Constantin Film — Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin. Film Materials

25 June 2015

Foreword

“Once again I have to reflect on what it means to stand alone in fear and misery. It seems easier to me when the torment of sharing another person's suffering is absent. What must the mother of a ruined girl feel? What must anyone who truly loves someone feel when they cannot help, or do not dare to help?”

More than sixty years ago, the author and journalist writing under the pseudonym Anonyma put these sentences into the diary that would later appear on bestseller lists.

Anonyma describes the struggle for survival and the humiliation of women through the mass rapes committed by Red Army soldiers in Berlin in 1945, without making violence and rape the sole focus of her account.

It remains a taboo even today. The film ANONYMA — A WOMAN IN BERLIN offers an opportunity finally to break that taboo and to connect the past with the present, because women in war zones are still raped, humiliated and used as “spoils of war” every day.

We are challenged to answer the questions that arise — as this film does: openly, honestly and without sparing us. Our children deserve this, as do all the women who, to this day, have been unable to speak about what happened to them.

We would like to encourage you to address this still-existing taboo in your lessons and seminars. The materials we have compiled are intended to support you in doing so.

Vera Conrad, together with the authors Regine Wenger and Rolf Thissen

Synopsis

It is the final days of the war, Berlin in April 1945. In the cellar of a half-destroyed apartment building people crouch and wait. They have survived the nights of bombing and the artillery fire. Most of them are women, and they have an idea of what awaits them. The Red Army is about to enter Berlin.

There is the ever-helpful widow (IRM HERMANN); the high-spirited sisters Bärbel (JÖRDIS TRIEBEL) and Greta (ROSALIE THOMASS); the elderly bookseller (KATHARINA BLASCHKE); the liqueur manufacturer (MARIA HARTMANN), whose husband left her for a younger woman; the lesbian couple Steffi (SANDRA HÜLLER) and Lisbeth (ISABELL GERSCHKE); the resolute eighty-year-old (ERNI MANGOLD); the desperate refugee girl (ANNE KANIS); mothers with their children; and a few older men from whom the war has drained all strength.

Above all there is Anonyma (NINA HOSS), not yet thirty, once a journalist and photographer. She records the events of the coming days for her partner Gerd (AUGUST DIEHL), who disappeared years earlier on the Eastern Front.

These will be days of terror and deeply contradictory experiences. Like most of the women, Anonyma is raped repeatedly by the victors. But she refuses to remain merely a victim. With courage and an absolute determination to defend her dignity, she makes a decision: she will find herself “a wolf,” a Russian officer who can protect her from the others. In return she will sleep with him — voluntarily.

Then something happens for which she is least prepared. The courteous, melancholy officer Andrei (EVGENY SIDIKHIN) awakens her interest. A genuine closeness develops. And yet they remain enemies to the end — he a Soviet soldier, she a German woman.

The other women also develop their own strategies, sometimes cheeky, sometimes submissive, often aimed at obtaining small advantages. It also becomes clear that the Soviet soldiers themselves long for human closeness. They settle into the bombed-out building. Finally, victors and vanquished even celebrate the end of the war together, like a wild dance on a volcano. Something does unite them: after a long war, they have escaped death.

After the terror of male violence and a whirl of emotions, a view toward the future slowly opens — a future in which normal life can begin again, very gradually. (Source: press booklet)

The Book

In three densely written school notebooks Anonyma — at the time still relatively young, but already a well-travelled journalist — recorded her experiences in Berlin from 20 April to 22 June 1945, when looting and raping Red Army soldiers moved through the city and she herself became a victim.

Beginning in July 1945, these notebooks were turned into 121 closely typed pages on grey wartime paper. Years later the typescript came, among others, into the hands of the writer Kurt W. Marek (C. W. Ceram), who quickly recognized the historical value of a document that went far beyond one woman's private experience.

Ceram honoured the author's wish to remain anonymous and arranged for a New York publisher to issue a translation in the autumn of 1954. A British edition followed in 1955. Since then translations have appeared in Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, French and Finnish.

A German-language edition of the original was published by a Swiss publisher in 1959, but it attracted little attention in the Federal Republic. Only when Hans Magnus Enzensberger included it in his “Die andere Bibliothek” series at Eichborn in 2003 did it become one of the most widely read books of the year, with critics almost unanimously praising it as an extraordinary contemporary testimony.

Enzensberger respected the wish of the author, who had died in 2001, to remain anonymous even after her death. At the end of September, however, the Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed Anonyma's identity. In Die Zeit of 2 October 2003 Iris Radisch called the disclosure a case of “journalistic machismo.” A day earlier Joachim Güntner, writing in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, one of Europe's most respected newspapers, had reached the harsh conclusion: “The evidence that would distinguish serious journalistic research from malicious gossip is still lacking.”

