Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin – revisiting the horrors of 1945 will be shown in the West Parry Sound District Museum on Thursday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m.
This movie was a big budget German production, like the Downfall.
A new film version of the 1959 memoir, Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin, disturbs an old hornet’s nest concerning German women who were raped by Russian soldiers. “Wie oft?” (how often?) was a phrase understood by everyone in Berlin in the aftermath of the Second World War. “How often have you been raped by Russian soldiers?” was what was really meant.
Such a matter-of-fact exchange summed up how German women suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers who captured Berlin. An estimated one million German women fell victim to the troops, 100,000 of them in Berlin. An estimated 10 per cent of rape victims died, mostly from suicide. Many of the rape victims had abortions and those who did give birth often gave their babies up for adoption. In 1946 almost four per cent of Berlin-born children were thought to have Russian fathers.
A candid diary account of the horrors was published in 1959, written by a women who had been in her mid-30s at the time the rapes caused a public outcry.
Anonyma: A Woman in Berlin was seen in West Germany as a slight to the honour of the German nation – both the women who were raped and the men who were unable to protect them – while in East Germany it was viewed as being shockingly critical of the Soviet “heroes” who had defeated the Nazis.
The recent release of a film adaptation, directed by Max Färberböck, has disturbed the hornet’s nest again. Färberböck says the reason he wanted to make Anonyma was, “the extraordinary courage of its author to speak about things that nobody wanted to know. I found her completely infectious, even though I knew that there’d be a huge hue and cry when the film opened.”
After its initial publication, the original book was quickly swept under the carpet and forgotten about until 2003, when it was republished, two years after the identity of its author had been revealed following her death at the age of 90.
She turned out to be the experienced journalist Marta Hillers. She started her diary in a cellar on April 20, 1945, just 10 days before Hitler’s suicide, and is played in the film by Nina Hoss.
Hoss is aware of the ambiguity of a character who was both a victim of the Russians and a Nazi.
“I had to ask myself, why did this young, educated, well-travelled German adopt the ideology of the National Socialists?” she said. “I could not portray her simply as an innocent victim. On the other hand she is impressive – amid all the horror she finds the strength to reflect on who the Russians are and why they are doing this to her. It requires a lot of strength and honesty to be able to think five minutes after a rape that it is revenge for what the Germans did in Russia.”
Difficult too, said Hoss, was working alongside Russian actors for whom the Russian liberation of Nazi Germany is still a point of national pride.
“I had the feeling that many were split on the issue,” she said. “You mustn’t forget that the victory over the Germans is central to the Russians’ self-consciousness.”
What makes Anonyma/Hillers’s position especially interesting is her attempt to take a degree of control over her circumstances: not only by choosing to write about her experiences, but, in a more practical sense, by seeking out a single Russian soldier, as many German women did, who would protect her in return for sexual intimacy and food. This was a less ugly alternative to being repeatedly raped by Red Army troops. It is this strategic act of compromise on which the film turns.
“From now on, I will decide who gets me,” she wrote.
Both the diary – now a bestseller – and the film have had a cathartic effect in Germany, allowing many women and their relatives to start talking openly about the hidden horror of those months in 1945. This is one film that, for a whole generation, is most definitely not just a movie.
Also this film was of particular interest for me, since I remember my mother’s story of the flight from the Red Army, that was pushing deeper and deeper into the German populated Third Reich. My mother, working as a young nurse was in contact with sometimes disillusioned wounded German soldiers, who had to live through, horrifying experience in occupied Russia. My mother could only imagine how the Russians felt about those German atrocities. Germany had shown no mercy to the Russian population and the soldiers of the red army, so little mercy was expected of the vengeful enemy.
“Go West, as far as possible !” was the slogan in 1945, when you still could get out of the reach of the Russian armies. But the Russian tanks were fast, and the Wehrmacht was only a shadow of the once mighty army that invaded Russia in 1941. In Stettin, the Russian army caught up with the refugee trek my grandmother, my mother and her sister was part of. My grandmother was fluent in Russian and sought immediate protection from superior Russian officers. According to my mother, protection was given. The Russian officer was part of the army headquarters, who hid them in the attic of an undamaged Patrizier house, for about two weeks. A few drunken soldiers did come close, but where driven back by a young captain. That’s all I know.
(Ernst Wiltmann is a history buff and avid movie collector whose column appears monthly.)