Twentieth-Century Literature “A World of Tomorrow”: Trauma, Urbicide, and Documentation in A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City

Volume 66, Issue 2

RESEARCH ARTICLE JUNE 01 2020

Twentieth-Century Literature (2020) 66 (2): 185–206.
Online ISSN 2325-8101 Print ISSN 0041-462X

Sarah E. Cornish is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Northern Colorado, where she teaches courses in transatlantic modernism, modern women writers, and film studies. She is cofounder of the Feminist inter/Modernist Association, and her research on the modern city and material culture in interwar and midcentury literature and film focuses particularly on women writers and makers. Her work has been published in Feminist Modernist Studies, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, The Space Between, Woolf Studies Annual, the Rocky Mountain Review, and in the MLA volume Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English.

“A World of Tomorrow”: Trauma, Urbicide, and Documentation in A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City

[…] World War II diary A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City (2005) documents one woman’s story of survival in the spring of 1945 in Berlin, during which upward of 130,000 women were raped by soldiers of the Red Army. First, this essay introduces the politics of recuperating the English translation of the diary within the context of the scant supporting historical documentation and memorialization of Berliner women’s experience during the occupation. Second, it demonstrates how the diary produces a feminist account of survival and a narrative for collective trauma by examining the diarist’s representations of the effects of rape and rubblestrewn Berlin. Third, the essay details the complicated publication history of the diary through a consideration of the relationship between the trauma sustained by the survivors of mass rape and the blows to German national identity that it […]

[…] journalist Lucy Ash, in a BBC World Service radio piece, “The Rape of Berlin,” which aired on May 2, 2015, threads together some of the narrative surrounding the eight weeks of occupation, including a brief reference to the diary and its 2008 film adaptation. Her piece focuses especially on the grown children of rape survivors and Russian soldiers who want to tell the stories of their parents, put them into print, or memorialize their experiences in other ways, but who face tremendous resistance. Tellingly, Ash reports that there is just one plaque that alludes to the women who survived the Red Army’s terror, a granite stone that looks more like a marker for a “collective grave,” in Berlin’s Lilienthalstrasse Cemetery (Friedhof Lilienthalstrasse). The stone’s inscription reads, “Against war and violence for the victims of expulsion, deportation, rape, and forced labor, innocent children, mothers, women, and girls, their sufferings in the second world war should be unforgotten to prevent future suffering” (Ash 2015; my transcription)—a formulation in which the historically specific experience of those who were raped by the Red Army is dissolved into the vast canvas of all those who suffered and died during the whole of World War II. According to Ash, even now it is still taboo to discuss that mass rape, and the Russians she interviews about it speak of the laws put in place to prevent the denigration of the Russian army, ensuring that rape narratives remain buried. The film adaptation that followed the reprinting of A Woman in Berlin, entitled Anonyma (2008), directed by Max Färberböck and starring popular German actor Nina Hoss, did prompt some surviving women to begin to tell their stories at least to their families, Ash’s piece suggests, but most of these narratives have not been recorded or put into print in any formal way. While Anonyma itself is not true to the tone of the diary and, indeed, invents a rather saccharine love story out of trauma, its release did have a cathartic effect for those survivors still living, Philip Coovert reported to Ash, after having in 2008 collected narratives from twenty-seven elderly patients about the rapes. In conjunction with the film’s screening, Coovert held a panel discussion, after which many people contacted him to talk about their experiences, suggesting, Coovert told Ash, that because there was “never a possibility to give the survivors official acknowledgement” (quoted in Ash 2015), the film served as such. As Ash demonstrates through her interviews, the work of recovering narratives about what happened and thus moving toward recovery from trauma is still just beginning, and those engaged in it, especially in Russia and Germany, often meet difficulty when attempting to get their research […]

[…] diarist records that rape was so widespread that there were almost no women who had not been attacked multiple times, even those who were elderly or disabled. Oddly, their collective experiences promoted a sense of unity and kinship among them. Rather than greeting another woman with “hello” or “good morning,” one might say, “How many times were you raped?” (WB 204). Talking about being raped becomes, for these women, an act of survival. The women even begin to develop a sense of dark humor about the experiences, especially notable when the widow with whom the diarist lives makes and often repeats a crude joke about the youthful, firm condition of her vagina. The diarist also expresses, boldly, her changing perceptions of the German man. In one particularly telling passage, she writes,
These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards 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. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. 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 women, 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 […]

[…] like that above abound within the diary. There are numerous exchanges the diarist recounts with the men who stayed in Berlin, and who watched and listened to their wives and daughters being attacked, and for which she offers scathing commentary on the changing attitudes of men. For example: “I think our men must feel even dirtier than we do, sullied as we are. In line at the pump one woman told me how her neighbor reacted when the Russians fell on her in her basement: he simply shouted, ‘Well, why don’t you just go with them, you’re putting us all in danger!’ A minor footnote to the Decline of the West” (75). However, the women’s narratives are submerged once the men return home and begin rebuilding the city. It was considered a mark of immorality and of shame to have been raped, and the German men, suffering from the intense emasculation and their own sort of shame brought by the fall of the Reich, the condemnation of their masculinist ideology and propaganda, and the war’s shocking number of casualties, did not allow women to talk about their experiences, especially when those experiences included bodily violation. Women represented home and nation to returning soldiers, and the infiltration of both, now represented by women’s raped bodies, was too much to bear.9 The author of the diary shows this when her fiancé Gerd returns from the front. They cannot seem to connect any longer, and he says to her, “You’ve all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches, every one of you in the building. Don’t you realize? . . . It’s horrible being around you. You’ve lost all sense of measure” (259). She tries to make him understand by offering him the three notebooks full of what has transpired. While reading, he comes across a word in shorthand, “Schdg” and asks her what it means; “‘Schändung,’ of course—rape” (260), she tells him. He closes the diary, does not speak to her, and leaves the next […]

[…] Ash interviews Vitaly Gelfand, for instance, whose father, Vladimir Gelfand, left behind a war diary that Vitaly has been unable to publish. Similarly, Vera Dubina, a historian at the University of Humanities in Moscow, who has written on the subject of rape has had difficulty getting her work published. “The Russian media reacted very aggressively,” she recounts, “people only want to hear about our glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War and now it is getting harder to do proper research” (quoted in Ash 2015 […]

BBC News, By Lucy Ash "The rape of Berlin"
BBC World Service "The Rape of Berlin", BBC RADIO 4 FM, By Lucy Ash

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“A World of Tomorrow”: Trauma, Urbicide, and Documentation in A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City

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