In January 2004 the writer Walter Kempowski, a recognized expert on diaries, spoke in favour of the authenticity of Anonyma's texts, helping to bring the unpleasant controversy to an end.

Notes by Producer Günter Rohrbach

It is the last great taboo of the Second World War. Even today there are few publications on the subject, even in academic research: no standard work and no reliable figures. Hundreds of thousands of women, especially in eastern Germany, were raped during the final weeks of the war. Some estimates range between one and two million, but they are not reliable. How could they be? Hardly anyone spoke publicly about it — least of all the women themselves. Even within families there was something like a ban on speaking. The shame was as great as the suffering, especially in relation to one's own husband and one's own children.

Where scholarship did approach the subject, it relied largely on the few written testimonies available. Historians work from files and documents; oral research has traditionally been less familiar to them. It was therefore journalists such as Erich Kuby (The Russians in Berlin 1945) and above all filmmaker Helke Sander who produced some of the most substantial work on the complex of mass rape.

Helke Sander's film BeFreier und Befreite appeared in the early 1990s together with a book of the same title. Alongside numerous personal testimonies, it attempted for the first time to quantify the shocking scale of the events. One may have doubts about the methodology used to arrive at those figures, but there can be no doubt that the scale was enormous and that the successful suppression of the subject can justifiably be called scandalous.

In men's wars, women have always been treated more or less as a self-evident form of booty. Today this might be described as “collateral damage.” Judging from reports from the former Yugoslavia, Iraq or Afghanistan, little has changed in our own time. Even so, the scale of the rapes in 1945 was extreme and unprecedented.

The taboo surrounding these events has many causes. The most important is Germany's own grave guilt. For decades it was difficult, indeed almost impossible, for Germans to deal with crimes of the Nazi era and the war in which they could also see themselves as victims. In post-war Germany this attitude was largely uncontested. Only more recently, and not without critical objections, has there been a willingness in some cases to admit a different perspective.

It undoubtedly also mattered that the perpetrators of many of these rapes were soldiers of the Red Army, while many of the victims became citizens of the GDR. In East Germany it was politically unacceptable to burden the “liberators” with such a stain.

It was therefore a remarkable exception when Bertolt Brecht wrote cautiously in his working journal on 25 October 1948, trying to do justice to both sides:

“Even now, after three years, I hear that among the workers the panic caused by the looting and rapes following the conquest of Berlin still trembles beneath the surface. In the working-class districts the liberators had been awaited with desperate joy, arms outstretched, but the encounter became an assault that spared neither seventy-year-olds nor twelve-year-olds and took place in full public view. It is reported that during the fighting Russian soldiers, bleeding, exhausted and embittered, still ceased fire to allow women to fetch water, led the hungry from their cellars to bakeries and helped dig out those buried beneath rubble; but after the fighting drunken hordes went through the apartments, fetched the women, shot men and women who resisted, raped in front of children, queued outside houses, and so on …”

Not least, the women themselves prevented the subject from being discussed. Understandably, they had no “interest” in being confronted again with something which, despite all the violence inflicted upon them, they often regarded as their own shame.

Even the ten-volume overall history of the Second World War edited by historian Rolf-Dieter Müller on behalf of the Military History Research Office treats the rapes only in passing. Again there are no figures: it uses the broad term “hundreds of thousands” and, faced with the impossibility of reliable quantification, speaks of victims as “countless and nameless.”

Whenever the crimes against women in Berlin in 1945 have been discussed during recent decades, people have repeatedly referred to Anonyma's diary A Woman in Berlin. It remains the best-known authentic published testimony dealing directly with the mass rapes of the final phase of the war. It is significant that the author refused to reveal her name even decades after the events she described. We respected her wish to remain anonymous beyond death, although her name has meanwhile become public elsewhere.

There have been attempts to question the authenticity of the document. They were not convincing. Walter Kempowski's expert assessment also refuted them. The events themselves are in any case beyond dispute.

Anonyma kept her diary in Berlin from 20 April to 22 June 1945 and, under the guidance of her mentor Kurt W. Marek — the well-known C. W. Ceram — first published these notes in an English translation in New York in 1954. The book was an immediate success. After roughly a dozen further foreign editions, it appeared in German at the end of the 1950s and passed largely unnoticed. The temporal distance was still too small, the wounds too fresh. In those years people were generally preoccupied with pushing the events of the Second World War as far as possible out of collective memory.

It was not only the content that deterred readers but above all the tone in which Anonyma processed her experiences. It is free of self-pity: no pathos of victimhood, no appeal for sympathy. She describes weeks of terror and persecution with self-confidence and with the brisk, matter-of-fact coolness so characteristic of a Berliner.

She refused to be broken, as did many women around her. Her will to survive was powerful. Nor did she shy away from “prostituting” herself when she saw no other way to secure survival.

