A Woman in Berlin -- Book Review
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, A Diary. By Anonymous. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Henry Holt & Company/ Picador. 2005. 261 pp.
It is hard to find candid, unvarnished accounts of rape, particularly from the male point of view -- that is, from the point of view of the rapist. It is a subject that is almost taboo, except from a prosecutorial standpoint. Condemnation of rape is so severe and so universal in contemporary civilized societies that any description or discussion of it that is not steeped in the vocabulary of victimization and condemnation of the aggressor is nearly impossible. However, if we move outside the boundaries of civilization, it becomes quickly obvious that rape is a very commonplace interaction between human males and females. It is tempting to say that it is an essential element in the male-female relationship. The reason for this is the pervasiveness of warfare in the human experience, with women always being among the spoils of war. Men fight wars, and the winners take the women of the losers -- and normally they rape them. Civilization has only within the last couple of centuries begun to condemn this ancient practice and attempt to suppress it -- with very limited success. The Lieber Code, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, first codified rules of conduct for United States armies in the field, and specifically outlawed rape and made it punishable by death (Article 44). In fact, Lincoln often pardoned soldiers who were guilty of desertion and sentenced to be shot, but he never pardoned a solder convicted of rape. The Hague convention of 1899, which was influenced by the Lieber Code, did not specifically mention rape, but the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 did (Article 27). This institutionalized campaign against raping soldiers is a very recent innovation of large, powerful civilized societies. The rule throughout most of human history has been that female captives were raped without apology as a matter of course.
A Woman in Berlin is a female account of the closing days of the Third Reich in Berlin and the aftermath of the Russian takeover of the city. It illustrates the point that once the restraints of civilization break down, this elemental aggression of male toward female emerges with uninhibited brutality. The restraints of the Lieber Code and the Geneva Conventions are not internalized in conquering soldiers who have been fighting for their lives and enduring the miseries of the battlefield. Conquered women are not seen as innocent bystanders; they are booty, prey, welcome rewards for hard fighting. The men who once protected them as their own are dead or defeated, and they are thus laid bare to the rampaging lust of the victorious conquerors. Estimates of the number of German women raped in the aftermath of World War II range as high as two million. This means that a lot of ordinary guys became rapists in the rush of victory. Men who would never behave in such a manner in their own societies become predatory, rapacious hunters of females with the intoxication of military victory. Women, ever resourceful, and eminently practical, adjust in a variety of ways to the new reality imposed on them. This woman's diary describes many of these coping strategies. The chaotic rampage of predatory lust that occurs in the immediate aftermath of conquest quickly settles down to a more ordered existence. While rape may be an element is the male-female relationship, particularly at the outset after a conquest, it does not characterize ongoing male-female relationships. Once this barrier has been breached, if a continuing relationship is established, a familiarity sets in and a more complete engagement of the personality tempers the raw aggression and lust with which it opened. The effects of the trauma may endure quite long in the lives of the women raped, however. Rape serves to establish a new order in male-female relationships. It lets the women of a conquered society know, with undeniable surety, that the men to whom they had been previously attached and dependent upon for sustenance and security are gone: those feelings, attachments, and modes of relating have been mercilessly shattered, and if they wish to survive they must adapt to the ways of the conquering males and their desires. It has a primal authenticity that violates the woman's physical and psychological space with utter ruthlessness. Just as war kills the defeated males and destroys their society, rape destroys the emotional legacy of those males in the hearts of the women who nurtured and supported them and slept with them. It hearkens back to a time when war was personal, when men fought face to face, hand to hand. Personal viciousness and savagery were valuable qualities on a battlefield. No apologies were ever made for them. Modern warfare has become depersonalized through the development of weapons that allow men to kill at a distance and the political objectives of modern warfare usually fall short of total destruction of an enemy society and its people. Thus rape has fallen into disfavor among the political and intellectual leadership in civilized countries.
But the human psyche and particularly the human sexual response has been shaped by millenia, if not millions of years, of uncivilized conditions. During this long, formative era the capture and rape of women was commonplace and accepted as an obvious reward for victory in battle (For a summary, see Gottschall, 2004).
