Tam Eastley reviews one of the most controversial and poignant books to emerge from Russian-occupied Berlin in 1945…

A Woman in Berlin (Eine Frau in Berlin) by Anonymous is a true diary account of the postwar city from April 20 – June 22 1945. Written by a well educated 34-year-old German woman and professional journalist alleged to be one Marta Hillers, the startlingly frank narrative is an eye opening chronicle of the fall of Berlin to the Russian Red Army.

The first 65 pages of the account are spent in frightened expectation of the Russian liberation during the last few days of the Allies’ bombing campaign. Rumours of Russian drunkenness and brutality are passed around the city in conversations at breadlines and whilst burying corpses.

The author and fellow residents of her near-demolished apartment building huddle in the basement, running outside only to collect food and news. The author calls herself and her neighbours “cave dwellers”, as their lives have begun to revolve around the basement, their only place of temporary safety.

As the bombings come to a slow and bloody end, the men of the Red Army storm the city, finding a capital in utter ruin. “Berliner Strasse looked desolate, half torn-up and barricaded off,” writes the author. Hasenheide was destroyed, “(o)ur own troops had felled all the trees to have a clear field for shooting. The ground was scored with trenches strewn with rags, bottles, cans, wires, ammunition.”

When planes weren’t swooping overhead and when bombs weren’t exploding, the city was eerily quiet, “(…) nothing but an oppressive silence broken by our own footsteps.”

The city was not only destroyed, it was also completely defenceless. As the Russians swooped into a Berlin completely devoid of men and protection, it was the women who bared the brunt of the soldiers’ violent anger and desire.

For pages, the anonymous woman describes rape after rape after rape; her own, and others’. The first time for her takes place on a crumbling staircase just beside the closed door of the safe basement, which was slammed quickly in her face by her fellow “cave dwellers” as she was trying to escape from the groping hands of Russian soldiers.

Some further sexual encounters are used to gain protection and food. It becomes obvious to the reader, and the author, that it is a time when one’s own survival quickly takes precedence over everything else.

In the introduction t…