But that was precisely what outraged many German readers of the 1950s: her willingness to do what seemed impossible, to ignore the rules of bourgeois morality with bold determination because obeying those rules would quite possibly have killed her, and then defiantly to write about it. Their image of the German woman allowed little beyond the role of sacrificial victim, even to the bitter end.

When Hans Magnus Enzensberger revived the book at the beginning of this century and published it in his “Other Library,” the response was overwhelmingly positive. Driven by the enthusiasm of critics, the book immediately entered the bestseller lists, and new editions followed in many countries.

I immediately sought the film rights. This was not simple because their holder — a friend of the deceased Anonyma and the widow of Kurt W. Marek — initially refused permission. She had to be persistently courted and persuaded. In the meantime many requests for the film rights had arrived from Germany and abroad, including the United States.

The film confronts the subject in a complex and unusual way. It does not tell a conventional victim story. It does not conceal who attacked in this war, who the perpetrators were and therefore who caused the catastrophe. It is not a film about “poor German women” and “evil Russian soldiers.” At the same time it does not evade the hard facts. This is a narrow line to walk, but it is possible because Anonyma herself made the courageous decision not to define herself only as a victim.

She also gave us the opportunity to avoid something that repeatedly happens in comparable German films: removing the protagonists from the political context of the Nazi era and thereby ideologically absolving them. We faced the fact that Anonyma was part of the system. “Was I for it myself? Against it?” she writes in her diary. “In any case I was right in the middle of it and breathed the air that surrounded us and coloured us, whether we wanted it to or not.” She was a journalist and therefore had few possibilities of escaping the expectations of those who ruled the country. She wrote texts of the kind that were written at the time, including by journalists who would later represent the democratic spirit of the Federal Republic.

We also tried to portray the Russian soldiers as human beings. Many were simple peasants who had been promised rich Germany as booty, as compensation for the suffering they had endured. No other people suffered anything close to the same number of casualties. Of the more than fifty million dead of the Second World War, more than half were citizens of the Soviet Union.

The rapes and the courageous self-assertion with which a group of Berlin women try to deal with them form the framework of the film. At its core, however, the film tells the highly dramatic story of two people who are enemies and nevertheless develop strong feelings for one another. We base this on cautious hints in the diarist's text, but permit ourselves to go beyond them.

“War changes words,” Anonyma says to her protector. “Love is no longer what it was.” When Gerd, her husband, returns at the end, we experience the true drama of the story. Most of the women endured their wounds with courage. It was the men who could not cope. (Source: press booklet)

Notes by Director Max Färberböck

When I first read Anonyma, I was divided. On the one hand I was shocked by what happened in Berlin. On the other, I was captivated by the intelligence and merciless clarity with which the anonymous author reported the events. I could not escape the pull of her narrative. Yet there remained a small, nagging distance. It had to do with the author's aura.

Her completely unsentimental way of writing, the hardness of her gaze at herself and everyone else — Germans and Russians alike — was unsettling. Why? Perhaps because a woman who had experienced something like this was expected to suffer more, to be more visibly a victim? A great many questions opened up, and the only thing I knew at the very beginning was that I would have to face them.

First came the question of the historical significance of the diary. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, kept silent about the events of that time. What happened was, and in many respects still is, taboo for both Germans and Russians. May one touch such a taboo? And if so, how can one write and stage such monstrosities without exposing or injuring the people who were involved? Who gives us the right to break the silence of so many people?

Historical subjects are popular. But precisely that often makes them questionable. Cinema and television can of course emotionalize history and make it “experienceable again.” But why? Must we appropriate every painful period simply because it yields good stories? Or may we stand over the past like a governess and dictate how life had to have been in order for it to fit into a plot that can be consumed today?

I think storytellers, and the film and television industry connected with them, are allowed to do this. The question is only whether these newly invented, often highly standardized narratives come even approximately eye to eye with the reality they depict; whether they try to let reality retain priority, or whether they are merely a drastic miniaturization of what actually happened.

With ANONYMA, my co-author Catharina Schuchmann and I tried to follow the diary and a great deal of additional research. Together with historian Dr Elke Scherstjanoi we entered this cruel and deeply contradictory period and tried to hear what it wanted to tell us in its many voices.

That took time. About seven months passed between my first and second meetings with my producer Günter Rohrbach — months filled with desperate yet strangely life-affirming women who, in order to survive, courageously pushed themselves beyond the suffering and collapse of their men. Women who preferred actively to “prostitute” themselves to one soldier rather than remain exposed to repeated rapes by many soldiers. It was a search for the smallest possible degrees of freedom in order to preserve one's personality and stay alive.

They were women who could be mocking, cheerful and sometimes bitter. Women who simply did not fit into a conventional plot. Yet more and more I wanted to tear them away from silence. Why? Because it matters to speak about how people react when precisely that which must never happen happens to them. Because what occurred then through rape is still happening every second somewhere in the world. And because perhaps it is also useful that a woman who prostitutes herself need no longer see the moral boundary she crosses only as her own private abyss.