The capture of women was one of the spoils of victory -- and occasionally one of the primary aims of warfare -- for many tribal warriors. In many societies, if the men lost a fight, the women were subject to capture and forced incorporation into the captor's society. . . . The social position of captive women varied widely among cultures, from abject slaves to concubines to secondary wives to full spouses. . . . the treatment of captive young women amounted to rape, whether actual violence was used against them to enforce cohabitation with their captors or was only implicit in their situation. (Keeley, p. 86)
The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward: All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured to death as a matter of course, some more slowly than others; the captive women were gang-raped. Some were killed, some tortured. But a portion of them, particularly if they were young, would be spared. . . . Babies were invariably killed, while preadolescents were often adopted by Comanches or other tribes. (Gwynne, p. 19)
. . . the social position of returned female captives in nineteenth-century America was deeply compromised. People were under no illusions about what had happened to them. They knew with great specificity what Plains Indians did to adult women, and thus repatriated captives were usually objects of pity. If they were married, their husbands often would not take them back. (Gwynne, p. 120)
We see this explicitly in the account of this woman. Toward the end of the book, Gerd, her fiance, returns from the war, somewhat surprised to find her alive. He is displeased with the news of her ravishment by the Russians and she reported:
After the unaccustomed rich food I felt flushed and high-spirited. But in the night I found myself cold as ice in Gerd's arms and was glad when he left off. For him I've been spoiled once and for all. (p. 258)
Hearing their experiences over the last several weeks he said to her "You've all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches, every one of you in the building. Don't you realize?" He grimaced in disgust. (p. 258-59) Soon after, he departed, and the diary ends with her uncertain if he would return.
The book is sensitively written. Her observations of her external circumstances, the people in her company, and her own inner life are acute and detailed. It is a vivid depiction of the chaos, misery, and desperation of a city in the throes of being sacked by an invading army. In Antony Beevor's Introduction there is a discussion of the authenticity of the diary, since there were a number of spectacular exposures in the years following the War of fictitious writings attempting to pass themselves off as contemporary accounts of the War. Beevor concluded, as did many others, that this diary of the Woman in Berlin is authentic based on the closeness of the observations and its consistency with other contemporary accounts. I found nothing in the book that made me doubt it was an authentic account by a woman who did indeed live through the events described. The diary begins on April 20, 1945, which happened to be Hitler's birthday, and the first day of Allied bombardment of Berlin. It continues for two months until June 22. It was a harrowing time of extraordinary upheaval. It is a rarity to have such a well written, meticulous documentation of such an occurrence. I did not particularly like this woman. She is a depressive personality. Her outlook on life is generally bleak, and it is not just the circumstance of being invaded by an foreign army and having her city and her society completely demolished before her eyes that has her down. I feel her native temperament beyond the dire circumstances. The multiple rapes notwithstanding, she does not seem to like men very much and does not have great empathy for them, particularly on a sexual level. This seems to predate the Russian invasion and her composition of this diary. She leaves out any eroticism that she might have felt with any of her partners, particularly the ones with whom she established ongoing relationships, but she does make a point of recording disgusting or repulsive details. It was interesting that the German women were eager to talk amongst themselves about the rapes, were curious about one another's experiences, but did not feel comfortable discussing such experiences with men, particularly German men. Her attempt to share her rape experiences with her fiance, Gerd, did not go well, and resulted in their estrangement.
This book has been published anonymously, in accordance with the author's original wishes. However, in 2003, Jens Bisky, a German critic, identified the author as Marta Hillers (1911-2001), a journalist who was educated, well traveled, and who wrote extensively for German newspapers and magazines, as well as some minor propaganda for the Nazis (Harding, 2003). She died in 2001 at the age of 90. The book generated controversy from the moment it was published and the controversy continues on a number of counts. People seem unwilling to recognize that women are routinely raped in large numbers in the aftermath of warfare and that their sons, husbands, and fathers, the soldiers whom they wish to see as conquering heroes, are also the rapists of the defenseless women they conquered. It is a fascinating, beautifully written account, a somber, thought provoking read that does not sit well with the expectations civilized societies often make of themselves and the soldiers who fight for them.
Gottschall, Jonathan (2004) Explaining Wartime Rape. Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 129-136.
Gwynne, S. C. (2010) Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. New York: Scribner.
Harding, Luke. The Observer. October 4, 2003.
Keeley, Lawrence H. (1996) War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.