The Duke (Ralph Fiennes) raping the Duchess (Keira Knightley) and a moment afterward (Saul Dibbs’ and Amanda Foreman’s The Duchess, screenplay Jeffrey Hatcher 2008, one source for which is The Sylph, published 1778)
Our anonymous heroine witnessing one of countless rapes in Anonyma (2008), adapted from Marta Hiller’s A Woman In Berlin (first published 1945)
Dear friends and readers,
The last few weeks I’ve been immersed in two books which ought to be better known to English readers, Georgiana Spenser, the Duchess of Devonshire’s one novel, The Sylph, published anonymously in 1778, and the German diary now Englished as A Woman in Berlin and known to be Marta Hiller’s one book, also published anonymously 167 years later. They extend our understanding, our definition (if you will), the terrain of rape.
About four years ago I finally wrote the paper I should have written in 1980 (when I wrote my dissertation) on Richardson’s Clarissa; it took me 30 years to get to the point where I could discuss what riveted me when I first read Clarissa at age 18: “Rape in Clarissa,” which I subtitled from its heroine’s words, “What right have you to detain me here?”, surely not that you have raped me once? (it is that first rape that makes Lovelace assume he has the right to detain Clarissa).
In this recently thoroughly researched paper (if I do say so myself), I outline the two basic types of rape that most discussions of rape are subsumed under:
1) simple rape: an event where someone is compelled to submit to, or participate in, a physical sexual interaction which includes fucking, sodomy, fellatio or cunnilingus. Central is a loss of agency or control which occurs when the first onslaught is an event that goes well beyond the target’s expectations;
2) aggravated rape: a situation where the rapist uses extrinsic highly visible violence (weapons), where there are multiple assailants, a high degree of brutality and/or beating, or where there is no prior relationship between victim and rapist.
The problem is these definitions both demand the woman reject the sex, they both assume she has agency. All too often she does not. She cannot just say no. This is of course true of chattel slavery. But that condition is often ignored as now over with. In The Sylph and countless rapes in A Woman in Berlin, Georgiana and Hillers present two other all too familiar set of circumstances today where saying no is ignored: when a woman is married and cannot get out of the marriage; during war.
From the appalling experience of sex shown us from Georgiana’s POV on the first night of her marriage to the Duke
Georgiana Spencer’s novel was regarded as scandalous for many reasons; one not discussed is that in several scenes sex is forced on her heroine when she clearly does not want it; she has been insulted by seeing her husband with one of his mistresses; he has attempted to fool her into going to bed with Lord Biddulph, his fellow-rake, now a creditor; he has himself insulted and berated her when she does not hand over the rest of her jointure or refused to go to bed with this creditor once again. Her heroine, Julia, married of her own free will but in an arranged way, as an exchange of property and money between her father, Sir William Stanley, and after some months when she has been treated corruptly she clearly does not want to have sex with him, and it is forced upon her. In the scenes in the novel where Biddulph attempts to have sexual intercourse with her, had he succeeded might fall under the rubric of simple rape, except the situations have been set up by Stanley is Julia as payment for a debt. So they extend the definition of marital rape.
From a scene as the armies invade: the women flee into a basement; they are heckled as “Frau Hitler” and raped …
The nameless journalist heroine of Hillers’ book tells of the entry of the Russian armies into Berlin in late April 1945, and takes us into mid-June when the war is declared over. Yes there are countless (truly) rapes where women are beaten into complying, brutalized, humiliated, but there are as many where the women seem to comply, do not fight the men off and yet others where they allow one man to take over their body nightly in return for food and protection from ceaseless rapes by other men, but all the while writhing within, silently bearing it until the war situation comes to an end. This presented by Hillers as continuous rape. After the declaration of war new rapes occur less often, but the women are still answerable with their bodies. For weeks afterward they are driven like animals to do heavy physical labor by the occupying males (who while supervising, needle, heckle and try to get them to have sex with them in return for favors) for food. Sex slaves. In both sets of cases, the scenes are dramatized so that we shall see the woman complies at the same time as what is happening is rape.
Both books are the only books by these gifted women because both anonymous authors were excoriated (vilified) for writing them. For telling. The books show that apparent compliance is no criteria for saying that the act of sexual intercourse was not rape. The women are subject to their society which redefines these experiences of rape so as to by law declare them not rape (marriage) or by custom silence or shame the women who were subjected to them. While some of what the women think in both novels can be aligned to what a hostage is led to mouth when she finds herself the victim of hegemonic values which she takes on as a protection for her self-esteem, the physical acceptance of the act is accompanied by self-alienation, disgust, an intense desire to get away at the first opportunity. At the close of The Slyph Julia knows peace only when she returns home to her father. The anonymous heroine is relieved when her protectors (she takes on two) are gone, but she is immediately confronted by her continuing need for food, an incessant preoccupation in the diary and to return to a profession where she can be independent and eat, she attempts with others to recreate a press and write again, very stressful and against great odds (e.g., not enough paper).
In both cases a film adaptation has now been made. Saul Dibbs’s and Jeffrey Hatcher’s The Duchess (with Amanda Foreman as advisor) tell the story of the life of the Duchess using perspectives taken from Foreman’s and Georgiana’s books. For example, when one of Georgiana’s extravagant wigs were set on fire. (In the film she is drunk out of despair and collapses.) They blend easily as The Sylph mirrors a number of events known to have occurred in Georgiana’s life (sometimes represented in a reversal, as in the novel the Duke loses egregious amounts of money while it was Georgiana who lost extravagant amounts). Rape figures centrally in the film: Georgiana’s first night with the Duke is made to feel like a rape (she is his property); he rapes her after she finds him in bed with her paid companion-friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell): the three stills above are taken from that scene where the camera shows us the rest of the house hearing her cries and doing nothing. We feel she is violated when her child by Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper) is taken from her. Little of this is discussed in reviews of the film; its genre, costume drama, frames it as romance and it’s easy to find stills of Keira Knightley in fabulous hats from it, often looking virginal. Here is a less familiar pair: the Duchess despairing and drunk just before her headdress is set on fire from a fallen chandelier:
I regret to say the 2008 film, Anonyma, written and directed by Max Faberbock loses the value of the book. It has great power and that lies in the opening half-hour where there is recreated what it’s like to be invaded by an army in just these specific circumstances: you are in a city that is ruined by bombing, the people whose “side” you are said to be on have basically lost (Hitler’s suicide is announced about 40 minutes in). The POV is our heroine’s, Anonyma (that’s what’s she’s called) played by Nina Hoss. Faberbock and she and all concerned convey the terror and brutality — rape is what the women suffer hideously — brutal and ugly and slow: these rapes don’t happen all at once; there’s time for women to try to get commanders to stop the men and they refuse (“my men are healthy”). But rape is only one aspect of what’s experienced: filth, destruction, eating filth, destroyed houses, rooms, things, children hidden and sudden and quick deaths as people are simply shot or there is a barrrage of fighting with guns. Faberbock is very willing to use black screens to convey darkness. But what happens within the first 40 minutes is the film becomes a love story — as the diary never does. We are asked to believe our heroine overlooks the way the major who becomes her long-term bed partner refused to stop his men and other horrendous acts when she first met and appealed to him. The film vindicates masculinity conventions and beliefs about women (such as they do not mind rape when not accompanied by harsh beating or death).