How many of these women went on living with this “guilt,” which was no guilt at all, and with a lifelong silence that probably became heavier and heavier? How many men suspected something and also remained silent? What did these marriages look like later? It is impossible to approach these events without thinking about how profoundly they affected family life.

How many women lost respect for men they had once revered as heroes, mobilized their own strength and simply got on with the work? Today we might call that emancipation. At the time it was about silence, suppression and reconstruction — rebuilding not only the cities but also the sick and broken men who were needed again as heads of families as quickly as possible.

The author of ANONYMA saw all of this with a dissecting, sharp eye. She sensed the future and refused to remain silent. She was intelligent enough to recognize the timeless, almost archaic nature of these brutal processes. At the same time every detail, every human impulse mattered to her. She wanted to record, report and understand. She would have laughed at the hope that such a report might change life. Truth was closer to her than morality.

By describing a brief moment of sexual fulfilment with a Russian major she broke not only the taboo against allowing herself to be touched, but also the taboo against writing about it. She knew that someone who admitted such a thing would no longer be accepted as a model of moral world-improvement. I see it differently. Her courage in describing even the most extreme experience can only be an example to us all, because the command to remain silent in an era is often precisely what damages that era most.

And then there are the Russians — “the beasts.” Many of them had been brutalized by their own leadership; many were sent into the fire. Many were convinced Soviets, others were murderers and rapists. Soviet losses are estimated at about 26 million, at least half of them civilians: old people, women and children. Anyone who reached Berlin had seen fire and death and an endless amount of blood. Anyone who reached Berlin was capable of extremes. All of them? Certainly not.

Our judgement about Russian brutality is firmly established, even today. So why challenge it? Because the contradictions within the Red Army were enormous and because hundreds of thousands of soldiers were not rapists and murderers. In order to understand those who did not belong to that category, I wrote the first version of the screenplay from a Russian perspective. Only after that was I able to commit myself to the project with my extraordinarily patient producer. I would like to thank him here for his great trust and intensive collaboration.

I was less concerned than he was with “justice.” Given the historical complexity of the subject, I could not even say exactly what that means. But I know the events and their authenticity very well.

When one immerses oneself intensely in a period, it begins to speak through you. We heard the Russians' laughter, mockery and speeches. We smelled their raw liquor, saw their exuberance and brutality. We knew their powerful faces long before we worked our way through photographs of hundreds of Russian actors and around two thousand extras.

And at some point a miracle happened. The period we had been trying to understand stood in front of us: worn uniforms, exuberant joy, desire for revenge and violence; the anxious faces of women who did not know what was coming; the horribly bitter aftertaste of German crimes and the unconditional will to live. “Perhaps it could have been like this,” I thought. Now I only had to make the film.

One final word about the relationship between Anonyma and the major. Our research suggests that Anonyma may have felt more for him than the diary explicitly reveals. Nevertheless, like most women in those mercilessly constricted weeks, she remained without illusions. He was Soviet. She was German. Neither of them moved even a millimetre away from his or her own thinking or origin. And yet she could not help taking this profoundly foreign, idealistic and unpredictable man into herself.

Their story is one of a steadily growing attraction between enemies. They both knew they had no future. Yet each tried to give the other everything the war still allowed them: eyes, words, breath, heart. Is that love? Anonyma did not call it that. And if she had, perhaps she would have found another word. (Source: press booklet)

The Occupation of Berlin, 1945

In the so-called London Protocols of 12 September 1944 the Allies agreed that Greater Berlin, like Germany as a whole, would be divided into three sectors. At the Yalta Conference the heads of government of the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom approved this arrangement. The Western Allies did not move into Berlin, however, until after withdrawing from territory that would later become the Soviet Occupation Zone.

On 11 July 1945 the Allied Kommandatura, expanded to administer Berlin under four powers, began its work for the American, British, French and Soviet sectors. Until that date the Red Army had been the only occupying power in Berlin.

The so-called Battle of Berlin began on 16 April 1945 with a Red Army pincer movement intended to encircle the city. On the Soviet side around 2.5 million soldiers, including 180,000 Poles, fought with 6,250 tanks, 7,500 aircraft and well over 10,000 artillery pieces. Opposing them were about one million German soldiers with 800 tanks and fewer than 100 aircraft.

The Berlin garrison capitulated on 2 May 1945. Estimates put the losses in the fighting at around 250,000 dead and 450,000 wounded. At least 100,000 of the dead were civilians. Around 600,000 apartments had been destroyed.

The losses were so high partly because Stalin wanted Berlin captured as quickly as possible in order to secure a strategic advantage in later negotiations with the Western Allies, and partly because the Nazis had issued the order to defend Berlin “to the last man and the last cartridge.”

