Not So Fragile

Each time we visit my father-in-law, he presses reading material on me - usually the latest New Yorker, or the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, or the New York Review of Books. He can no longer see well enough to read them and he seems to want to give them to someone who can. I've been so busy lately that my reading of anything other than online news and blogs has been minimal, but for this stay in Montreal I brought along two NYRBs and two New Yorkers, and the newest ssue of World Literature Today (WLT), and have actually made a dent in them. The New Yorker is way down in my estimation these days; in fact I'm feeling less and less enamored of regular magazines - they feel increasingly unfresh, studied, overly planned, formulaic and repetitive. I blow hot and cold on the NYRB; cold when it gets overly academic and self-conscious, warmer when someone actually writes a review that is about the book and its author more than it is about the reviewer. In both of these publications, I think these criticisms are the result of celebrity journalism and celebrity reviewers. I like WLT because it's not that way, and it brings a lot of authors to my attention through in-depth appreciation of the writers and their work - an opposite approach, really, since these are often obscure authors for an English-speaking public, as opposed to the New Yorker's chosen few: the olive-wreathed luminaries of the current literary scene.

In any case, I was struck by a review by Gabriele Annan in the Ocotber 6 NYRB of a recently published, anonymous diary written by a German woman during the Russian occupation of Berlin during WWII. The book is called A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. The author, who was 34 when she wrote the diary, died in 2001. We know that she was a journalist and editor, and that she was very well educated and well-read, especially in the classics. From the excerpts published with the article, it's clear this is a remarkable book by a remarkable person who must have felt her kinship with the Trojan Women during those eight weeks.

What happened during the occupation was "hunger, destruction and rape". According to estimates, over 100,000 German women were raped after Berlin was taken by the Russian army. The author - and virtually all of her female friends - were among them. She writes of feeling hungry all the time; she writes of feeling filthy and not being able to get clean; she writes of the rapes and her plan - which succeeded - to latch onto an officer who would protect her from the hoards in return for "the service" of her body. He is careful and apologetic, he can sing, and she says that what he does could not possibly be called rape. Still:

"For the moment I've had it up to here with men and their desire; I can't imagine longing for any of that again. Am I doing it for bacon, butter, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent I'm sure I am."

Most of all she seems to retain the capacity, in spite of the situation in which she finds herself, to observe and record what is happening and her own feelings with a certain detachment and clarity that I find rare and moving; for me this is the nobility contained in just a few literary works, from the Iliad to the poetry of Anna Akhmatova.

"And yet I don't want to fence myself off; I want to give myself over to this communal sense of humanity...there's a split between my aloofness, the desire to keep my provate life to myself, and the urge to be like everyone else, to belong to the nation, to abide and suffer history together."

After the armistice, the officers depart; the electricity comes back. Someone plays a recording of Beethoven; she says she turned it off - "Who can bear it?" There is forced labor for everyone between 15 and 55 and her despair grows about the future: "Peace", writes Annan, "seems to have been a gray, gloomy anticlimax" to the sense of shared suffering during the war and occupation. But eventually the author begins to feel better - when she begins reading again: Rilke, Goethe and Hauptmann. "The fact that they were also Germans is some consolation," she writes. "That they were our kind too."

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Comments

[Marja-Leena]

This is a beautiful commentary on the German woman writer, Beth! What struck me too, is the sense of understanding for the trials of the German people after the war, instead of the name-calling (Nazis) and hatred still perpetrated by many people, even 60 years later. In any country and any war, the ordinary people aren't guilty, but are innocent victims of bad leaders. I wish people would forget the past wars and move on and improve the lives of those who still suffer from war. (Sorry, Beth, I've gone off the topic again here... this obviously touched something in me.)

[beth]

No apologies necessary, M-L -- I'm always glad for your thoughtful comments!

[Joerg]

You probably also want to read the article right before this one - it indirectly refers to it. Needless to say, reading the first one (which talks about more general aspects of guilt, shame, punishment etc. in Europe) in the end does not help at all because what you realize is that you cannot disentangle every aspect of how to deal with, say, the Germans after World War II. They did kill millions of Jews, and millions of them suffered horrible deaths themselves - and even this seemingly innocent description will probably make everybody fly into some rage: Why "they"? Were all Germans killers? If not, how do you make a distinction? If you want to make a distinction how do you want to do it? And if you do make a distinction doesn't that belittle the suffering of others? Etc. etc.

Everything related to this subject is almost a hopeless mess, because it's almost impossible to separate issues. I personally am glad that stories like these are now being re-published. After all, I think what people will have to realize is that there is no simple explanation for pieces of history like this one. You cannot try to "reconcile" the murder of the Jews with the bombing of German cities. I think you have to just take them as what they are, and if you can arrive at a state where you feel sorry for anybody who lost his life, then maybe you've come to the only conclusion (of sorts) which ends up having a hint of humanity in it. In any case, the standard black-and-white thinking that people seem to prefer when dealing with this epoch doesn't get you anywhere.

It's interesting to know that the book wasn't published in Germany until a few years ago. The first German edition was published in Switzerland, I think in the 1950s, and it was basically completely ignored in Germany. You'd imagine that if would be different; but it appears that only recentlyhave Germans become aware of those parts of their history, while, at the same time, digging ever deeper into their Nazi past. It is quite fascinating to watch.

[maria]

I have been trying to bring myself to read this book, as I have followed articles about it. Yule, on her blog:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/yulelog/

wrote about this (though I don't have time right now to research the link to the actual post!) and included links to lots of German resources and articles 9she herself had lived in germany before), and like Joerg, pointed to the ways in which this book was not and could not be published in Germany for years.

[zhoen]

I kept thinking about how women during war are in such an impossible position. If they don't fraternize, they starve, are raped, killed. If they do, and survive, they are excoriated after the war (as in France, where female "collaborators" were mobbed and had their hair shaved off. ) Treated as spoils, as in Algieria (?) and then rejected by their families because they are not virgins. Scapegoats and victims and monsters all in one.

I'm going to go read the Fortean Times, at least that is not supposed to make logical sense.

[beth]

Joerg, thanks for your long, thoughtful comment (as always!). I'm going to read the other article tonight - thanks for pointing it out as a sort of companion piece.

Maria - I do want to read it; I'll look at what Yule has been saying about it too.

and Zhoen - you're totally right. In this book the woman's fiance returns from the war and is disgusted by the women and says so; he leaves and she doesn't care. I didn't make that comment about The Trojan Women lightly - Euripedes' play, written so very long ago, speaks about the very same tragedy and the same powerlessness. And of course, Cassandra was one of them.