A Woman in Berlin

“The horizon has shrunk to three hundred paces.”

Enemies surround Berlin and bombing raids take place nightly, and Marta’s experience with the war becomes much more immediate. Once, she dreamed of holidays abroad and tours of the world, but now, it is impossible for her to conceive of a journey more than a few minutes away. The horizon looms ever closer and the Berlin residents face a reckoning; she cannot imagine anything outside of this small and desperate world.

“We are debasing our language in expectation of the impending humiliation.”

This quote illustrates the relationship between nationalism and language. As the Russians close in, the inhabitants of the shelter begin to curse and use profane language, losing their ability to remain nationalistic and pro-German. They debase their language by using coarse words, revealing their diminishing national pride. 

“Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.”

As the women in Berlin fight hard and endure untold horrors, the men mope, already broken by the war. To Marta, this contrast in behavior is evidence of the superiority of the women and the destruction of the myth of women as the “weaker sex.”

“We speak in whispers, our breathing is forced, we gulp down the hot malt coffee (which the bookseller cooked on the stove over a fire of Nazi literature, as he tells us).”

The arrival of the Russians signals the destruction of the Nazi ideology which asserts that German people are strong and superior. This image of a bookseller burning his collection of Nazi literature to cook and to provide warmth to the household is ironic; not only are the words worth only the heat they can provide, but the Nazis themselves had a predilection for book burning as a political act. The Nazi ideology is finally consumed by its own destructiveness. 

“I am a chelav’ek—‘a person’.”

Anatol corrects Marta’s Russian in this passage after she labels him a bear; Marta knows what the word means, but Anatol thinks she has made a mistake and points out that he is, in fact, a person. Anatol, a man who rapes Marta and who oversees thousands of rapes each day, unafraid of using violence to get what he wants, ironically insists on his humanity. His inability to realize that Marta was talking about him in metaphorical terms reflects his lack of education and his guilty conscience. Anatol wants to see himself as human, even if he is part of an inhumane force. 

“Yes, girls are a commodity in short supply.”

In a matter of days, the Russian attitudes towards women in Berlin has changed. Marta notices that most men have dehumanized the German women to the point where they have stopped caring about the personal details of the women they use as receptacles for their violent impulses. Marta notes this fact out loud, and her tone is deliberately ambiguous. 

“Which still isn’t an answer to the question of whether I should now call myself a whore, since I am essentially living off my body, trading it for something to eat.”

Marta struggles to define her situation with the Major. She questions her own actions because she cannot determine if her relationship with the Major is prostitution. She receives goods and gifts in exchange for sex, and she does not believe that the Major is raping her, so the question seems unanswerable. The fact that Marta is asking such a question of herself reveals that she is an introspective character, capable of emotional honesty at even the most trying times. 

“I felt rotten.”

At this moment, Marta finds herself in a compromising position. She has had sex with both Anatol and the Major in the hope that they will offer her protection during a difficult time. Anatol has been violent with her and she cannot class her time with the Major as rape, so neither relationship is on equal footing. Marta feels “rotten” about lying to the Major, and she blames herself even though she is doing what she can to stay alive. 

“She howled into the pillow and wanted to die.”

For the first time, the narrative switches from first person to third person. Marta writes a more figurative and floral description of the scene which she has just described. In the context of the diary, this passage reveals Marta’s skill as a writer and her ability to find the emotional core of a scene, illustrating why the diary is a successful example of writing that captures the tension of war-ravaged Berlin. 

“But here we’re dealing with a collective experience, something foreseen and feared many times in advance, that happened to women right and left, all somehow part of the bargain.”

Marta recognizes that the volume of rapes turns individual crimes and tragedies into something bigger, something which affects the people on a societal level. The pain and the suffering experienced by one woman is instantly understand by others; sympathy and empathy exist in abundance, as the collective experience of enduring so much rape and violence has bound the women of the society together as one. 

“These girls have been forever deprived of love’s first fruits.”

Marta sums up the full extent of the damage done to the girls sheltered by Gisela. Not only have the rapes caused physical pain and psychological damage, they have also deprived them of the joy of experiencing love for the first time on their own terms. Not only have the girls suffered; they have also lost their potential for joy. 

“I’m waiting for the first moment in my life when I tear a piece of bread out of the hands of someone weaker.”

Marta accepts that few moral boundaries exist which desperate people will not cross. She has witnessed firsthand what hunger and desperation can do to people, and she does not elevate herself above others in this respect. She acknowledges that she may one day be desperate enough to take food from a weaker person. Marta’s traumatizing experiences have shaped this negative, cynical view on life.

