Letter from Berlin

For all the splendour of Berlin's present, I can't stop imagining the Soviet soldiers battling up blackened streets blocked by rubble and bodies. Nor can the film-makers
December 20, 2008

Most days I ride the S-Bahn into the heart of Berlin. Beyond the carriage windows rises Norman Foster's Reichstag dome. The vast glass parasol above Potsdamer Platz catches the sun. In the high-tech temple of the new Hauptbahnhof, sleek white ICE trains arrive from Frankfurt, Zürich and Paris.

Yet for all the splendour of the present, I can't stop imagining the burnt-out buildings, the whistle of shells, the Soviet soldiers battling up blackened streets blocked by rubble and bodies. The second world war, which left 90 per cent of the city centre in ruins, feels ever present. The black husk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church, destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943, casts a long shadow along glittering Kurfürstendamm. Next to the Brandenburg Gate is the Holocaust memorial, the undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths which commemorates the murdered European Jews. At my son's school an old brick wall is still pockmarked from machine-gun fire.

Germany no longer shies away from acknowledging the darkness in its past, as do Russia and China. In a courageous, humane and moving manner, atrocities are unearthed and confessed as a condition of healing, as if the psychic health of a society depends on it. In the arts this process is reflected in, for example, Walter Kempowski's Echo Sounder, and the films Downfall and now Anonyma.

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In May 1945 1.5m Soviet soldiers fell on Berlin, raping somewhere between 95,000 and 130,000 women (the figure for the whole of Germany is estimated to be as high as 2m). A 34-year-old journalist, Marta Hiller, kept a diary, recording—with striking imagery and honesty—the first two months of defeat and brutal occupation. Her journal, A Woman in Berlin, is one of the most important accounts to emerge from that war. It was published anonymously in America in 1954 and in Germany six years later. But it received scant attention from the public and the author was accused of "besmirching the honour of German women." It fell out of print.

WG Sebald once likened the taboo subject of mass rape and sexual collaboration for survival to "a shameful family secret." Certainly many of those who lived through those terrible days refuse to speak about them; the women because of their shame, the men because of their rage and inability to protect their mothers, wives and daughters. But in 2003, when the book was republished, Germany was no longer a society traumatised with guilt and unable to acknowledge its own suffering. A Woman in Berlin became a runaway bestseller.

Hence the anticipation of last month's release of Anonyma, the feature film based on Hiller's diary. Would her heartrending account translate successfully to the screen? Did German women want to eat popcorn while reliving their mothers' pain? Would German rapprochement with Russia, advanced by Schröder and restrained by Merkel, be derailed by a wave of anti-Russian sentiment? The answer to these questions echoed through the deserted cinemas, scarcely a week after the film's opening. Anonyma has bombed at the box office in Germany, taking just €645,000 in the first fortnight following its release in late October.

In the book Hiller allies herself with a Red Army major as a means of protecting herself from arbitrary assault. With him she is "not raped so much as at his disposal." Their relationship is purely functional, with moments of tenderness. Unfortunately the filmmakers felt it necessary not only to inflate the alliance into a love affair, but also to conjure up a Soviet rival for the major's affections. Whereas Hiller's original is a work of true literary merit, Anonyma clangs with Kalashnikov-dropping lines like "[One day] European countries will overcome their borders and grow together again" and "What do you prefer? His dick or my bike?" The result, according to Der Spiegel, is "a near kitsch love tragedy."

Where Anonyma does succeed is in its fierce rejection of victimhood and self-pity. Germans are not portrayed as simple victims, a charge levelled against other recent films including Downfall. This moral strength owes as much to the author as it does to the producers. Hiller allied herself with an enemy to reclaim a measure of control of her life. She doesn't absolve herself of ideological guilt. As she wrote: "Was I for or against [Nazism]? What's clear is that I was there, that I breathed what was in the air, and it affected all of us, even if we didn't want it to."

Germany may have found the courage to take responsibility for its true history, but is it ready for a Tarantino-style treatment of the second world war? The American director of the hyper-violent Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill is shooting in Berlin now. His new film Inglourious Basterds (sic) stars Brad Pitt as the leader of a band of American-Jewish soldiers sent behind enemy lines to scalp and brutally kill Nazis."This is pop culture meeting Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with unprecedented force," said a film critic at the Süddeutche Zeitung. "The effects of this collision are utterly unpredictable."