History: One of the most significant but least remarked phenomena of the second World War is the brief period of freedom - of liberation - that was afforded a large number of women due to the absence of men from field and factory.
The phenomenon was largely confined to countries on the Allied side of the conflict, Britain and America especially - in the Soviet Union women had been, for better or worse, fully integrated into the workforce since the Revolution - as suddenly those who before were mothers, wives, daughters or girlfriends put on dungarees, took spade or spanner in hand, and set to work on the land and in heavy industry, including bomb making and aircraft manufacture. Even in offices and public institutions, women, or at least a determined few, were allowed, however grudgingly, to be more than menials and shorthand-typists.
This moment of freedom was not to last, of course, beyond the end of the war. The peacetime powers-that-be ensured that male hegemony was reasserted, and that women were driven back into their rightful roles: as breeders to restock the tribe after the battlefield losses, as helpmeets and comforters of their homecoming heroes, as child-minders, cooks, cleaners, washers and note-takers. The return to normality was smoothly effected. Everybody helped, including women themselves. Popular culture, so-called, was one of the chief persuaders. There is a big book to be written on the part played by Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley, as the music business used to be called, in reinstating the image of woman as fragrant, pastel-pretty and dumb. It was not until late in their lives, and the coming of the Women's Liberation movement, that the likes of Doris Day recognised how they had been used as propaganda in the campaign of normalisation.
The drive to war in Germany and Japan was predicated upon a cult of male power that firmly, one might say hysterically, insisted upon woman staying put in her traditional image and role. As Germany faced the reality of total defeat in the spring and early summer of 1945, all that seemed set to change:
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.
The writer of those words was a 34-year-old German woman, a Berliner who had worked in publishing and who had travelled widely as a journalist - on an extended trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s she had picked up a smattering of Russian that was to prove of great value when her city fell to the Red Army in April and May of 1945. Recognising the momentousness of the German collapse, and determined to produce a record of what the Russian capture and occupation of Berlin felt like to the city's inhabitants, she kept a diary of events from Friday, April 20th to Friday, June 22nd, 1945. As a note at the beginning of the entries states, "This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war".
It was in the early hours of April 14th that people in the east of the city heard the thunder of Russian artillery 60 miles away. Within days, Soviet forces under Marshal Zhukov had penetrated to the suburbs. Even the German High Command, or what was left of it, had not realised how close the Red Army was. After a week or two of desperate street fighting, in which a million and a half soldiers of Zhukov's First Belorussian Front were met by what Antony Beevor, in an introduction to A Woman in Berlin, describes as "the desperate scrapings of the Third Reich", including Hitler Youth, old men of the Volkssturm, which was the Berlin version of Dad's Army, some military cadets, "and a stiffening of veterans and SS". The end of the Third Reich was bitter and terrible. On April 30th Hitler committed suicide, and his henchmen followed suit or, in the case of most of them, simply fled. By May 2nd it was all over, and the city surrendered.
Berliners had lived in particular dread of the Red Army. It might be said that Hitler's war had been directed most forcefully, certainly in terms of ideology, against the "Asiatic hordes" of the East - Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was Hitler's greatest mistake, the one that lost him the war - and for years Goebbels's propaganda ministry had been pouring out frightful warnings of what would happen should those hordes ever be allowed to overrun the country. In 1944, as Antony Beevor notes, Soviet troops had made a foray into East Prussia and laid waste the village of Nemmersdorf before being driven back, and Goebbels sent camera teams to film the corpses of women and girls who had been raped and murdered by the Russians. The resulting newsreel footage was so appalling that it was widely assumed the ministry had faked them. However, the pictures were all too genuine.
The enormous scale of the rapes carried out by Russian soldiers in the first weeks after the collapse of Berlin has puzzled historians. Rape was not a deliberate policy, as it seems to have been in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. Stalin, in his avuncular way, had chuckled at the notion of his men having their fun with Berlin's women, but the Soviet command in the city does appear to have tried to rein in the soldiers. The anonymous author of A Woman in Berlin records that a number of officers she encountered were scandalised by the behaviour of their men, and protected women against them when they could. Nevertheless, within hours of the fall of the city rape had become a commonplace. Few females in the city were spared, from pre-pubescent girls to elderly women. As a healthy and, we suspect, handsome woman in her early thirties, Anonymous knew what was in store for her.
What is most remarkable in her account of those terrible first weeks of the occupation is the matter-of-fact tone in which she relates her sufferings and the sufferings of those around her. Already debilitated by months of near-starvation, the women had no defence against the Soviet soldiers; the best they could do was to find a protector among the ranks, who in return for sexual favours would keep the other rapists at bay. Anonymous suffered repeated rapes - one of which ended with the rapist forcing open her mouth and dropping into it "a gob of gathered spit" - before she took up first with Anatol, a Ukrainian sub-lieutenant, and, when he was assigned elsewhere, with an educated and relatively civilised professional officer whom she names only as "the major". Both men treated her with some respect, supplying her with food and at least some security. In the diary she has no illusions about her conduct, but prostituting herself to one man at a time was infinitely less demeaning than being at the mercy of every passing soldier. With the major her life takes on the trappings of a grotesque normality:
Outside, the May morning is chilly. Chains are clinking, horses neighing; the rooster has long since crowed. But no katyushas, no gunfire, nothing. The major [who has a leg wound] limps around the room and stretches his leg, singing one song after the other in a beautiful voice, including the magical 'Linger with me, my lovely one'. Then he sits on the edge of the bed, pulls a little harmonica out of his pocket and plays a march, with amazing verve and skill.
Eventually, towards the end of May, the Russians depart, and Anonymous's former lover, Gerd, returns from the front. At first she is "feverish withjoy", but very quickly all goes sour. Gerd cannot accept the fact of the rapes she has endured. Hearing Anonymous talk with ironic humour to other women in the apartment building of their common experience at the hands of the Russians he becomes furious. "'You've all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches, every one of you in the building. Don't you realise?' He grimaced in disgust. 'It's horrible being around you. You've lost all sense of measure.'"
As it would turn out, Gerd's response was representative of that of the majority of German men in the aftermath of war. A Woman in Berlin was first published in an English translation in America in 1954; a German-language edition did not appear until five years later, in Geneva. The book, Beevor writes, "was highly controversial in Germany. Some accused it of 'besmirching the honour of German women'. Rape and sexual collaboration for survival were taboo subjects in that post-war period, when men firmly reasserted their authority".
The history of A Woman in Berlin is remarkable, and depressing. The anonymous author had given the diary manuscript to Kurt Marek, a journalist and publisher, who arranged the English translation and publication. After its controversial reception in Germany, however, the book went out of print, although photocopies were in circulation in the revolutionary spring of 1968, and leaders in the women's movement of the 1970s knew the text well. In the mid-1980s the author Hans Magnus Enzensberger tried to republish the book in his Die Andere Bibliotek series for the publisher Eichborn, but the author, no doubt still smarting from the book's original reception in her native land, let it be known through her literary executor, Hannelore Marek, Kurt Marek's widow, that she did not want the diary republished in her lifetime. Anonymous died at the age of 90 in 2001, and Ms Marek gave permission to Enzensberger to reissue the book. A few months after the new edition was published a German journalist, Jens Bisky, named Anonymous, prompting Enzensberger to accuse him of Skandaljournalismus. It is an irony that 60 years after it was written, men were still disputing over this compelling, shocking and courageous testament of suffering and survival.
John Banville's novel The Sea was published recently by Picador
A Woman in Berlin By Anonymous Virago, 311pp. £16.99