A Woman in Berlin : Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary

by Marta Hillers

  After our midday meal I went up to the attic apartment, rummaged through the mountains of plaster and debris, carried buckets of rubbish downstairs, mopped the floors. I planted some chervil and borage in the rotting balcony boxes, that is to say, I made some shallow grooves and sprinkled in the brown grains and tiny black seeds that are supposed to become my kitchen garden. I have no idea what these herbs look like except for the pictures on the front of the packages the woman from Hamburg gave me, from some of her leftovers. Then I lay in the sun on the floor of the terrace. A full hour of deep contentment-followed by unease and restlessness. I feel something nagging at me, boring into me. I can’t go on living like a plant, I need to move, I have to act, start doing something. I feel as though I’ve been dealt a good hand of cards but don’t know whether I’ll be able to play them. And who am I playing with? The worst thing of all at the moment is our being so cut off.

  I went back down to the widow’s and found her absolutely jubilant. Suddenly and completely by accident she turned up her late husband’s pearl tie-pin - the one she’d stashed away and couldn’t find - in the toe of a much darned sock. ‘How could I forget something like that?’ she wondered.

  Pentecost Sunday passed peacefully. From 8p.m. on I waited for Nikolai the sub lieutenant, who’d asked me on Wednesday if he could drop by today. He didn’t show up, nor is it likely he ever will. Herr Pauli couldn’t resist the occasion to make a snide remark.

  MONDAY, 21 MAY 1945

  This Pentecost Monday didn’t feel much like a holiday at all. Hardly anyone is still employed. Berlin is on an extended vacation. While out for wood I stumbled on a notice calling on ‘cultural workers’ - artists - people in publishing, journalists, to report to the town hall today at eleven. We are to bring records of previous employment as well as samples of our work.

  Off I go. The queue on the second floor is unmistakable. Full-fledged artists in their stubbornly unconventional clothes, theatre girls next to elderly female painters lugging paintings smelling of oil. Here a mannish woman, there a womanly young man with long lashes, probably dancers. I stand in the middle listening to the talk on either side, about famous So-and-so who was supposedly hanged. Until a woman’s voice breaks in shrilly: ‘That’s not right at all! Haven’t you heard? It’s just come out that he was half Jewish.’ That might be true, too. Everywhere you look ‘non-Aryans’ who’d been kept hidden deep in the family tree are being spruced up and put on display.

  Registration was just a matter of form. An older woman with Jewish features took down our personal data in a thick notebook, giving each of us a certificate of registration, and that was that. Will anything come of this, some tip concerning work, some kind of assistance? Probably not. For our main meal the widow opened one of the jars of chicken she put up in 1942 and has anxiously guarded ever since. Chicken it was, but chicken with a taste of mothballs.

  For years the jar has been sitting in the basement between mothballed rugs; by now it was completely permeated with the smell of naphthalene. That gave us a laugh. Even the gluttonous Herr Pauli abstained. The widow managed to get down a few bites and left the rest to me. I came up with a method of holding my nose and swallowing. But for hours afterwards I was burping mothballs.

  Around 3.30p.m. I set off for Charlottenburg to visit Ilse R., who worked as a fashion photographer and as an editor for a women’s magazine until she married an engineer, a specialist in armaments and consequently someone they couldn’t snatch and send off to the front.

  After a protracted exchange of goodbyes with the widow I started out. Long streets, desolate and dead. Inside the tunnel, where there used to be lamps both day and night, it was pitch dark and smelled of excrement. My heart was pounding as I scurried through.

  On towards Schöneberg. In a quarter of an hour I met only two people, both women, one barefoot, with varicose veins as thick as ropes. Everything looked so contorted and ghostly; possibly because of the sunglasses I’d put on because of the dust. A Russian woman in uniform with curly black hair was dancing on a wooden platform at the crossing, waving little red and yellow flags whenever a Russian car passed and giving a friendly greeting to the people inside. Her full breasts were dancing with her. A number of Germans carrying water buckets shyly squeezed their way past.