From the close of the film where we are presented with a silent adieu between the major who was our heroine’s central protector-rapist
The way Anonyma is described on IMDB is so distorted as to be comical — it imposes this sentimental meaning on what’s happening ludicrously — Lore must save her people; she learns to rely on what she hated. Roger Ebert wrote an intelligent review; so too one appeared in The Guardian. Also I have come across nothing in the press which discusses the sex in The Duchess truthfully, much less any awareness of its debt to The Sylph. So the rest of this blog will be a brief account of The Sylph and A Woman in Berlin as rape stories.
There is much more one could say about both, I am treating them from this point of view as it is central to them.
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The first page of the first edition quotes Pope’s Rape of the Lock
The Sylph is a multi-voice epistolary fiction. Sir William marries Julia because he can’t get her any other way and by her letter we see that he is imposing on her values and norms which are a kind of violation of her feelings. He in short is not in love with our heroine — nor is she in love with him. She recognizes he is a stranger to her. when she gets to London, she is immersed in an amoral world and meets Lady Besford who urges her to have affairs, only be discreet: a mild version of Madame de Merteuil who in Les Liasions Dangereuses is enisted by Cecile’s mother to teach her daughter (recently it’s been recognized that Valmont rapes Cecilia the first time and controls her by blackmail — he’ll tell her mother — thereafter). Lady Melford is the helpless good mentor. Georgiana’s is an anti-libertine libertine novel, a critique of the adulterous disloyal world frankly presented. Early scenes with her husband (as Caroline Breashears wrote — she read with me and others) “the complexities and violence of the bed chamber.” A miscarriage is callously dismissed. Julia is taken as a sex object, impregnated, encouraged to have liasions discreetly so her husband can too. He returns from the opera which he attended with one of his mistresses and refuses to account for his long absence, insisting immediately on his marital rights which Julia now find distasteful because done with false words (hypocrisies). The Sylph is an anonymous correspondent who offers to watch and monitor her behavior — to the modern reader he feels like a stalker; there’s something insidious in his demands she reveal to him, a stranger, her inward thoughts. (Admittedly Julia-Georgiana does not take his presence this way, but agrees to subject herself to his judgement in order to protect herself.)
We have several inset stories. One is told early on by Julia’s father about his past and that of her mother. It is an exposure of the evils of primogeniture, marriages arranged sheerly for money. A story of Lord D who finds out his wife, Lady L, had taken a lover and challenges that lover to a duel and is killed by him presents duelling as murder in disguise. In another in-set story Georgiana makes it plain how rape can work. The aristocrat Montague tries outright to rape a lower middle class girl, Nancy; when Montague is thwarted, he removes her fiance by persuading Will to join the army, fomenting rebellion in Will, catching him deserting, and having him flogged — is it any different than say a court intrigue where the king or powerful man manipulates a lower courtier to allow his wife to go to bed with him? This is also a parable against flogging — against the terrible inhumane treatment of the lower classes. We are really made to feel how much flogging hurts.
As the novel progresses and Sir William gets deeper and deeper into debt he successfully pressures Julia to give up a proportion of her settlement (what she is supposed to live on in widowhood, and what could support them if he becomes a bankrup); it does no good, he is not grateful; he does not pretend even to love her — she no longer deludes herself his lust is love. Another sex as rape scene is implied and he returns to the gambling tables. On one level this is a portrait of unhappy marriage, what a marriage for sex and at a price ends end up in. As such, it may be an original novel — is there any other that in a middle class type novel shows this level of reality — deeply distraught and disillusioned young woman does not know where to turn. There is an allusion to Pamela Andrews as a pernicious book because it leads women to believe they can win a worthy man by withholding sex; we can also assume Georgiana was thinking of this central English novel. Julia finally encounters the Sylph at a masquerade ball and it becomes apparent he is a male who is after her too.
It is when she goes home thinking she is with Sir William she discovers he has sent Biddulph in his place in an attempt to delude her into going to bed with this man. William is then enraged with her for refusing Biddulph. part of the scene where Biddulph is disguised comes from the old canard that sex is the same in bed in the dark and it doesn’t matter what individual you are with. It’s an old bawdy joke, masculinist, and presented misogynistically in the Renaissance chapbooks and fabliau from the 15th through 18th century. Shakespeare uses it in Measure for Measure. We see it in comic plays where people jump into bed with the wrong people and have sex with them. Behn uses it. Since the conventions of verisimilitude are in play in The Sylph too, Georgiana does try to account for this by having Biddulph try to imitate Stanley’s behavior and Julia be puzzled. But she relies on her acceptance.
When Stanley comes in enraged and now demands that Julia turn over the rest of her settlement (jointure) he is particularly corrosive over her “prudery.” Stanley comes as close as he dares to offering Julia to Biddulph in lieu of the money he owes Biddulph: “I have but one method (you understand me) though I should be unwilling to be driven to such a procedure” (p 177). To do this break all norms for masculinity. Note he is willing to force sex himself on Julia anyway – no respect for her chastity, for himself as a proud male owning females, no concern for any pregnancy she might have. Let us acknowledge this is another form of rape – the selling of one’s acknowledged “woman” (wife) to another man and coercion of her. This motif turns up in novels otherwise not in imitation of one another: the wife in D’Epinay’s Montbrillant find her husband’s creditor in her bed and her husband waxing violent when she refuses to have sex with this man; in Edgeworth’s Leonora the vicious heroine plots to go to bed with someone to pay her debts (she is married). How common then was this? In Georgiana’s case it was she who was deep in debt so it might not be herself she is pointing to: her husband openly had Lady Elizabeth Foster, her companion so it seems reversed.
The novel is brought to an end when confronted with bankruptcy, and unable to cope with negotiations and an utterly (to his thinking) shamed life, Stanley kills himself and Julia returns home. If the novel had ended at this point we would have a very anti-marriage novel. Caroline wrote: “Moreover, it would be a convincing novel inspired by events in Georgiana’s own circle. In the introduction by Jonathan Gross, he notes that Lord Stanley’s gambling debts and suicide were inspired partly by the debts and death of John Damer (husband of Georgiana’s friend Anne), who shot himself in August 1775. Instead we have a sudden turn into idyllic romance, with Julia’s friend and sister marrying ideal young men and the Sylph turning out to be a suitor who had been rejected by her father because he had not the rank and money of Sir William. This is not Millenium Hall where the women built a life out of a female community together.
2005 edition, translator Philip Boehm
Continued in the comments: a parallel reading of A Woman in Berlin: first half; second half; denouement.
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General thoughts placing both books in a woman’s tradition of books. For the 18th century:
Georgiana’s Sylph is a book much influenced by French novels and is a critique of the ancien regime too. If we posit there is such a thing as a libertine novel, (say — I came across this title this morning –, Crebillon’s Le Sofa, or Diderot’s Le Bijou (about a necklace’s adventures) — this one shows us the attitudes of the libertine novel and world, but is critiquing it. That is what LaClos claimed to be doing: he claimed he was not on Valmont or Madame de Merteuil’s side but exposed them to enable us to condemn them. This recalls Richardson’s writing outside his novel about Lovelace, and Georgiana’s Stanley and Biddulph are clearly modelled on Lovelace.