The Wehrmacht and SS units remaining in Berlin, together with the Volkssturm recruited from boys and elderly men, sometimes took that slogan bitterly seriously. They fought stubbornly for every building and every street, inflicting heavy losses on the Red Army with snipers and Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons. But the overwhelming force could not be stopped.

On 21 April the first Soviet units crossed Berlin's city boundary near Marzahn. On 25 April the encirclement of Berlin was complete. One of the last major battles developed around the Reichstag building, which SS troops held until 30 April.

On 8 May 1945 the Second World War in Europe ended after Colonel General Alfred Jodl, authorized by Hitler's successor Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, signed Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender.

A Diary from a Male Russian Perspective

In 2005 Aufbau Verlag in Berlin published Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946. Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten by Vladimir Gelfand — the first private wartime diary of a Red Army officer to appear in German. The authentic record of the young lieutenant, who turned twenty-two in March 1945, includes entries from the same period covered by Anonyma's diary.

Gelfand was an educated and well-read young man who occasionally wrote poetry. His rougher comrades and superiors often mocked him as an aesthete. As a Jew, he was also frequently passed over for decorations, something he complained about bitterly.

After Berlin was captured, Soviet soldiers were officially forbidden to socialize with Germans. Gelfand was outraged by this rule and did not obey it, especially when German girls were concerned. Violence, however, plays no part in his own encounters.

From more than 300 printed pages, the following is a somewhat longer entry written between 25 and 27 April 1945, after Gelfand's unit, the 301st Rifle Division, had just crossed the Spree near Treptower Park:

“The day before yesterday in an outer district of Berlin … I was riding a bicycle — incidentally, I had learned only the previous day how to move about on this, to my mind, wonderful device — and met a group of German women carrying bundles, packages and suitcases. […] In broken German I asked where they lived and why they had left their homes. Terrified, they told me about the suffering inflicted on them by the assault troops on the first night after the Red Army arrived.

They lived not far from our position and from the area where I made my bicycle excursions, so it was no problem for me to go home with them and investigate the whole story in detail, especially since I was drawn above all to one beautiful girl who now, by chance and completely unexpectedly for herself and her parents, stood face to face with someone belonging to those who had caused these painful experiences. I went with them.

[…] They did not live badly. A huge two-storey house with luxurious furniture, splendid interior decoration and paintings on the walls and ceilings. It was a large family. When our soldiers came, everyone was driven into the cellar. They took the youngest of the adult women, and probably the prettiest, and assaulted her.

‘They pushed me here,’ the beautiful German woman told me, lifting her skirt. ‘All night long, and there were so many of them. I was a virgin,’ she sighed and began to cry. ‘They destroyed my youth. There were old men, full of pimples, and all of them climbed on top of me, all of them pushed into me. There were more than twenty, yes, yes,’ and she burst into tears.

‘They raped my daughter in front of my eyes,’ the poor mother added. ‘And they can come back again and rape my girl again.’ Those words made everyone tremble once more with horror, and bitter sobbing echoed through the cellar into which the residents had led me.

‘Stay here!’ the girl suddenly urged me. ‘You will sleep with me. You may do anything you want with me, but only you alone!’ […] She showed everything, she spoke about everything, not because she was vulgar. Her grief and suffering were stronger than her shame and modesty. Now she was ready to undress completely in front of people if only no one would touch her tormented body — a body that might otherwise have remained untouched for several more years — if only no one would touch what had been so suddenly and brutally …

[…] The girl embraced me, begged me and smiled at me through tears with her whole face. It was difficult for her to plead with me, but she tried to employ the entire repertoire of a woman, and she played her role not badly. For me, who am attracted to everything beautiful, she could easily have won me over with her shining eyes, but the duty of a soldier, which stands above everything else, decided the matter, and I …”

[Here the diary entry breaks off in mid-sentence.]

Language Hostile to Victims

In her book Der verlorene Kampf um die Wörter. Opferfeindliche Sprache bei sexualisierter Gewalt. Ein Plädoyer für eine angemessene Sprachführung (“The Lost Battle for Words: Language Hostile to Victims in Sexualized Violence — A Plea for Appropriate Language”), published by Junfermann Verlag in Paderborn in 2007, author Monika Gerstendörfer argues convincingly that careless language can trivialize acts of sexually motivated violence and thereby humiliate and degrade victims a second time.

At the beginning of the book she writes:

“There are no ‘child desecrators.’ There are no ‘sex tourists.’ There is no ‘child pornography.’ There are no ‘sex murders.’ […] What is called ‘child pornography’ is by no means a staged sexual representation; it is the visual documentation of real abuse, up to and including torture. And a so-called sex murder is nothing other than a murder following physical and psychological torture. […] A man described as ‘paedophile’ is, in the literal sense, precisely not paedophile — not ‘child-loving’ — but the exact opposite. […] If the words, concepts and linguistic conventions surrounding sexualized violence help prevent us from understanding the problem, if current language itself becomes a dangerous weapon directed above all against victims, then it is absolutely necessary to insist on lasting change.”

