genuine prayer of thanksgiving ought to rise as high and as freely as fragrant incense. But this is all speculation. The fact that our German word for praying – beten – is so close to our word for begging – betteln – obviously means something. After all, there was a time when beggars were as much a fixture at the church door as the handle, as legitimate as the king himself and every bit as graced by God, so that the king would have his exact opposite here on earth, and so that whoever prayed to God in supplication would have someone to whom he in turn could extend divinely sanctioned charity. But I never will find out whether the moaning in the dark basement really was a prayer. One thing is certain: it’s a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly, amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear. People who can do it are lucky. I can’t, not yet, I’m still resisting

After I came back from getting water, the widow sent me to the meat queue to find out what’s going on. People were cursing; evidently they keep postponing the deliveries of meat and sausage, which maddens these women more than the entire war. That’s our strength – we women always focus on the task at hand. We’re happy whenever we can flee into the present to escape worrying about the future. And for these women the task at hand is sausage, and the thought of sausage alters their perspective on things that may be much more important but are nevertheless much further away.

Back in the cellar, around 6 p.m. I couldn’t lie down upstairs any longer – there were some hits dose by and I got scared when thick pieces of plaster started falling on my blanket. I dozed down here until Henni came from the baker’s and reported that a bomb had landed right on the pharmacist’s next to the cinema. The owner was killed on the spot, though it was impossible to say whether by shrapnel, the blast or a heart attack. According to Henni he didn’t bleed. One of the three elderly pudding sisters got up and asked, with elegantly pursed lips: ‘If you don’t mind – how did he get finished off?’ That’s the way we talk these days, that’s how far we’ve fallen. The word ‘shit’ rolls easily off the tongue. It’s even spoken with satisfaction, as if by saying it we could expel our inner refuse. We are debasing our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.