But it is Madame Riccoboni’s novels I call attention to where one heroine is raped while unconscious (drunk), another commits suicide; and most significantly in the decade after The Sylph: Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichfield is nowadays available in English translation on line is significant here. Isabelle de Montolieu did the astonishingly brave thing of showing a girl coerced into marriage refusing to go to bed with the man that night. It made open and clear in novels for the middle class that coerced marriage is rape. The man is a Colonel Brandon type (S&S is based partly on this novel I am convinced of it) and so does not force her, but he could. Montolieu punts by having his looks improved and them fall in love by the end (heroine betrayed by a Willoughby type). Trollope has heroines commit suicide rather than go to bed with a man distasteful to them, but he makes them so bad looking, and the women forcing it so sadistic, it does not seem ordinary as it is in Caroline de Lichtfield. The only other novel I know of that does this in the 19th century is Sand’s Valentine, and there the young man does try to force her. She throws him out and finds herself a pariah. Caroine de Licthfield is a 1780s novel — again after the Sylph, but not much after.
In both the 18th century and until today it is common for novels to be about women who fake rape; only very recently have women written about real rape (see my bibliography and notes for “Rape in Clarissa”).
As to Hillers’ book it belongs to European books written after WW2, often in the middle to later 1940s: all extraordinary, especially the journals by women (and men, Primo Levi’s for example) from Iris Origo’s War in Val D’Orcia, 1943-44 to Elsa Morante’s Historia, to Ingeborg Bachman’s poetry and Christa Woflf’s Cassandra and Four Essays. They were often either ignored upon first publication, or heavily criticized, framed by some aspect of the woman’s life. None of these are about rape, though Morante includes it. The European women’s books often rise to a level the UK people don’t — bombs are not the same as occupation (which as we know can bring genocides): I don’t mean to to be frivolous but I read the first Poldark novels coming out of UK in 1945 after Graham’s years as a warden on the beaches of Cornwall; Simone de Beauvoir’s is another extension of the kind of book WW2 prompted. Here are some reviews first published years later,
http://arlindo-correia.com/eine_frau_in_berlin1.html
From Joseph Kanon:
That population was largely female and the dramatic events here are rapes — repeated rapes, group rapes, violent rapes, accommodating rapes. It has recently been the fashion to think of rape as a military tactic (as it was in Bosnia), but here it appears in its more familiar aspect: crude men seizing their spoils of war, as barbarous as Goebbels had promised. The most commonly accepted figure for rapes committed in Berlin during the first weeks of the Russian occupation is around 100,000 (calculated by hospitals to which the women turned for medical help). ”A Woman in Berlin” shows us the actual experience behind those abstract numbers — how it felt; how one got through it (or didn’t); how it brought its victims together, changing the way they saw men and themselves; the self-loathing (”I don’t want to touch myself, can barely look at my body”); the triumph of just surviving.
from Ursula Hegil:
A Woman in Berlin is an amazing and essential book. Originally written in shorthand, longhand and the author’s own code, it is so deeply personal that it becomes universal, evoking not only the rapes of countless German women in 1945 but also the rape of every anonymous woman throughout war history — the notion of women as booty. The book’s focus is not on the Nazi rampage across Europe but on its aftermath, when 1.5 million Red Army soldiers crossed the Oder River and moved westward. More than 100,000 women in Berlin were raped, but many of them would never speak of it. “Each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared,” Anonymous writes. “Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us anymore.”
Anonymous was an editor and journalist. Her voice is unlike most other voices from that period: She probes, refuses to look away. Nearly half a century ago, when her diary was first published in German, it challenged the postwar silence and all it concealed: guilt, lies, defensiveness, denial. . . .
The others hardly discuss the topic of rape; one is a slur, attempting to suggest the book is a work of ficiton. All life-writing is dramatized, shaped by themes and aesthetic considerations
http://arlindo-correia.com/eine_frau_in_berlin.html
The above are mostly in German; the last two by women discuss rape centrally, Linda Grant discussing “mass rape”; Cressida Connolly how the women talked together and coped with the situation by talking of it in ways unthinkable usually (undoable), as jokes; Joanna Burke tells us of a survivor.
http://arlindo-correia.com/161103.html
Atina Grossman’s academic paper sets the book in the contexts of real documents from the time — showing by the way the book is non-fiction, telling an accurate truth as the author experienced it.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
A diary of reading A Woman in Berlin:
It is compelling, like an epistolary novel — it is probably rewritten as it’s so eloquent, but it is a diary written to the moment. We do not know what is to come next, only that the writer had to have survived to write it at least — if it’s true and it reads as a based on real experience.
The opening is about the desperation and crazed behavior of people under the bombs. What it really feels like as experience to be in a place continually being bombed — people dying, blown up, their houses too, all around you. It makes me think of Orwell’s statement in Homage to Catalonia where he points out that once war is declared, no one cares in the least for niceties and order. Curtains are torn down to make towels — all decorum thrown out the window.
The tone at first and whole sense of inner isolation — no one is friends with anyone else that chance and place has made their bomb shelter mate — reminds me of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and the opening of Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. This deep sense of vulnerability and powerlessness. But these two are fictions, and Hillers soon moves away from that encompassing feeling to show our heroine waiting on line for hours for food. She does visit people, she has one phone call (miraculous the phone worked) from a friend elsewhere in Germany.
Some of what occurs feels like a dramatization of a story within Lodz Ghetto: our narrator tells of the horrors happening to people around her. The book I must say is so much more human than Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and its film adaptation, Fortunes of War as a movie seems a pretty picturesque tour, an upper class story of manners set in a horrifically warring place. We never get anywhere near as close in Manning — she hasn’t the humane outlook of this writer.
The women do live in dread of the coming men and they do dread rapes which they expect.
A friend I had lunch with yesterday suggested that the tendency to believe the heroine would fall in love with her “protector” (the man who rapes her like others but who she finds some protection from from others) can come from seeing in her “hostage’ like behavior. We take on the values of those who oppress us as something in our nature leads us to worship and respect power and we don’t want to identify as despicable. (But the movie does not show this: Anonyma shows the heroine falling in love with a major who has the power to stop rapes and refuses to, make a sub-story of love between her and a lieutenant. I’ve read enough to know this is a travesty of this book, an erasing of the story of rapes as central to what happens in war .. and maybe why wars continue to be fought. If men refused to do it, it would not happen.
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Half-way through Hillers’ book, I have a whole new understanding of rape. All these women are being raped and subject to it as a matter of course continually even if they seem to acquiesce and use whatever relationship they might have that might help them. It was the entry labelled (in the English translation) “Looking back on Monday, 30 April Recorded on Tuesday 1 May, the concluding sequence where the brutal blonde lieutenant rapes Anonyma (she gives herself no name) all night – and she gives in lest he pick up a wooden stick that if he hit her head with it would kill her. I see why Anatole and the major were presented as affectionate even love relationships: they are not. Nor does my friend’s hostage analysis work: at no point does Anonyma or as far as I can tell any other of the women take on the values of these male animals.
I am not shocked, but now I see the usual division of rape into “simple” and “aggravated” won’t do because both assume one night or one person, not ceaseless subjection and availability. The woman are treated as animal-things and the continual crude careless and harmful ways their bodies are treated cannot quite be called aggravated assault since only some are malicious (some are). Are there studies of war rape? It’s like the difference between an ordinary headache and migraine.
I note the persistence of the valuation of virginity. To me ridiculous most of the time and here wildly nuts. Some of the girls are hidden not to protect them from rape and endless rapes or the brutal harm that comes with it but to protect their virginity! And our narrator does not comment on this.
