in the Zone, "rubble women and trash" & "the walking machine"

[pynchonoid]

Bearing and recording degradation
In 1945, an astute German woman faces hunger, rape and
chaos

Reviewed by Edie Meidav
Sunday, August 7, 2005
 

A Woman in Berlin
Eight Weeks in the Conquered City
By Anonymous; translation by Philip Boehm


[...] destined to be a classic, given its depiction of
one woman's candid response to an unambiguously
horrible season, the vanquishing of Berlin by the
Soviets over eight life-changing weeks in the spring
and early summer of 1945.

In contrast to many Holocaust diaries, its author was
a woman lacking Jewish ties, a German journalist in
her 30s who had traveled abroad and who spoke a bit of
Russian, her relative fluency becoming both a burden
and a privilege once the "Ivans" entered Berlin. "An
orphan," she says of herself at one point, "a
pale-faced blonde always dressed in the same winter
coat." Written often in a basement air raid shelter or
in an apartment sacked daily, on scraps and shreds, it
was issued in Germany in the '50s, only to be met with
a shaming reception, given the book's frank account of
rape in war. Hence the author, who died in 2001, chose
to remain Anonymous.

Because some of the author's most complex thoughts
concern the nexus of gender and war, including the
weakening of prewar ideas of German masculinity, the
published diary was no naif's tale. The intelligent
introduction by Anthony Beevor makes the useful point
that rapes by Stalin's army were less often a terror
tactic, as was the case in the Spanish Civil War and
Bosnia, and more pertinently arose from what Russian
psychiatrists have called barrack eroticism, "created
by Stalinist sexual repression during the 1930s (which
may also explain why Soviet soldiers seemed to need to
get drunk before attacking their victims)."

[...] Several sorts of archetypal scenes take place
frequently, including the piecing together of a meal
out of nothing, running down stairs to the shelter or
volunteering in some useless, well-meaning effort. The
most socially dense moments are those when Anonymous
considers which of the conquering soldiers she should
entertain at night: Who among them will act as a
"single wolf to keep away the pack"? How can she
prevent more of the gang rape she encountered early
on? She is clever and survives, and later, after a
calm settles in, wonders if she might not have been
more clever and survived with greater feeling intact.
"To the rest of the world we're nothing but rubble
women and trash," she says later on. When she chokes
on her own words, we understand that she feels more
than she can write, and such moments sing out, among
the most moving in an already gripping testament. When
her long-lost soldier boyfriend returns, when she
shows him her diary, she feels she has lost her
connection to him. "For him I've been spoiled," she
mourns. Early on, she has begun to dissociate,
referring to her depleted self in the third person as
"the walking machine." [...] 


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