  No end to the empty streets. Then, all of a sudden, a crowd of some twenty or thirty people, streaming out of a cinema, where, according to the hand-painted signs a Russian film called Chapaev was showing. I heard one man’s voice, half in a whisper, pronounce the film, ‘Absolute rubbish!’ The walls are covered with colourful posters, scribbled and scrawled by hand, advertising variety shows in various pubs. The artistes are the first on the scene.

  Bicycles were literally clattering up and down the boulevardon bare rims since there aren’t any tyres. This is a new and effective way to avoid Russian ‘confiscation’. Incidentally a number of Germans have recently been ‘finding’ bicycles of their own, since the Russians abandon the ones they’re riding at the first flat tyre, then look for new and better models.

  Onward, through green residential streets. All was frozen, paralyzed. The entire district seems to have been scared into hiding. Now and then a young thing came mincing by; all dolled up. The widow heard at the baker’s that people are even dancing again, here and there.

  My throat was dry with nervous excitement when I turned onto my friend’s street. When you haven’t seen each other for two months - and what months! - you have no way of knowing whether the buildings are still standing or whether the people inside are still alive.

  The building was there, safe and sound but locked shut, no signs of life. I wandered around for nearly fifteen minutes, shouting and whistling, until at last I managed to slip inside with one of the tenants. The familiar name was still on the apartment door upstairs. I knocked and shouted and called my name. I heard a shout of joy and soon I was again embracing a woman with whom I had previously shaken hands at most. Her husband called out, ‘Imagine! She comes waltzing in here as if it were nothing at all!’

  Ilse and I hastily exchange the first sentences: ‘How many times were you raped, llse?’ ‘Four, and you?’ ‘No idea, I had to work my way up the ranks, from supply train to major.’

  We sit together in the kitchen, eating jam sandwiches and drinking real tea they fished out for the occasion, and exchange reports. Yes, we’ve all been through a lot. llse got it once in the basement, the other times on the second floor, in an empty apartment where they pushed her inside, using their rifle butts on her back. One of them wanted to keep his rifle with him when he lay down with her. That scared her, so she gestured to him to put his gun aside - which he did.

  While Ilse and I discussed the subject, her husband stepped out, to visit their neighbour, as he put it, to get the latest news for me from a crystal set· detector. As he left, Ilse grimaced: ‘Yes, well, he can’t really bear to hear about that.’ Her husband is tormenting himself with reproach for staying in the basement and not doing a thing while the I vans took their pleasure with his wife. During the first rape, down in the basement, he was even within hearing range. It must have been a strange feeling for him.

  We took advantage of Herr R.’s absence for a little female gossip. Ilse is a worldly; discriminating woman, very stylish. She’s travelled all over the globe. So what’s her opinion of the Russian cavaliers?

  ‘Pathetic,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘No imagination whatsoever. Simple-minded and vulgar, every last one, from everything I’ve heard around the building. But perhaps you had better experiences with your officers.’

  ‘No, not in that regard.’

  ‘Maybe they have the latest in socialist planned economies, but when it comes to matters erotic they’re still with Adam and Eve. I told my husband that too, to cheer him up.’ Then she says with a wink, ‘with food so scarce a poor husband doesn’t count for much. Mine is already getting a complex about it; he thinks that the Red Army with all its ladykillers really has a chance with us
women.’ We laughed and agreed that as normal suitors under normal conditions, ninety-nine out of a hundred of our worthy enemies wouldn’t have the slightest chance with us. At most this hundredth might be worth a try.

  We gossiped that way for a while, taking our mocking revenge on everyone who had humiliated us.