I bring it up also to say the men know they are violating deep norms – which are not quite the same as ignoring furniture as furniture and burning it for heat or pulling down curtains as towels which (as Orwell says) is a sign war has begun.
The emotional state of the woman subjected to this who writes her diary in pages and pages daily is finding outlet by writing , reaching out to some norm of sanity by imposing on what she is writing the ethic of survival and desperation. I note that the book reminds me of Richardson’s Clarissa this way: time is moving very slowly. 130 pages in and 13 days and nights have gone by. In Clarissa once you are at the center of the passionate discourse letters go on for improbable amounts of pages (as is often said) and within these letters are other letters copied out (not as much noticed): it doesn’t matter because what’s happening is travel inward as you nonetheless record each minute incident, it is so traumatically searing. No one but Richardson in the century quite does this or so relentlessly (Rousseau writes travelogues in his La Nouvelle Heloise)
The movie did not begin to convey we were on a plane of a different kind of rape — partly it began to present Anonyma as willing and in love. If memory serves me correctly I think I have seen a Bermann movie where he went into the terrain of rape for real but cannot recollect anything beyond that. It was rare — and some art films I saw in the Thalia from Europe (made in the 1950s). Two Women presented just a single group assault, not the same thing that is happening here.
This novel-diary carries on forcing the reader who would talk about it for real to broach topics usually never discussed and truths not admitted to. In fact our anonyma does on some level appreciate both Anatole and the major for what they can do for her. So she is (she says) a form of prostitute. She asks if it is rape as she gives in so readily and then says yes it is because she does not want this sex. She dislikes it intensely, she says. But she wants to live and that she wants to live that enables her to prostitute herself under brutal forcing conditions. so she is the equivalent of a slave and she uses this term of herself too — enslaved she says. Without undermining the point I still feel that there would be women who’d loathe it more — those do kill themselves we are told — in the book, the stories of women hanging themselves, jumping out of windows. Maybe they ended up with a more brutal male — in Middlemarch Mrs Cadwallader remarks is what really counts is did you get a good husband (funny how her talk is often accurate and not moralistic falsely at all). But maybe the sex was more intensely shameful, horrifying — rather like Richardson’s Clarissa feels who does on one level simply die (takes her time but does it). We see Anonyma making the best of her condition and this is misunderstood by readers and that film-maker.
I do not detach myself — as I do in this sort of woman’s novel, I bond with the central female – that’s why I see that she is not as strongly revulsed as she could be — why? because I would be revulsed and driven wild (as in Polanski’s Repulsion).
When she grows calmer, the entries grow a bit shorter and more time is covered by each. The raping occurs periodically as new men appear: our heroine does what she can to avoid Anatole when he comes twice, and to avoid sex with the major. It’s apparent they don’t comprehend her attitude at all. A telling reponse by one man to the widow that our heroine lives with when he is determined to rape her and she becomes hysterical; what is the fuss, it’s all over in no time. That is still what one can read about the heroine of Clarissa — a mischievous (scholar has made a flourishing career by writing a book calling the heroine a prig, favoring Lovelace: it brought out of the woodwork all the males (and alas females too) allured by Lovelace’s rhetoric and resentful of Clarissa’s self-esteem (at heart that’s it).
Our heroine brings in how she appears to acquiesce and other of the women too: they are saving their skins; they would be carelessly beaten and killed if they resisted. I am bothered by this: my understanding of rape is it’s akin to murder and many men who rape a woman will murder her at the same time even if she gives in immediately. Anonyma (or Hilliers) characterizes these Russians as not violent, as if crude, brutal in gestures, filthy, awful, not killing any women who they rape. Is she sliding over truths? I’ve read that when troops come into countries they rape and murder all at once. And we get no Germans that I’ve noticed raping anyone. There’s a scene where this is made specific. Friendly fire has its counterpart is my understanding in rape by those on “your side.”
It feels right not to cite her name: the heroine is presenting herself as nameless partly because her name, her identity, any individualilty about her and other women does not count. The book could have been subtitled: varieties of rape. It’s safer to be upstairs for to get at you requires climbing them. Children and babies and sometimes a pregnancy protects women – -as a presence they can constitute an inhibition.
At least it was so in Berlin in the 1940s — it is no longer so in Gaza. Indeed the bombs are aimed at children. And the Bible tells us about how boy children were singled out for death.
But these soldiers are shown as sentimental, not hating the Germans as such, not natural enemies, just stuck there somehow. She presents how strange it feels to live without clocks, calendars, in timeless time and how she began an earlier diary once — also to record fearful political happenings.
Her comments about hero veneration bring home to my how this book exposes the nonsense of that.
She goes to bed with the major without describing the acts any more; it’s just that he left her alone one night and another night exhausted her. You might assume she has come to like hiim: he does protect her, he brings good food. But she characterizes him as a “Dog” and in a sudden bracketted paragraph bursts out in how she howls inwardly, how she’s like to tear herself from limb to limb rather than live in this used body any more. This comes after a sudden release: the major allows her to take a trip on his bike. He must like and trust her. He is fearful she will be grabbed, raped, the bike destroyed or stolen but she bikes furiously fast.
It is interesting that the film stops when the rapes stop, as if that were all there was (“a love story!”) I found the second half of the book as riveting as the first as the author shifts into a primarily physical, rather than sexual, survival–essentially starving, as she can’t get enough fats, working to dismantle the German industrial infrastructure and ship it to Russia, humiliated by having to hand wash Russian soldiers laundry. She describes the destruction of Berlin and her former editor’s (?) desire to get up and running again–her participation, whilst starving, in a project that, however, unrealistic–and she knows it is–evinces hope for a future. We see how grim it is. We see what she has lost too–she is spared the rape–but she has no food. Her host hounds her out so as not to have to feed her.
There are two nationalities generally speaking who are described as potential and actual rapists: the Germans in Berlin and the Russian invaders. Hilliers mentions Italian men as passing by good-naturedly; there is a brief dialogue with a Russian who speaks French and our heroine considers going to Paris. I know I mentioned that I found her depiction of the Russian men somewhat improbable. She insists on relative chivalry: yes there are the animals who do whatever it is that they do brutally, but she clears them of murder — there are no murders, mocking torture, senseless killing. All the deaths of the women she describes are from suicide or starvation or despair on their own part (we don’t know quite how the woman or women did it). In the studies of rape I’ve read — and fictions — repeatedly rape is the other side of murder; the man is attacking the woman has much as forcing “sexual intercourse” on her, and when the war is over the Hilliers describes the first attempts at return to normality, and Hiliers finds she must use the phrase “sexual intercourse” to describe what was done to her, she loathes it.
Thinking about this now, I should admit too that the book is for the most part blank on what happens during rape. She does describe a couple of the long night encounters forced on her but there is but a phrase or to and then it’s morning and it’s her feelings that we are given descriptions of. Not literally what was done to her. Someone might say to describe so literally would be distasteful — to me, yes, maybe many readers. Carol Shields in a moment of Unless suddenly produces a rare literal description of what happens during sex to point out how little this is written up. That she shies away from this makes me think she may not be recording the full horror of what she saw.
