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September 12, 2005
'A Woman in Berlin'
Not entirely by design, I spent nearly all my leisure reading time this summer on diaries and memoirs. I started with Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, moved on to Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, delighted in Russell Baker’s Growing Up, and spent hours digging into the early Cold War period in Drew Pearson’s diaries. All these books I came by at library book sales, to which I am addicted.
Then, in mid-August, I read a rave review of A Woman in Berlin, a diary written by an an anonymous woman during the Russian capture of Berlin in 1945 and its immediate aftermath. It is a stunning book, in part because of the writer’s candor about surviving a regime of wanton rape and utter defeat.
As I read it, I did wonder about two things. First, the writing is beautiful – nuanced, thoughtful, reflective as well as descriptive. It seems polished for a diary, particularly one written under such desperate conditions and supposedly transcribed from scraps of paper. Second, I wondered why the book was published anonymously. In the review I read in the New York Times Book Review, Joseph Kanon wrote: “Anonymous died in 2001, but she remains officially unnamed, a private woman who has bequeathed us an extraordinary public legacy.” I choked a bit on the word “officially.”
Then, in yesterday’s Times Book Review, Christoph Gottesmann, a reader from Vienna, had a letter addressing just these two points. The author of A Woman in Berlin, he said, was presumed to be Marta Hillers, a German journalist. Gottesmann also recounted what he knew of the history of the handwritten diary, beginning with its transcription to a typed manuscript a month after it was written.
The controversy over these issues – the naming of Hillers and the possible editing and revising of the diary – broke out in Europe in 2003, when A Woman in Berlin was republished in Germany and became a bestseller. (Germans rejected the book when it was first published in 1959, complaining that it impugned the reputation of German women.) A German literary critic disclosed Hiller’s name, and the essayist who had republished the diary slammed the critic (for a fuller account, click here).
I think the introduction to the new American edition should have named Hillers. I also think the publisher should have disclosed all that is known about the process Hillers’s words (presuming she wrote them) went through between the spring of 1945 and the new English edition in 2005. I would not mind if the original was cleaned up and polished; I would just like to know it.
In spite of the controvesy, A Woman in Berlin is a fine book, at once troubling and enlightening.
Of course, its revelations are unwelcome in Russia. Antony Beevor, the historian who wrote the introduction to the new edition, is the author of a 2002 book, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, recounting the Russian takeover. He estimates that Russian soldiers raped 100,000 women in Berlin. The Russians have denounced the claim.
Posted by Mike Pride at September 12, 2005 09:25 AM
Comments
Hey Mike,
How bout' getting your website fixed...this is pathetic.
-Josh
Posted by: Josh Tiffany at September 14, 2005 01:58 PM
Thank you for your good article on A Woman in Berlin. This book has been a fascination to me since I found by chance an old copy of the 1954 edition that I swiped from a tiny library on a freighter to Alaska a few years ago. Now I have the new 2005 edition. Of course I would love to discover more information about the author's later life, if she had a family, etc. Nice to know she moved to Switzerland and lived to be 90. Check out two great books by a German author who lives nearby in the Seattle area: Dancing to War and Shadow of Defeat, by Elfi Hornby. Great companion books to A Woman in Berlin.
Posted by: Mary Ellen Hundley at January 22, 2006 10:53 PM
Reminds us that history is written by the victors,wonder what the french and belguim soldiers did after WW1...
Posted by: Petr-Jon at June 6, 2006 06:25 AM