Tearing down the gates

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
By Anonymous
Translated, from the German, by Philip Boehm
Metropolitan, 261 pp., $23

Two weeks after the Russians fought their way into Berlin the Nazi flags hanging from the apartment houses had been reworked. The housewives cut them into small red squares (with curved indents where the white-circled swastikas had been excised). Each of these instant Soviet flags was painstakingly hemmed and stitched.

''How in our country could it be otherwise?" asked the anonymous author of ''A Woman in Berlin," a diary kept for eight weeks beginning in late April 1945, shortly before the city fell. She had emerged from her battered apartment to take her first walk through the rubble-filled streets of the city.

Her rhetorical question, like the diary, was less sardonic than coldly resigned. It was not judgment, a luxury in desperate times that featured hunger, destruction, and the effort to avoid death and rape (often, as in her case, unsuccessfully). It was the compulsion to see clearly.

Buried in rubble, the mortal need is air; in the rubble of Anonymous's world the mortal need was truth. During those weeks of chaos, violence, and fear, the three notebooks filled by the former journalist kept her together. (Unlike those who live by the sword, those who live by the pen may in fact live by it.)

Her journal earns a particular place in the archives of recollection. This is because it neither condemns nor forgives: not her countrymen, not their occupiers, and not, remarkably, herself.

Such unsparing chill earned it a brief, disliked life when it was published in the 1950s in a Germany committed to positive thinking and reconstruction. Its reappearance, now, stands gritty and obdurate among a swirl of revisionist currents that variously have asserted and disputed the inherent nature of Germans' national guilt.

The diaries record the final days waiting for the Russians. The author and her neighbors huddle in the basement shelter, feeling the jar of bombardments. Their government's authority has disappeared; they are in a disquieting German position of having no instructions.

Power is out and the radio is silent. ''What a dubious blessing technology really is," Anonymous writes. ''Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can't plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute."

Food becomes an obsession. As she leafs through an English novel, one sentence leaps out: ''She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table." Anonymous reads it a dozen times. She scratches it with her fingernails.

Then the Russians surge in. No one knew what to expect; many feared deliberate vengeance. It was stranger: wildness, chaotic and uneven. The first soldiers on Anonymous's street appeared on stolen bicycles that few knew how to ride, gleefully swerving, skidding, and crashing. Attention turned to wristwatches; before long some flaunted six or seven.

It was not punishment or rage but a blithe, indifferent pillaging and pleasuring that grew more shattering -- with an occasional unpredictable kindness -- with the mounting consumption of vodka and looted schnapps and wine. Before long, the appropriating turned to women. Soldiers seized them on the street and, when most tried to hide in their apartments, broke in after them. The estimates of rapes ranged between 30,000 and more than 100,000, Anonymous writes.

Weeks later, after discipline was restored, friends would meet and their first question was ''how many times?" The author suggests that rape was so widespread and universally acknowledged as to give paradoxical rise to a collective female solidarity that somewhat lessened the psychological damage produced in peacetime. Here the shame and guilt, far from secret and inward, were public and elsewhere.

Anonymous writes of the protectors she and others sought out. They were officers, successively higher-ranking and more sophisticated, who sought a sexual connection rather than demanded it. She draws vivid portraits of these men, for one of whom she comes to feel a kind of love. Partly from gratitude and superficial in part, but then the skin is an organ as well as the heart.

It would be a mistake to read ''A Woman in Berlin" in terms of the more recent political genre of ''we were hurt too." The author notes acidly how quickly her neighbors went from praising Hitler to mocking him. For herself she refuses such contorting. ''I breathed . . . the air," she writes of the Nazi era.

Not heroic, and no doubt insufficient. But, if you like, clean. And above all useful, in letting us take her diary for what it is: oddly suggestive, this half-century later; and conceivably prophetic.

To put it briefly, Anonymous writes a merciless account of what individuals can be faced with when all material and social props collapse. Not just their own, but those of an entire society, whose majority regards itself as ordered, justified, and comfortable. Never mind what it may be up to outside -- or to the outsiders inside.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.