OTOH, she avers repeatedly the Russian males were limited in the violence they perpetrated. I suggest one reason the book was castigated because she shows many women beside herself took what seemed to be a lover who protected her and brought food and supplies. It has to be admitted her description of Anatole, the major and others are of decent men — except for forcing sex. She also seems to imply that Germans raped women too, the women are as scared of them and flee them. Myself I find the distinctions of nationality make me uncomfortable — except when we are talking of people told they are coming into an enemy territory and it’s a free-for-all to murder, destroy and rape (in Palestine Gaza — an outright rampage). So in a way Hilliers has presented rape as incomprehensible and perhaps herself punted as it is so painful to tell.
Ellen
As the war is declared over, the rapes cease, the entries become briefer and now we have our heroine as undaunted independent woman. What she is showing is how people cope in such a dire situation: imagine say the Israelis stopping killing the people and lift the blockade (unlikely as the purpose of the tunnels was to break through the blockade and those what the Israeli gov’t is intent on destroying) when there are still some left and they try to regroup and live a civilized life.
Brief as these entries are at first, even laconic, they are valuable; they strike me as truthful (There’s a version of this in Andrea Levy’s Small Island when WW2 comes to an end and her heroine is a person who is someone who has to lie to others and pretend to be helping them with gov’t aid when the forms are there to make sure only a small number of people get direct aid, the rest supposed soothed and gotten to resign themselves eventually).They try to get a pump to work. She and her friend, ever referred to the “widow” and the tenant, Herr Pauli do housework. They and others get on line again and we begin to hear about coping with regulations and forms.
Our heroine has to think about being alone, an independent and there’s a paragraph on how it’s easier – of course for her it seems easy to be alone. The people she finds most devastated are mothers whose daughters have been savagely raped – she does not talk of the mothers themselves. She think those who do best are long married men – that’s interesting – they have wives to return to though she reflects that wives will eventually call them to account. She does know why families cling to one another when there is anyone left.
She keeps on making daily entries, but they grow short. I find the behavior of the German men and he Russians as horrible in its way as the rapes. The women are forced to come out of their hovels and do heavy filthy work all day long — to clean up and some of the procedures do make the women work harder than they have to. The men are the supervisors. Hillers does not run away; she is one of those more willing — I suppose she hopes for food, information, but she is being treated as a type of person who because she is not as strong, can be forced into doing what no man wants to.
The work day reminds me of that of slaves in the south – -the women are forced up early and work until late at night, treated without an iota of respect — by the Germans now.
I have mentioned I identify — but I have not asked myself what I would have done until now. I can see why one might take a protector — but I’d do it I like to think only if the man was not intolerable to me, as a person as well as a body. I would not be like Hillers running to the center to fill out forms and do hard physical labor. You’d have had to have forced me out and beaten me first. Maybe that happened and Hillers is not telling.
The situation is as revealing and dismaying about human beings as all that came before. Both German and Russian soldiers, any one who is a man thinks he has the right to treat women as so many animals to be herded and forced to work.
In her description of 14 hour hard labor days — often laundress but also lifting heavy objects (garbage in the form of iron) onto wagons, she gives us insight into why slaves sang and behaved the way they did. When given good food, the women grow chatty with one another and relax. If you do not show up, you do not eat. She is aware they are being treated as slaves, worked as slaves, and respond as slaves — using that word in the English translation. It’s understood — or used to be — in some quarters of the world that Sunday is a day off. These soldiers want the women to work on Sunday and say if you don’t show they will come and ferret you out. That’s a threat of rape, gang rape. On that Sunday the women bicker and fight among themselves. As the woman work they stand supervising, that is to say, doing nothing themselves, except trying to grab and grope them, issuing sexual invitations, or insults, and offering minimal bribes. Except Sunday, on Sunday most do not show and the food is bad — gruel — the usual Russian male cook not there.
Her hands are rubbed sore and skinless.
She carries on presenting the Russians in a more favorable light than one might expect, as this cook. She says without saying why that the Russians are better as rapists is what’s implied than the Americans. The Americans are much worse. Rapes have not stopped. One of the woman Hillers has come to work with each day tells of how one day while washing in a basement she was ganged raped by three Russians and then for fun the put marmalade they found all over her hairs and then sprinkled that with powder. ho ho ho (p. 262-63). Hilliers does not describe the rape itself — rapes, there are three.
Meanwhile she is glad to get out because all along she has known the widow and Herr Pauli grudged her food. Now she comes home one night, and the widow, all apologetic, says Herr Pauli has decreed our heroine must leave. Where should she go? the widow does not show any interest or concern. The widow is “good cop” here — well, cowardly cop. Our heroine returns to her attic room.
When she is thrown out, she frames the act as what happens to a single woman – and says this is the most bitter aspect of being not partnered. You are automatically the “odd” person out, she is the one perceived by one of the pair as trouble and is kicked out to preserve peace between them. Yet she wants to remain single — she seems to dread the return of Gerd, the man who was her semi-partner and lover. Probably with good reason: in the movie he’s presented as sullen, angry, jealous — though nothing more as the movie ends around then.
It’s an edition owned and read by a reader who puts comments in the margins and brackets paragraphs. Twice a comment is about what a comedown it is to go from a woman who writes for publishers to a laundress, washerwoman and find herself among other women of this class. I don’t get the feeling that is what bothers Hillers — she is too genuine, decent, not hierarchical in her bones. She hates the work the way she hated the sex because it’s hard and degrading for anyone. Again asking myself what I would have done, I would have loathed the work because I would have hated the degradation as well as the filth, not as a derogation from a rank I achieved or was born into (I wasn’t) but for anyone. Still it would have been the degradation I hated and deep resentment against these men herding them, raping them.
I assume that is one motive for writing this book — to expose the social life of war particularly with regard to women but also to expose them. For her pains by most people she was castigated in the press. But I daresay a few with brains and sensitivity knew what this book shows and that must be her reward as well the sheer relief of saying it in public and that itself a protest.
It comes to a sudden halt. She re-establishes connections (though she would not use that word) with former colleagues (she does not call them that) and hard work efforts are made to start up a magazine with her as one of the writers. Everything a problem, especially paper. She is endlessly hungry once the slave labor forced on her stops. She lives in the attic and walks a lot everywhere. Sometimes she is with the widow — how the widow gets food is a puzzle. It is curious this identification throughout the book: the widow is a particular kind of woman, not that it saves her from rapes. The rapes go on and some are recorded (by Germans).
Then Gerd returns and that is really what ends the writing finally. She tells him what has occurred, and shows him her three notebooks. He is apparently horrified and so put off he leaves. She is told by someone she must keep silent, must not tell. The last sentence are about a hope that Gerd will return.
Then we get a publishers statement about how the first edition was ignored — rather like Primo Levi’s books, and then lashed out at. The author never wanted her name used, and stipulated the book should not be published until after she died — or not even then. It is only now (2005) that an edition is getting real circulation. We know what was done to it in that movie. Only the first assault can be told the truth about, once it’s about how men treat women and how the people under seige treat one another and their captors, the film punts; no one wants to listen.
