A Woman in Berlin

This diary was first published anonymously in 1954 in an English translation in the United States and in Britain in 1955 by Secker & Warburg. A German language edition followed five years later in Geneva, and 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.

In 2003, A Woman in Berlin was republished in a new edition in Germany by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s most distinguished men of letters, in his Die Andere Bibliothek series for Eichborn and who adds the Afterword to this edition. It subsequently emerged that the decision to republish followed the death of the anonymous author in June 2001 at the age of ninety. She had not wanted another edition during her lifetime after the storm it had provoked. A few months after its republication, however, Jens Bisky, a prominent journalist and critic, claimed that he had discovered the identity of the anonymous diarist and named her as Marta Hiller. Enzensberger was furious and accused Bisky of ‘Skandaljournalismus’. Though other journalists agree with Bisky and feel certain that Marta Hiller is the author, the only person to know for sure is Hannelore Marek, literary executor of the estate, who has at no point confirmed it. Bisky also cast certain doubts over the authenticity of the work, but Walter Kempowski, one of the most experienced editors of personal documents from the period, testified that he had examined all the original documents and the first typescript and was convinced that they were completely genuine.

It was perhaps inevitable that doubts would be raised about this book, especially after the scandal over the fake Hitler Diaries. And the great bestseller of the 1950s, Last Letters from Stalingrad, was found to be fictitious over forty years after its first appearance. On reading the earlier edition of this diary for the first time in 1999, I instinctively compared my reactions to the Stalingrad letters, which I had read five years before. I had become uneasy about the supposed Stalingrad letters quite quickly. They were too good to be true. One, for example, milked the emotions with a letter about a German concert-pianist in Stalingrad whose fingers had been broken. As soon as I was able to compare the published collection with genuine last letters from Stalingrad in the German and Russian archives, I was certain that they were false. Yet any suspicions I felt obliged to raise about A Woman in Berlin were soon discarded. The truth lay in the mass of closely observed detail. The then anonymous diarist possessed an eye which was so consistent and original that even the most imaginative novelist would never have been able to reproduce her vision of events. Just as importantly, other accounts, both written and oral, which I accumulated during my own research into the events in Berlin, certainly seemed to indicate that there were no false notes. Of course, it is possible that some rewriting took place after the event, but that is true of almost every published diary.