The rape of Berlin

In fact, German men are largely absent from "A Woman in Berlin," and the ones who do pass across its pages do little to earn our esteem; those who refrain from expressing their ridiculous faith in the regime in the midst of Soviet artillery bombardments are busy surrendering their wives to marauding Russians. "I think our men must feel dirtier than we do," the diarist observes, and goes on to recount the story of one German man who berates his neighbor as she's about to be raped: "Well, why don't you just go with them, you're putting all of us in danger!" Even before the Soviets arrive, the diarist perceives in the failure of the German Reich the irreparable decline of the male archetypes it venerated: "The Nazi world -- ruled by men, glorifying the strong man -- is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of 'Man.' ... Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex."

Indeed, what is perhaps the book's most chilling insult comes not at the hands of a Russian rapist but from the diarist's partner, Gerd, who returns from the front in June, casts his eyes on the diary that our heroine has been dutifully keeping for him, declares that she and the other women have "all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches" and disappears, presumably forever.

After the war there was clearly no shortage of rape stories. Though one Russian commandant dismissively assures the diarist that "our men are all healthy," the spread of sexually transmitted disease -- as well as the pregnancies that resulted -- forced the Germans to take action. The Nazi authorities, for all their neglect of the civilian population, were sufficiently alarmed to relax eugenicist laws prohibiting abortion as an act of "sabotage against Germany's racial future," although women had to submit to what was surely a humiliating police interrogation to prove they had been raped. It has been estimated that 90 percent of those women who became pregnant had abortions; many of the children who were born were put up for adoption.

The diarist at first refuses to acknowledge that she might be pregnant -- "no grass grows on the well-trodden path," she suggests hopefully. Later, when her period is two weeks late, she heads to a female doctor who has hung out a shingle among the ruins ("she'd replaced the [broken] windowpanes with old x-rays of unidentified chests"). After being reassured that she is not pregnant, the diarist ventures to ask the doctor "whether there were indeed lots of women who'd been raped by the Russians" coming in search of abortions. But the doctor wants no part of such talk: "It's better not to speak of such things," she replies curtly. Though the diarist expresses her hope that women might "overcome collectively," no such public reckoning would be possible in postwar Germany, as she anticipates ruefully: "We ... will have to keep politely mum; each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared."

After the war, a friend of the diarist, Kurt Marek, read the manuscript and attempted to have it published. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that "A Woman in Berlin" was first released outside Germany, when Harcourt, Brace published an English edition in 1954. The New York Times judged it "profoundly relevant," but the reception in Germany, when a Swiss publisher released the book five years later, was precisely the opposite; the prevailing sentiment among the very few notices that did appear was expressed by a critic who excoriated the author's "shameless immorality." Clearly the diary broached what Sebald would later describe as "a tacit agreement ... that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described."

Though the diary at first fell on fallow ground, it enjoyed a samizdat second life, circulating among leftists and a growing women's movement after 1968. But what was once unspeakable out of shame was now prohibited by politics: Accounts of Soviet atrocities in the east, like attention to Allied bombing in the west, had become the sole province of the German far right. Where one taboo had lifted another settled: Helke Sander, a German feminist whose 1992 film "Liberators Take Liberties: Rape, War, and Children" chronicled the rapes and their aftereffects, was pilloried in some quarters as a revisionist. The woman in Berlin, still guarding her anonymity against the disgrace of rape, would not allow her diary to see the light of day again so long as she lived. But by the time of her death in 2001, a seismic shift in German consciousness had transpired, and the book, published in 2003, quickly became a sensation and shot onto bestseller lists; last summer the film rights were sold for an undisclosed amount.

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