Ellen
Referring to the respected journalist, Bisky’s account of Hiller’s life and her relationship to the respected writer,Kurt W. Marek, Christopher Gottesmann casts doubt on the authorship and truthfulness of the diary. To the contrary, Bisky’s account demonstrates that Hillers wrote the book in the form of many hasty notes and entries in three notebooks, directly after the war typed it up, and then gave it to Marek to publish. I quote relevant excerpts from an English translation:
Ambitious, tenacious and determined, Anonyma led an amazingly self-determined life, one in many ways typical of her generation …From May 1933 to July 1934 she studied History and Art History at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the summer of 1934, she went home to the Reich, initially for a “vacation in Southern Germany”. Then she moved to Berlin and began her career as a freelance journalist, writing articles, reports and narratives for the late edition of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and for magazines and provincial newspapers … From December 11th to 15t , 1934, the “Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger” published the report ” My home, the country road. Two girls on the road with truck drivers. By Trude Sand and Marta Hillers. ”
Trude Sand was then employed by the Union German Publishing Company. Her work on “the life, bustle, deeds and adventures of boys and girls during their year as land workers,” with the memorable title ” Zickezacke Landjahr Heil ” appeared in its fourth edition in 1935 … The report casually combines the old and then new, modern transportation, feeling for nature, tradition and economic life. Things are looking up. The novel describes the German national community’s fresh attitude to life. The report was later turned into a radio play, “Vikings of the Road” by Marta Hillers and Kurt W. Marek.
Ten days before the Christmas of 1935 Hillers described the relationship between “children’s games and world history,” explaining why little Wolf and his comrades play Nürburg races and field exercises, despise the tame games from the “years of reaction ” and “ want a Reich’s motorway for Christmas”. “If you leave boys to their own devices, their hord drive breaks through. Boys have the need to relive long-lost eras of humanity in their games. Atavism runs riot in contemporary clothing. When boys play world history, girls have silent roles at best.”
It is the collapse of this notion of masculinity on the German side and its confirmation on the Russian side that are reflected in the diary records. Nazi propaganda, which found man’s war companion in the woman, doubtless did the groundwork here …
ho wrote this book “A Woman in Berlin”, which obviously owes much to Martha Hillers? It is a book of literary non-fiction, published by the author who established the genre of literary non-fiction in Germany. Kurt W. Marek entered the literary history of the Third Reich with a “rousing report based on diary entries”. He was conscripted in 1938, soon deployed as a war correspondent in many arenas of “the Greater German freedom struggle” and submitted the diary-based report “We Held Narvik” in 1941. It tells the story of the Berlin flak gunners who occupied Norwegian Narvik with Lieutenant General Dietl’s Mountain Infantry Division, thus helping to safeguard the national community’s raids. Marek changed “the names of almost all the people”, “partly reversed and partly invented their characters” in the report. The changes to Anonyma’s diary are described in almost the same words in the preliminary remarks.
Marek’s success as a book author is based on his ability to compress what he has heard and read into a catchy story. He did this well in his most famous work, his “archaeological novel,” which he first published in 1949 as CW Ceram. “Gods, Graves and Scholars” was sold so often that Marek moved to the United States to save on taxes in 1954. In the same year he was out there, he published “A Woman in Berlin”. A book like this, humanly touching, valuable as propaganda (in the wake of the Korean War and during the Cold War – my note), was just the right thing to consolidate his position on the American book market,
The diary records were published in German for the first time by Helmut Kossodo of Geneva and Frankfurt am Main in 1959, largely unsuccessfully and without specifying an editor or rights holder. Marek’s epilogue is missing, instead there is a preliminary remark. This was adopted in the successful 2003 edition with some amendments. In 1959 it was said that the author had copied her diary, the three exercise books, on a typewriter in “July and August 1945”. In 2003 only “from July 1945” is to be read. The once clear indication of the textual history has become vague. How long did the unknown woman sit at her typewriter? “In doing so, sentences were written from key words, what was hinted at was clarified, what was remembered was added”, in short, something like the original text was created. Whether it emerged in two months or over a longer period is by no means a matter of indifference. Was the text finished before or after the Berlin blockade?
In the Eichborn edition it says the main text, “follows the first German edition, with some corrections.” In 1959 it reads: “Somebody points to the furniture around (Schietkram = crap) and sees it as superior culture” “Schietkram” is rarely said in Berlin. To someone like Marek who worked in Hamburg for several years it’s more evident to use this word. In the Eichborn edition of 2003 it is entirely absent: “Somebody points to the furniture around (in the style of 1800) and sees it as superior culture.”
There are a few marginal notes in the text, some later additions. Such things increase its plausibility in a suggestive way, making it clear that we are dealing with a “document”, “scribbled in the margin weeks later, to be used by novelists.” In the German edition, there was a precise specification: “scribbled in the margin three weeks later. . . “Obviously the development history of this document has changed over the years. Who edited the print version of 1959, who was the editor in 2003? Which formulation comes from who? Where are the “three exercise books” today? Three exercise books, 121 typed pages, the manuscript of the first print edition – how many versions are there?
It is possible that the manuscript is by Marta Hillers. It is possible that she gave Marek the papers, and the latter turned them into a book. It is also conceivable that Marek thoroughly revised Hiller’s manuscript. The responsible editor, Rainer Wieland, doesn’t want to give any information as to how the publisher verified the authenticity of the document, saying it was important to maintain the anonymity of the unknown woman.
The Eichborn edition also presents a different conclusion than the German edition. A paragraph was deleted that gave the history of the text. “I want to do one more thing. I have borrowed the widow’s typewriter. I’ll copy up my diary notebooks cleanly on it, on paper, which I found in the attic apartment. Nice and slow, as my energy permits. Nice and clear and without any abbreviations such as Schdg. (=Schändung= rape or defilement – my note) Gerd is to read it when he returns. “
I see the attribution question of A Woman in Berlin to problems with who wrote _The Sylph_,only I don’t have the details of what is the objection to believing it, only that Sophia Briscoe is now said to have been used as a front and she wrote novels. I have read some of Miss Melmoth by Briscoe and find its tone and events far lighter, more gay, the events far more innocent; Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment reads like an imitation of Grandison, and its abstract lexically complex sentences are nothing like the style of The Sylph.
In the case of George Ann Bellamy I have and am struck by the direct parallel. I began to type the six volume autobiography that she wrote; it was a long tedious job as I could not use a scanner because the books I had were 18th century remnants (cheap) and used the long “s.”
As with Hillers, one learns that she did not publish the book herself but used a more respected male, Alexander Bicknell, a journalist of the era, and what has happened is the book is sometimes attributed to him; he did publish the 3 volume redaction that Chatto & Pickering preferred to reprint. It omits a long section about Bellamy’s problems over sexual harassment and clothes as an actress only a woman could have written – -probably as embarrassing. I heard a paper at a conference only a couple of years ago denying Bellamy’s authorship or presenting her as not up to writing such a book — which is what is suggested here about Hillers. Only someone who really reads with subtlety, has some interest in women’s real issues could begin to try. Bellamy is still disrespected because she failed at her career in the end.
I see what an unconventional woman Hillers was; that she survived by enduring rapes from two men who protected her seems in character — I am not sure I could have endured just any man. It seems to me obvious she wrote this book but gave it to a respected friend to publish and then the first reponse was to hostile, she gave over and walked away. She was clearly unconventional and does not try for place and position the way those wanting a career do; when she is up against the need for money, then she writes what she has to. No false sentiment though in the end she found refuge with a decent man. Great irony there.
One of the notes of the English translator concerns something I felt while reading it. The book can be used to anti-communist propaganda even though Hillers is at pains to present the Russians as unusually chivalrous at times. Pasternak’s book came out in 1960 and in an Italian text; it was taken over as this masterpiece by the Nobel people and then in the Us made into an extravagant movie which because of the famous director and stars was praised to the hilt. It has a memorable tune but Andrew Davies’s mini-series is superior, especially because Davies brings out that it is an anti-war book and liberal humane in its outlook, not anti-communist (except insofar as one can extrapolate that out) — one could equally frame it as anti-fascistic because it is anti-war and fascist states are usuallyi gung-ho on war.
