The conventional narrative holds that in the first decades after the war, Germans struggled fitfully with the Nazi years, embracing a kind of blanket guilt yet indicting no one in particular, taking psychic refuge in the triumph of West Germany's "miraculous" economic recovery. 1945, "zero hour," marked an irreparable boundary between present and past that few Germans cared to cross. But it is a convenient myth that Germans have only now recognized their own suffering: Instead of forgetting the war in the years that followed, Germans remembered it selectively, with great attention to certain of their own victims, particularly prisoners of war and expellees driven from their homes in the east.

Still, during an era when it was common to decry the Soviet "rape" of eastern Germany, the very real rape of German women remained a forbidden topic -- despite the number of women who suffered. "None of the victims will be able to wear their suffering like a crown of thorns," the diarist told Marek. "I for one am convinced that what happened to me balanced an account." Such self-effacement testifies to our diarist's ethical fortitude, but that German women should have endured such pain on behalf of German men should satisfy no one's sense of justice.

Pity for the German people was in short supply after World War II, and for good reason. But the prevalent understanding of Nazi barbarities as an evil beyond human comprehension is nevertheless a cunning absolution of the rest of us, a self-exoneration that the diarist, to her credit, vehemently refuses. To see Germany's descent into madness as an incomprehensible anomaly outside the bounds of humanity is to forget the evils of which the rest of us remain capable. "We learn nothing by blaming them," I.F. Stone wrote in 1961 as Adolf Eichmann went to trial. "We all marched with Eichmann ... whether it was the human incinerator or the H-bomb, we built it." The ensuing half-century of human brutality has illustrated this all too well, and those fateful place names that have joined Auschwitz in our atlas of evil -- Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Halabja, Iraq; Srebrenica, Bosnia; Kigali, Rwanda -- are a painful reminder that "never again" was a wish and not a binding vow on mankind. It has taken that half-century to allow the recognition that, in Germany as elsewhere, among perpetrators there are also victims; "A Woman in Berlin" reminds us that the exclusivity of these categories is little more than a fable.

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