The third chapter of the book deals with “War and Peace,” and Gerstendörfer discusses issues closely connected with ANONYMA — A WOMAN IN BERLIN. Under the heading “Political Functionalization during the Second World War,” she writes:

“The mass rapes of German women in the final weeks of the war and the first weeks of peace illustrate many things, including the fact that mass rape in Bosnia and elsewhere is not an invention of modern times. The rapes at the end of the war in April and May 1945 are nevertheless a special case — not only because they were committed on a massive scale. Women have always been treated as a kind of booty belonging to victorious ‘warriors,’ and rape has always been used as an act of revenge against an enemy.

[…] German women had no way to avoid all of this. In Berlin in April 1945 it was they who, despite the bombing, had to leave the shelters to obtain food, water and other necessities. They even cooked on wood stoves in the open streets and had to care for sick men. Nazi propaganda prepared them for rape through agitation and fear-mongering. A propaganda sheet for the defence of Berlin stated: ‘[…] With weapons drawn, this soldiery goes from house to house, stealing watches and jewellery and demanding liquor and cigarettes. In the evening the Inner Asian lechers search apartments for young German women and girls and violate them with the most brutal force.’

Such male propaganda spread fear and panic among women and at the same time incited men against the ‘evil Ivan.’ The fact is, however, that Russians were by no means the only ones who raped. The ‘liberators’ — Americans, British and French — did so as well. But the incitement of Goebbels and others continues to have an effect to this day. Hardly anyone thinks of Americans when discussing the mass rapes of the Second World War, and still less of the Wehrmacht brothels organized by Germans and the Nazis' so-called ‘joy divisions,’ in which Jewish women, Sinti women and others were forced to endure what women in the former Yugoslavia suffered only a few years ago.”

According to Gerstendörfer, the men who remained behind or later returned played a far from glorious role:

“It is important to ask how, and whether, German men who were called upon to protect women actually behaved. The truth is this: among hundreds of thousands there are said to have been only a few who stood up for their women and even gave their lives for them. The majority hid behind the women. The supposed ‘master men’ were unimaginably cowardly. Remarks such as ‘They won't do anything to you; you only have to lie still for a while. But they'll send us to Siberia’ speak for themselves […].

Another factor that could prove fatal for women and girls was — and is — so-called male honour. More than a few men sent their wives and daughters to their deaths and even gave them the poison or the rope. Many women are said to have suffered more from the accusations of their own husbands than from the rapists, whom they usually did not know at all.”

Her conclusion is: “Rape is a form of warfare, not a side effect of war.” And: “Society's general reaction to sexualized violence against women, to rape, is not so different in wartime from what it is in peacetime.”

The grim statistic she cites is that the number of women and girls raped in the Soviet occupation zone, the former eastern territories of Germany and during flight and expulsion has been estimated at 1.9 million.

Survival Strategies

One of the greatest strengths of the film ANONYMA — A WOMAN IN BERLIN may be that it brings survival strategies to the foreground and makes them a subject of discussion. This also makes the film highly relevant today. The audience is not simply confronted with a historical story; it is implicitly reminded that countless women in the war and crisis zones of the twenty-first century still face the same problems and traumas.

It may also revive memories that it is not long since systematic sexual violence against women took place almost “on our doorstep,” during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Dr Monika Hauser, a board member of medica mondiale, an organization supporting traumatized women and girls in war and crisis regions, also draws a direct line to the present. In a lecture at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin in August 2006, speaking on “The Eternal Taboo — Rape,” she said:

“On the basis of our many years of work in the war regions where medica mondiale is active, I draw a connection between the experiences of today's survivors and those of women in post-war Germany. I argue that there is a common patriarchal system which German and Western men resist recognizing: some of their patterns of behaviour and thought are entirely comparable, for example, with those of Afghan men. Sexualized violence is a constant companion before, during and after wars. Ordinary men make use of the limitless possibilities presented to them — possibilities that they might never actively create for themselves under the restrictive normality of peace.”

The subject's continuing relevance was demonstrated in June 2008 when the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1820, calling on all parties to armed conflict “immediately and completely [to] cease all acts of sexual violence against civilians” and to take measures for their protection.

The resolution officially recognizes rape as a tactic of war used to humiliate and dominate, to instil fear, and forcibly to displace civilians or members of particular ethnic groups. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who chaired the Security Council meeting, cited examples including the Democratic Republic of the Congo — where 32,000 cases of sexual assault had been reported in South Kivu — the Darfur crisis in western Sudan, and Burma.

“Rape is a crime that can never be excused. We have a special responsibility to punish those responsible for sexual violence,” Rice said.

The Security Council indirectly raised the possibility that perpetrators could be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, explicitly noting that rape and other forms of sexual violence may be prosecuted as war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts forming part of genocide.