  The engineer really did bring some news back from the neighbour’s: evidently Berlin is to become an international city, for all the victors, and Leipzig will become the capital of the Russian areas. He also heard that Himmler has been caught. Still no confirmed news of Adolf. While Use seems very relaxed and manages to sneer at the recent state of affairs with ladylike superiority, her husband is dazed and distraught. His career has come to an end. They’re clearing out what’s left of his armaments factory. The Russians are hauling off the German machines. On my way over I saw several cargo trucks with huge wooden housings on top. Now I know what’s inside. Herr R. is afraid of social demotion, that he’ll have to start all over again as a labourer. He craves contact and news, worries about surviving, is frantically looking for some job where he can earn his bread once again. He’s applied at the hospital for something in central heating. He’s still stunned by the defeat. Once again it’s clear that the women are dealing with this better, we’re not so dizzy from the fall. Ilse and her husband are both learning Russian. Although reluctantly, he’s contemplating a move to Russia, since ‘they’ll be shipping all the means of production out of here’. He doesn’t believe that we Germans will be permitted to produce much worth mentioning in the foreseeable future; he also heard from the crystal-set neighbour that the whole country is to be converted into one great potato field. We’ll see.

  Repeated goodbyes. After all, you never know when and whether you’ll see each other again. On my way back I dropped in on the widow’s shotgun-wed niece, the young mother-to-be, who’s living with her friend Frieda. She was lying on her back, looking very sweet, glowing from within. But her body was far too thin for her vaulted belly, which was literally jutting out. You can almost see the baby draining all the juices and all the strength from the mother’s body. Naturally no news of the father. He seems entirely forgotten amid the daily needs of finding food and fuel. Since there’s only one electric cooker in the apartment, which is useless at the moment, the girls have built a kind of brick oven on the balcony and feed it with laboriously gathered fir branches. It takes forever for them to cook their bit of gruel. Moreover, Frieda has to constantly tend the fire, fanning it and adding wood. The place smelled of resin, like at Christmas.

  Then the long march back home. A poster in German and Russian proclaims the imminent opening of a ‘free market’. By whom? For whom? A ‘wall paper’ - a news-sheet posted on a wall - announces the new heads of the city - all unknown dignitaries, presumably repatriated Germans from Moscow. Colourful troops of Italians stepping my way, singing, loaded down with trunks and bundles, evidently for the journey home. More bicyclists rattled past on bare rims. Schöneberg was more forlorn, and the ghost tunnel by the S-Bahn was black and deserted. I was glad when it was behind me, when I saw the buildings on our block. I returned home as if from a big trip, and divvied up my news.

  Tired feet, humid day. Now the evening brings rest and rain

  TUESDAY, 22 MAY 1945

  By six in the morning the widow was already up and moving about the apartment. She’d received a note from the building chairman the previous evening. (‘Building chairman’ is another new invention. In our building the role is being played by the husband of the woman from Hamburg.) The note, which was on a mimeographed scrap of paper, instructed the widow to report at the town hall at 8a.m. for work, nothing more. ‘It would be nice if it turned out to be cutting asparagus,’ she mused, making our mouths water at the prospect of a tasty dinner.

  So today I played housewife and cooked some pea-flour soup for Herr Pauli and myself. At around 2p.m. we heard loud shouting from down on the street outside our house - a kind of official town-crier, exactly like a thousand years ago. He’d planted himself under the maple tree and was rattling off information from a piece of paper: all men and women between fifteen and fifty-five years of age capable of work and currently unemployed should report to the Rathaus at once for labour duty.

  That set off a great debate in the stairwell: to go or not to go? The bookselling wife cast her vote for; she was afraid that otherwise they’d come and take us by force. I joined her, and together we set off. I asked her if she knew what was going on with their bookshop. ‘It burned down at the end of April,’ she answered tersely. Nevertheless she is pretty optimistic about the future, and told me about a huge crate of books in the basement that she managed to keep safe throughout the Third Reich - mostly ‘forbidden’ literature, that is, works that were banned in our country after 1933. At first this meant tens by Jews and emigrants, later by opponents of the war. ‘People have a craving for these things right now,’ she claims. ‘We’re going to wall off a corner of the shop and start a lending library - with a stiff deposit on the books, of course, or else they’ll be gone in no time.’ I told her I’d be the first to sign up; I have a lot of catching up to do.

