(no subject)

[skygiants]

schiarire recommended me A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City, the diary of an anonymous woman who was living in Berlin when it fell to the Russians in WWII. I am glad I read it, but it's going to be a difficult book to write about. Everything else is under a cut for potential triggers.


The main talking point of the book - the reason it was met with enormous controversy when it was initially published in 1959, and never published again until after the author's death - is the mass rape of German women that occurred when the Russian army conquered Berlin. The author is raped numerous times, and eventually affiliates herself with an officer to try and protect herself from casual rape by other soldiers. Her landlady, a fifty-year-old widow, is raped on the staircase by a sixteen-year-old boy. Some women escape by hiding in crawlspaces or attic lofts for weeks with almost no food or water; a different kind of torture. It becomes an almost casual question when women meet: "How many times . . .?"

And in-between all the brutality, there are the scenes of staggering absurdity, a bizarre kind of normality. When sober, Russian soldiers come to the author's house and discuss politics and architecture over tea. The widow frets over missing stockings and bits of jewelry. One soldier asks the author to help find him a nice girl. Another soldier, one of the ones who raped the author on the second day, comes back and declares eternal love for her; the author sardonicaly dubs him "Romeo." She classifies the Russians she meets: "An entirely new specimen!" She writes about the brutalities the Germans have done, too; they hear reports of German soldiers swinging the heads of Russian babies against the wall, and, towards the end, the stories about the concentration camps start to come out over the radio. This isn't propaganda or a story of victimization. It's a clear and cold-headed account of what happens to women in wartime. And in the aftermath, life continues. As the city slowly runs out of food, people re-open barbershops and movie theaters, and talk about how strange it is not to go to work (except of course on the days when they are sent to forced labor.)

The author was a journalist; her voice is intelligent and often witty, occasionally cruel, and full of black humor, which makes the parts where she lets her bitterness show hit that much harder.

I feel like I'm writing a lot about what's in the book, not what I thought. But I don't know if I can really formulate many of my thoughts. I think, though, that it is worth reading, if you can take it; I have never read anything before that discusses rape so frankly. The author knows this frankness is a temporary commodity, too, writing about how as soon as the soldiers come back, the subject will be taboo; "each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared." That's one of, but not the only, thing that makes this book so valuable.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

I've heard of this book because it's been cited (and sometimes quoted) in other works I've read on the experiences of survival in immediate postwar Europe, though I've never read it myself. There's another book, somewhat similar to this, that I think you should read, but for the life of me I can't remember the name of it.

For that matter, I'll see if my local library has this book -- it sounds like a difficult but worthwhile read.

[ojuzu.livejournal.com]

I've been very interested in the Eastern Front lately. This is definitely something I'll have to pick up, once I finish Blood Red Snow.

I always feel obligated to read war stories when I find them, even if I don't want to. It's something I need to know, regardless of anything else.

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

I think it's a really worthwhile book, though difficult. It's intensely painful in many ways. But the author's intelligence is so clear and stunning.

Um . . .

I also can't talk so much about it. There are big things in it like hunger and other forms of desperation that speak for themselves--vividly. And then there's politics. And the relations between individuals. The details are sometimes so arresting: like the Russians' obsession with watches (in preference to jewelry or other valuables).

One of my favorite scenes is the one in which the author and a Communist take a kind of comfort in what they've experienced, saying they can survive anything now, even Siberia.

One of my LEAST FAVORITE THINGS is GERD.

[elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com]

That was turned into a movie last year, which was said to be incredibly well done, and incredibly difficult to watch.

It's something I'm interested in, but not entirely sure I could stomach.