“Incidentally an official expression has been invented to describe the whole business of raping: ‘forced intercourse’.”

As life begins to return to normal in Berlin, the population must confront the violence against women. Rather than confronting the issue head on, as many women do when talking to one another, officials attempt to obscure and diffuse the reality of the situation through euphemistic language. The use of the expression ‘forced intercourse’ takes a violent, emotive word like ‘rape’ and softens it, turning it into a technical expression which diminishes the violence and horror typically associated with the word. In the aftermath of such violence, society actively tries to forget what has happened to these women, and the use of euphemism facilitates this process.

“I feel so hopelessly alone.”

Marta’s descriptions of her life during the fall of Berlin are often very guarded. Her experiences have taught her to be reserved and cynical, so admissions of raw emotion like the one in this passage reveal the heart of her character. At this point, Marta has spent days working hard and washing laundry, talking with other women who share her experiences. She arrives home and eats with others in her building. Here, at the end of a diary entry, she is finally honest with herself about her feelings of loneliness. 

“And still this page is smudged with a tear.”

Again, Marta provides insight into her emotional state. Marta does not say that she is sad, but she describes a diary page moistened by a tear, revealing her sadness in a poetic way. This indirect communication suggests that Marta feels a need to create a protective barrier between her emotions and her reality. 

“The May rent was cancelled: in the official records for 1945, that month won’t count.”

As the Russians prepare to leave the city, the Germans attempt to navigate the aftermath of a traumatic event. While the women talk to one another about the mass rapes and the men attempt to turn a deaf ear, the official records are making a concerted effort to pretend that nothing happened. The month of May, as evidenced by the rent cancellations, simply does not exist. This bureaucratic attempt to repress a memory enables officials to pretend that nothing untoward took place. 

“He sees skyscrapers where we see rubble, and dreams of a giant consortium.”

The Hungarian man is the only character who has hopes and ambitions for the future. While many of the Germans are too traumatized to think about anything beyond their next meal, the Hungarian has ambitions of building a publishing empire out of the Berlin rubble. Because he is neither German nor female, he was not as relentlessly targeted by the Russians, and to Marta, he seems a strange entity. 

“The black market is dying.”

The death of the black market in Berlin communicates the extent to which society has collapsed. People are too scared to spend the little money they have, so even the black market has dried up. Marta chooses to starve herself and to work hard to save money instead of spending Nikolai’s on food. Uncertainty and collapse have become accepted facts of life to Marta and other residents of post-war Berlin. 

“All I know is that we Germans are finished.”

The diary focuses on the lives of the people of Berlin on a very small scale, and Marta occasionally draws back and allows the forces of history to take over her narrative. The above quote speaks to the geopolitical realities of the German state after the war. Such considerations seem to operate separately from the actual difficulties that she faces on a day-to-day basis. The fact that Marta takes time to reflect upon these difficulties reveals that she understands the global implications of what has happened in her home country. 

“Bitter, bitter defeat.”

Marta spends much her life walking long miles and scavenging what food she can. To her, these pastimes are the reality of the German defeat, and she sees bitterness and dread in the face of every German person she passes in the street. The entire country is coming to terms with the reality of having lost the war; losing means no food and seemingly no joy for the foreseeable future. 

“To the rest of the world we’re nothing but rubble-women and trash.”

When Marta receives a haircut, she reflects on her bitter views regarding the way she believes she is perceived by society. While the city is still in ruins, Marta sees herself as a product of the ruins. The “rubble-women and trash” are equivalent to the ruined city, as destroyed and broken and as undervalued as Berlin itself. 

“The most horrific thing is the order and the thrift: millions of human beings as fertilizer, mattress-stuffing, soft soap, felt maps—Aeschylus never saw anything like that.”

Marta describes the horrors faced by the people of Berlin in the final days of the Second World War, but she soon learns the truth about what happened in the Nazi extermination camps. While Marta reflects on her own suffering and hunger, she listens to stories about the mass slaughter of Jewish people and compares her situation to theirs. This comparison introduces notions of guilt and regret, which complicate any possible joy she might feel at surviving the most difficult period of her life. 

“For a long time neither of us said a thing; we just stared at each other in the dim hallway like two ghosts.”

When Gerd, Marta’s old boyfriend, returns at the end of the diary, she describes their first meeting as one that takes place between two ghosts, or two shells of the individuals who last saw each other six years before. Both Gerd and Marta have changed so much, so when they face one another, they stare at the ghosts of their past. Marta compares the two of them to ghosts because their old selves are dead. This awkward reunion is far from the joyous coming together it might have been thanks to the extensive trauma that exists between the two.