  The steps outside the Rathaus were filled with women pushing and shoving one another - the men were few and far between. With a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, a youth took down our names. The patch of street outside the town hall looked like an extremely busy construction site. The trench in the middle of the boulevard, which was carved out for mysterious military purposes by a handful of Germans and several Russian girls in quilted jackets - forced labour - is now being filled in again, this time solely by Germans. This has a certain logic for me. Women are pushing the carts loaded with sand, brick rubble and fire-blackened debris up to the edge and tipping the contents into the trench. Bucket brigades have been lined up on all the side streets, and bucket after bucket is being passed up to the carts. I’m supposed to join in tomorrow morning at 8a.m. I have nothing against that.

  I looked for the widow among the women working, but didn’t see her. At one point a car with a loudspeaker pulled up, blaring the latest news in Russian-accented German. Nothing I hadn’t heard before.

  This evening we had bread with canned meat. The widow still hadn’t come back- it was 9p.m. before we saw her red hat down on the street. She was absolutely exhausted, drained, done in. A few short, unintelligible angry sounds were all we got out of her - she refused to tell us what had happened. Finally, after an endless amount of time washing up, she managed to utter a few sentences, from which it was clear that there had been no asparagus. A Russian truck had transported the women to a machine works, where the widow and some two hundred others spent the whole day packing parts in crates, then unpacking them, repacking them and wrapping them up - all under the eyes of stern Russian overseers. The widow had been jostled and shoved constantly; all they’d given her to eat was a crust of dry bread for lunch.

  And they call that organization!’ She was indignant. ‘What a muddle, what a mess!’

  Then she told us some more: ‘We pointed out to them right away that the iron parts were too heavy and would break the bottoms of the crates. And they just yelled at us to shut up and, “Rabota, rabota!” - Work, work! So when the first crate broke into pieces as soon as it was lifted, they really laid into us, and of course it was all our fault!’ Shaking her head, she added, ‘It’s a puzzle to me how these people managed to win the war. Any German schoolchild has more sense than they do.’ And she went on listing other examples of poor planning and stubborn insistence on the part of the Russians, to the point where she couldn’t calm down. She’d had to come home on foot - which took a whole hour and a half - since they hadn’t provided a truck to transport the women back after work. As a result she has a blister on her toe; she yammers on about that and about our fate and the German defeat. Nothing can console her, not even the hammer, the pliers, the dust rag or the tin cup she smuggled out of the factory under her dress.

  WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 194
5

  Fitted out with bucket and dustpan, I marched off to the Rathaus in the grey morning rain. Before I got there it was coming down in sheets; I could feel my knit dress soaking up the water.

  The rain kept coming- now a light drizzle, now a substantial downpour. Nonetheless we kept on scooping and shovelling, filling bucket after bucket with dirt so there wouldn’t be a break in the chain of hands. There were about a hundred women of all types. Some proved sluggish and lazy and didn’t move a muscle unless one of our two German overseers was looking. (It’s always the men who get to do the supervising.) Others went at it like avid housewives, with dogged determination. ‘Well, the work has to get done,’ said one woman with great conviction. Once a cart was loaded, four of us shoved it up to the trench. I learned how to operate a swivel plate. We worked until the heavy rain forced us to take a break.

  We stood under a balcony, huddled close like animals, our wet clothes sticking to our bodies. The women shuddered and shivered. We took advantage of the opportunity to eat our wet bread as it was, with nothing on it. One woman muttered in a thick Berlin accent, ‘Never ate the likes of this under Adolf.’

  She was challenged on all sides. ‘It’s thanks to your Adolf we’re eating this.’

  Embarrassed, the woman said, ‘That’s not how I meant it.’

  We stood like that for over an hour in the pelting rain. When it began to taper off, our supervisor - a man with a Czech-sounding name and a Viennese accent -sent us back to the carts. We called these carts ‘lorries’ -which sounded like a girl’s name, and christened one the ‘Laughing Laurie’ and the other the ‘Weeping Laurie’. But someone scratched out ‘Weeping’ and wrote ‘Smirking’ instead.