Unfortunately, the problem is not confined to wartime. After wars or pogroms, the general level of violence in everyday life is often significantly higher than before, and women and girls feel the effects especially strongly.

A July 2008 press release by Germany's national association of women's counselling centres and rape crisis centres stated:

“Workers in rape crisis centres and women's counselling services know only too well that rape is also part of many cultures and societies in peacetime. It is not sexually motivated either in war or in peace; rather, sexuality is instrumentalized as a means of exercising power. The women and girls affected are almost always left alone with the profound consequences.”

Examples can be found almost everywhere. After the Khmer Rouge terror, observers in Cambodia reported in the summer of 2004 that participation in gang rape had become almost normal among some lower- and middle-class groups of young men. A group would obtain a girl and take her to a cheap hotel or similar place, where friends would appear — if they were not already waiting — and rape her together. The young men often showed no sense that they had committed a wrong; refusing to participate could mean losing face or exclusion from the group.

Comparable problems, alongside a rapidly rising number of people living with AIDS, were reported in South Africa. In 2004, 55,000 rapes were officially registered there. Unofficial estimates suggested that the true number of victims could be about twenty times higher. If so, a woman would have been raped in South Africa roughly every twenty-three seconds. At Cape Town's Groote Schuur Hospital, staff dealing with rape victims estimated that around 75 percent of sexual assaults involved gang rape.

Cambodia and South Africa may seem far away, but Germany too is affected when one looks at trafficking in women and children. According to estimates by the International Organization for Migration, more than one million women and children are sold worldwide each year. One cited comparison stated that an authoritarian state such as Belarus “exports” about 10,000 women and girls annually, while even a democratic state such as Germany “imports” an estimated 50,000 women and children.

The material gave the following source: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005-10-28-csmith-de.html.

Returning to the past, one fact about the occupation of Berlin has remained almost completely taboo: adolescent boys were also raped. Psychologist Monika Gerstendörfer comments that sexualized violence is fundamentally about destroying what makes a person who they are, through complete humiliation. In war, she argues, it serves the total and collective humiliation of the enemy.

Women are treated as the enemy's “property” and are thus symbolically taken from him; once violated and perhaps impregnated by the enemy, they are marked as dishonoured. Gerstendörfer connects this with the idea of genocide through violence against women.

With adolescent boys, she argues, the pattern and intention may be similar. They are the sons of the enemy's men, potential future enemies and the next generation. If they too are humiliated — and sexualized violence is an especially powerful way to do so — then girls, women of every age and growing boys can all be damaged for the long term.

For boys and men, sexualized violence may create the myth of “emasculation,” both in the eyes of others and in their own experience. Many victims therefore do not speak. Without appropriate information, some may wrongly interpret involuntary physiological reactions during anal rape as evidence about their sexuality. Such bodily reactions are sensory reflexes and have nothing to do with sexual desire. Again, Gerstendörfer argues, the fatal mistake is to confuse the categories of sexuality and violence.

Before, during and after the occupation of Berlin, men were generally unable to provide much protection for women. Demography itself made this impossible. Of Berlin's pre-war population of 4.3 million in 1939, at most 2.8 million remained. Two thirds were girls and women of all ages. The male third of the civilian population consisted largely of children and adolescents under sixteen and men over sixty.

Obtaining water, food, clothing and fuel therefore fell largely to women, who often risked their lives doing so. During the eleven weeks before the Red Army began its ground offensive against Berlin in mid-April, the city had been subjected to eighty-five air raids, mainly by American and British formations. About 200,000 people were either killed or driven to flee the city. Anonyma's diary also devotes long passages to the difficulties involved in obtaining the most basic necessities of daily life.

After the war, conditions improved only slowly for women and men alike. In April 1947, two years after the Battle of Berlin, the Allied foreign ministers announced that the following numbers of German soldiers were still prisoners of war: 30,967 held by the Americans, 435,295 by the British, 631,483 by the French and 890,532 by the Soviets. The last figure was especially shocking because people had previously assumed that as many as three million Germans were still prisoners in the Soviet Union.

And when the men came home, what condition were they in? Many were broken in body and soul. As already mentioned, this did not prevent some from blaming their wives in part for what had happened to them, including the rapes. The last German prisoners of war returned to the Federal Republic at the end of 1955. Like all those released only after 1947, they were called Spätheimkehrer — “late returnees.” By law they received compensation of thirty Deutsche Marks for every month spent in captivity.

One could also put it this way: it was above all women who laid the foundations for what came to be called the “economic miracle” in the 1960s. The lessons in survival strategies that they had been forced to learn and apply during the war and the post-war years would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Film-Education and Methodological Suggestions for Working with ANONYMA — A WOMAN IN BERLIN

Themes and curriculum connections, from Grade 10 onward

Preparing for the Cinema Visit

“Now everything belongs to everyone.” — Seven days in Anonyma's life: a description of the situation in Berlin from 20 to 27 April 1945.