I agree we should have an edition which brings out these issues — but one which sees it as a woman’s text. Christopher Gottesmann’s slurring account partly because I care about Bellamy and can do nothing for her book. I did what I could to show what a travesty of feminism is Felicity Nussbaum’s Rival Queens.
http://www.jimandellen.org/Nussbaum.html
http://www.jimandellen.org/bellamy/apology.show.html
I probably made my notes on the two books into a blog because I do care about these issues, recognized the companionship of both books 167 years apart.
Ellen
I watched The Duchess last night and thought it quite good. I saw on the credits that Amanda Foreman was one of the executive producers, so she seems to have been a huge influence. It is beautifully shot and visually very appealing, as it stars Keira Knightly. As I watched it, I began to think that The Sylph was much more truthful in terms of the dissipation of the Ton and Julia’s mistreatment at the hands of men. The narrative of the novel and the film are quite different. The film is meant to be more of a biography but begins with Georgiana’s marriage to the Duke, William (excellent portrayal by Ralph Fiennes, but not nearly as wicked or strung out as in the novel). Perhaps women had no life until marriage.
In the film, it is clear that Georgiana’s function is to provide an heir, so she is just a beautiful body, a virginal vessel, and complains to her mother-in-law that her husband never talks to her, only uses her for sex (to satisfy himself). After seven years of marriage, she produces three beautiful daughters. There were two still births, but no male heir. William, who is used to getting his way, is bitterly disappointed. He then seduces Georgiana’s friend Lady Elizabeth, who has three boys. Georgiana protests, William rapes her, she produces a boy, her husband is thrilled, but still couldn’t care less about Georgiana and has no intention of giving up his mistress, who actually lives with them. We learn that William does not make deals, so it is Georgiana who must give up her lover Charles Grey and the daughter she soon bears him. What is made stunningly clear, is that men rule and women are powerless. This is after all what patriarchy is all about. Their privilege is not to be challenged. Georgiana is the one who must sacrifice or give up what she wants – everything basically, while William gets to have his way.
Although Georgiana is made to really suffer, in the end she accepts her lot graciously and becomes famous as a hostess. (The DVD package promotes her as the “it” girl – is there a message here ladies?) In terms of women’s powerlessness, I think the film was more frank, with the exception of the ending. I couldn’t help thinking of the Duchess’s great, great, great niece, Princes Di, who was also forced to endure a crowded marriage, but whose end was tragic. Di, as you may recall, did not submit to her fate obligingly. In writing this, it also occurred to me that we never did get to see Georgiana writing, which is a sad omission. Women are still made interesting by their looks and manners, a message the film perpetuates. Yet, The Sylph was actually more honest about how a woman’s body is viewed under patriarchy, the male gaze. But its fairytale ending also disappointed, spreading the lie that virtue will be rewarded. What then was Georgiana’s reward? Well, she was popular, something that must resonate well on Facebook. But then I’m cynical.
Elaine
[…] usually discussed under the umbrella terms of “simple” and “aggravated” (Georgiana’s The Sylph and Marta Hillers’ A Woman in Berlin), I found myself reading Preston Sturges’s shooting script for Miracle of Morgan’s […]
[…] the books as a girl, and Caroline loved listening to me read them when she was a girl. A number of other books too, essays in periodicals, and this poem which I liked as it put me in mind of how I feel about my […]
[…] away at the end; we are to feel he plays on because to give up is to cede all to barbarism. The woman from the Anonyma movie (Nina Hoss) is in it too: Hoffman’s implicit girlfriend and sidekick. I recommend it. Most […]
[…] away at the end; we are to feel he plays on because to give up is to cede all to barbarism. The woman from the Anonyma movie (Nina Hoss) is in it too: Hoffman’s implicit girlfriend and sidekick. I recommend it. Most […]
Having read your entry twice after discovering it, I feel that I should leave a reply (it might be a long one!). I found it recently while looking for anything new on the web regarding “A Woman in Berlin” or its author Marta Hillers – as her biographer I like to stay informed. 🙂
The topic of rape of German and Austrian women (and girls) by Allied forces is well documented in Germany, starting as early as 1945, but earnest research really only began with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The feminist filmmaker Helke Sander probably was the first to interview victims, children of those rapes and even a few former Red Army soldiers. There’s a lot to say about the subject, so I won’t even start, as it would easily fill a book!
To name just two contemporary works of fiction on rape 1945: James Wakefield Burkes “The Big Rape” (1951), which I think read like a sort of American spy novel but contains a few events often found in eyewitness accounts of the time. And a lighthearted but still phantastically accurate depiction of Allied Berlin, Billy Wilders “A Foreign Affair” (1948). You can also turn to “The Big Lift” (1948) which doesn’t touch the matter of rape but shows much of post-war Berlin. One of its main actresses, Bruni Löbel, was a good friend of Marta Hillers. Sadly, she passed away before I could talk to her for my book.
Marta Hillers herself did write other works, among them three screenplays, but none of them of the quality of “A Woman in Berlin”. There is a hard-to-find play, “Die Töchter des Präsidenten” (“The President’s Daughters”), which she co-wrote with her cousin, the dramatist Hans Wolfgang Hillers (who also features in “A Woman in Berlin”). Several passages in it relate directly to the events of her book, even one – albeit a discreet one – on Berlin women at the water pump talking freely about having been raped.
As for the reception of the first German edition of her book in 1959, there is that persistent rumour that it was met with hostility. I won’t deny it totally because some contemporary reviews refer to it, but as yet I’ve come across just one single negative review. A scandal of course makes a good story nowadays – however, I doubt there was one. So far I’ve found very few reviews at all, and most of them were positive. The German translation of Nabokovs “Lolita” was published around the same time as “Eine Frau in Berlin”, and everyone wrote about that – talk about scandal!
“A Woman in Berlin” was met with silence in Germany, not with a media-type witchhunt as the movie (and, consequently, Wikipedia) wants us to believe.
So why did its author refuse a new edition during her lifetime? I tend to think it was a combination of several reasons. Firstly, her book probably sold poorly; in 1986, when she added a clause to her last will, she remarked that she hadn’t received any royalties for 15 years, so it “probably wasn’t of much worth”. Secondly, it had been a long time since the events of 1945. I think she felt the book didn’t have much relevance anymore, neither to the reading public nor to the person she had become. She had married into a Swiss family of high standing which went hand in hand with a certain reserve. (For example, she never published anything under her real name for as long as her husband lived.) Maybe she considered it her duty to keep the family name clean from any possible stain.
What she did, though, was to correct her book with view to a posthumous new edition. I came across those correction sheets quite recently. So any changes between the two editions were done by the author herself, contrary to some journalists’ claims.
As for the topic of rape: There are just a few things I’d like to add.
The supposed importance of virginity – no, of course it wasn’t more important to save a girl’s virginity than it was to save her from rape. The point here is, it would have been the girl’s first exposure to sex. We all can imagine, and Marta too wrote to that effect, what that would do to her. In fact, there are many reports from 1945 about young girls learning ‘the facts of live’ the horrible way.
