Primate Brow Flash

A copy of A Woman in Berlin showed up in my house with a note on it: “This is my favorite book. Please read it before June 12.”
When I get a note like that, I get to it. This is the story of a woman in her 20s in Berlin in 1945 when the city fell to the Red Army. The Soviets ran around pulling women out of their bomb shelters and raping them, young, old, rich poor. This anonymous woman noted every detail in her diary. Her first rapist takes care to pry open her mouth and spit a hug gob in when he’s done. She ends up in sex-for-food arrangements with a Russian officer for a time. Rape is just the half of it, though, and conversations by the water pump are dark. “Better a Russian on my tummy than an American dropped on my roof” is one of the jokes of the time.

One of the themes of the book was the author’s view of German men. They often had to cower in the next room while the rapes were taking place.

These days I keep noticing how my feelings toward men- and the feelings of all the other women - are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man.” In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today we woman, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.

The world of men hadn’t quite crumbled, though. When the initial anarchy settled down, the work of covering it up began. The Russians didn’t have to do much covering. The German men didn’t want to be faced with the truth of what happened in Berlin when they were off on their grand adventure. When her boyfriend comes back she wants to tell him parts of her amazing story of survival, but it is beyond his ability to listen. He leaves her. The citizens of Berlin were forced to wash soviet uniforms and load all metal and usable machinery into trains for shipment to Moscow. It was German men who were put in supervisory positions for this forced labor and the women who did the work. This book itself pissed people off when it was first published in the 1950s. Not the kind of pissed off where everyone read it and discussed it, but the kind of where the author was vilified and the book was ignored. It was shunned and was not republished until after the author was dead (in 2001).

The other striking thing about this book is the author’s voice. She just drops these casual observations about people struggling for their lives in a ruined city: “When it comes to heating, other people’s furniture burns better than your own”. It describes in everyday detail how people behave when everything collapses around them.