Possible learning goals include treating an unfamiliar text as a historical literary source; practising techniques such as summarizing lines of thought or citing important passages; recognizing and evaluating the diary as a literary form; and placing the content historically within the final days of the Second World War and the capture of Berlin by the Soviet army.

Anonyma described her roughly two months of notes as an “attempt at a written conversation with myself,” not originally intended for publication. A gifted writer, she used her ability to process the extreme experiences through which she was passing. Perhaps only her husband Gerd would ever see the notebooks.

This authentic account therefore differs from the familiar categories of German post-war “rubble literature” or “clear-cut literature” associated with writers such as Borchert, Böll and Group 47.

The experience of life-threatening reality changes language. It becomes harder and more concrete without entirely escaping the writer's education and cultural background.

War leaves external and internal traces: burned-out shells of buildings; streets resembling lunar landscapes; loss of speech; frozen expressions and eyes; fear, insomnia and abnormal behaviour. Hunger, need, misery, brutalization, despair and even feelings of guilt simply for having survived are elementary human experiences reflected in the images of the film and have lost none of their relevance.

Task: Work with the diary excerpt as a historical and literary source; identify central thoughts and passages and place them in the historical context of the last days of the war in Berlin.

Following Up the Cinema Visit

The film interpretation allows the narrated events to be rendered more concretely while at the same time reducing events to significant moments and actions. A selected group of characters is staged at a defined place and time. Precisely in periods of speechlessness such as that described in the book, images take over where words have become sparse and communicate the emotional condition of the principal characters — in some sequences almost in the form of chamber drama, for example in the scenes after the men return home.

“It began with silence.” — The day of catastrophe: the film's action.

Suggested topics include examining the content and structure of the plot: main and secondary storylines, principal actors in the action, narrative technique, and the way these are realized through cinematic means.

Task: Analyse how the film organizes its central and secondary actions and how camera, editing, acting and narrative structure translate the diary into film.

“Nothing Shall Touch Me Any More!” — Survival Strategies in an Extreme Situation

Students can identify and reflect on phases of human survival strategies through a concrete example; recognize and discuss changes in moral and value systems from gender-specific perspectives; and express and debate women's and men's viewpoints in the form of media headlines.

The usual patterns of adaptation, values and psychological defence mechanisms can collapse in an extreme situation such as a devastating war. People reach the limits of physical and psychological endurance. Powerlessness, irrational feelings and depression, but also aggression, the will to survive, the search for comfort, safety and emotional stability, and the ability to suppress painful experience — compare the Stockholm syndrome — can alter personal attitudes, private relationships and social connections.

The social division of roles between women and men had already been thrown out of joint, even though patriarchal ways of thinking officially remained dominant. In 1949 Article 3, paragraph 2 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany enshrined equality between women and men. Only in 1957 was family law changed, removing restrictions on married women's employment and the numerus clausus for female university students that had existed since 1934.

“What Is That Supposed to Mean, for Example? … ‘Rape’” — Breaking Taboos

The material proposes confronting social norms of living together and examining the role of taboos in society, forming one's own position, justifying it and making it understandable to others.

Anonyma writes: “Well, the wild indiscriminate raping of the first days is over. The booty has become scarce. And, as I hear, other women too are now, like me, in steady hands and therefore taboo. … But that still does not answer the question whether I must now call myself a whore, since in practice I live from my body and receive food in exchange for surrendering it. … After all, it is an old and venerable profession and reaches all the way up into the highest circles. …” (from Anonyma — A Woman in Berlin)

Women such as Anonyma, who despite humiliation and assaults on their person tried to preserve respect for themselves and their self-esteem, were a minority. It is therefore hardly surprising that the author stipulated that her identity should not be revealed during her lifetime or after her death.

Breaking such taboos, and taboos surrounding the Third Reich more generally, remains a risky undertaking even today. Yet it is important to create and perceive images that provoke reflection, including those from which people often turn away because they show frightening aspects of human behaviour.

Task: The contribution by Claudia Schmölders mentioned in the teaching tips can also be used to discuss questions of human ethics. Students may conduct a structured pro-and-con discussion about a selected taboo and write a joint statement for publication on the class or project blog.

© Constantin Film

Additional Text from the Scanned Film Booklet

Imprint

Publisher: Vera Conrad, Schmellerstraße 26, 80337 Munich
Responsible editor: Vera Conrad, vera.conrad@t-online.de
Practical exercises: Regine Wenger, reg.wenger@gmx.de
Texts about the film: Rolf Thissen, rolf.thissen@fanesfilm.de
Graphic design / printing: FAMILY Print Production Services GmbH, Munich
Distribution: Sabine Heinroth, sabine.heinroth@education-gmbh.de