The film’s love story has been critized roundly and devastatingly. I once spoke with the director on the phone; he was very unhappy about the negative reception. After he had explained some of his ideas, I looked more friendly on his attempt, but I still can’t bring myself to like the movie. You’re right, the first 20 minutes or so are spot-on and always give me the creeps; the rest, sadly, is trite, not to mention flat-out illogical. I do like the Russian actors and only feel they should have had more dialogue in their native tongue.
There’s one tale in regard to any love story, however, and that is Marta Hillers describing the Major to a friend as a ‘Gary Cooper type’ of man. I got the impression both from this and her book that she actually liked him. She quite probably didn’t love him, and she certainly hated the circumstances of their acquaintance and relationship. But all things considered, he was on quite another level than lots of his fellow officers or soldiers. I wouldn’t classify him as a rapist, either. Morally ambiguous, definitely. Yet he never seemed to pressure or force her to do anything; he was gentle and considerate; he tried to get to know her better (as she wrote, she herself did rebuff such attempts); he even showed signs of jealousy.
Their situation wasn’t an unusual one at the time, and I agree with one of Marta Hillers’ nieces who said she could not condemn her aunt’s choices in any way, it was the smart thing to do. After all, what were the choices of those women? Sex with one ‘protector” or rape by many, being supplied with food for sex or going hungry. I think the definitions of self-esteem, of personal dignity changes massively in situations like that.
The slave labour was what it was, no doubt. But we shouldn’t fall into the trap of viewing it with eyes of modern civilization. First of all, the main reason why women were called in to do the hard work was simply because most of the men were either dead or POWs. As Allied occupation took on a more organized form, another reason emerged: The ration cards. Clearing away the rubble meant more food. (Concerning the work Marta Hillers did: It was almost the only way to get food at all.)
The ‘Trümmerfrauen’ (‘rubble women’) became the icon of post-war Germany and were (and still are) greatly venerated by their fellow countrymen. That time contributed in no small amount to women’s lib in Germany. During the war and the time following it, it had been the women who upheld society, who earned money and food, brought up their children, did all kinds of work formerly thought to be a man’s job, and neither they nor their children forgot it. Those who had a problem with it were, of course, the men who suddenly felt superfluous (there is a nice movie on that topic, “Eine Frau von heute”, 1954) and thus sought to cage their women once again – the conservative 1950s were a direct result of it.
Well, I could go on for hours! 🙂 Thanks for your article – I’m always especially glad when someone from abroad discovers Marta Hillers and her work and can understand and sympathize with her situation.
[…] or when a few of us turned actually to read together and discuss some of the works broached: Georgiana Spencer’s The Sylph for example; from there a few of us went on to read A woman in B…> and then two of us two more 18th century novels, one also attributed to Georgiana (Emma, or the […]
Just to follow up my earlier reply: I have now started a series of posts in English on Marta Hillers’ life: http://mehralsanonyma.twoday.net/
I hope to publish a post each week.
Oh wonderful. I’m going to come over right now and try to “follow” you or subscribe to your blog.
[…] WWTTA and EighteenthCenturyWorlds @ yahoo we read Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire’s The Sylph as a novel exploring rape; that morphed into just a few of us on WTTTA (as I recall the first for […]
[…] was our fifth novel by an 18th century woman in a row: we’d read Georgiana Spencer’s The Sylph; the anonymous Emma, or the Fatal Attachment, Sophie Briscoe’s Miss Melmoth, Austen’s […]
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On Wwtta summer 2014, we read and discussed Hiller’s (anonyma) A Woman in Berlin and talked about the film adaptation with the great actress, Nina Hoss. I wrote a good blog about the book, film and an 18th century book which included rape, which we were reading at the time
:https://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/georgianas-the-sylph-hillers-a-woman-in-berlin-understanding-rape/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1035730/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt
Miriam Gebhardt’s Crimes Unspoken: The rape of German women at the end of World War Two. This book has caused quite a stir in Germany because of the author’s claim that not only nearly 900,000 German women were raped, but many of them by US soldiers, and some of “allied” soldiers (Germans themselves, Russians). Gebhardt does not have enough hard statistics to support her because the society wants to refute this idea, but of course no hard statistics were kept except births and that is the number Gebhardt extrapolated from. The reviewer is Jane Yager, and the header: “Rubble Women.” Among the many troubling aspects of the controversy is that women are still not respected and still doubted when they say they have been raped, and the exposure of how after they were raped repeatedly or lived for a time with their rapists, German women were blamed, humiliated shamed. Appprently the recent Islamic New Year’s Eve free-for-all against women played differently in Germany than in the US (where it was basically a one day story against Muslims). There is still a concerted effort to keep this material from public consciousness; a statue of a soldier raping a woman was put up in Gdansk on October 12, 2013,; it was removed within hours “by the authorities.”
The review is in TLS for April 14, 2017, p 23:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/rape-germany-second-world-war/
Alas, again you must pay separately to read beyond the first paragraph.
Ellen
The controversy about Mrs Gebhardt’s book was not about her claim of rape by Allied troops – that fact has been known for decades in Germany and Austria and was, of course, especially of interest after the success of Marta Hillers’ book and the film adaptation. Several authors had already written about it before Miriam Gebhardt came along. The controversy was about the “hard statistics” you mention, mainly the fact that she took an estimated number of births and multiplied it times x and from that result claimed that actually a lot fewer women had been raped by the Red Army than formerly assumed. That’s part of the point she is trying to make – the “Russians” as scapegoats because it was politically convenient at the time (the Berlin blockade, Cold War and all that).
She’s not totally wrong, but what many readers and reviewers found so appalling is that she basically said: “Come on, it wasn’t really as bad as that according to my numbers.”
The positive thing about her book is that she devotes more time to the rest of the Allies than any other author before her. And there I have to agree with a lot of her findings. When I did research on the subject matter for Marta Hillers’ biography, it really shocked me how very little material there was. For example, French troops with a lot of Northern African soldiers in their ranks (I’m coming to that in a moment) went on a similar rampage as the Red Army in their conquered territories. But aside from, I think, two books on the city of Karlsruhe published by local authors in the 1960s and 70s, no one had written in-depth about it. A modern author mentioned the events in ca. 2012, again in a regional publication, but he was extremely dismissive about it.
I was really horrified by that. Everybody knew about the Red Army, and because of that people were able to talk or write about it. The Soviet Union, after all, had been the bad guy for Germans for a long time. But France had become an important and trusted ally very quickly after the war. The people of Karlsruhe and the border region were neighbours to the French. And so, even only a couple of years ago, no one discussed any of this. It had just been swept under the rug.
I don’t know about the coverage of Cologne’s New Year’s Eve events in the US. The authorities took some fire, to be sure, for not being open about it from the start. The problem here is political correctness. The police knew extremely well that, if they told the public a crime of that magnitude had been committed by Northern African immigrants, they would be accused of racism – facts or no facts. Which is what applies to the events of 1945 as well. The Northern African soldiers in the French army had been mentioned in connection with Allied rapes before (by modern authors), yet it was always: “Well, Germans probably attributed the crimes to them because they were prejudiced.” Political correctness at its worst when it tries to explain away or deny facts because reality doesn’t fit with a certain image.
(The French documentary “Femme de la rue” also was criticised as racist because a number of the men molesting the filmmaker were of Northern African decent.)
It really made me think about the influence of politics and society trends on the public memory of a people.
If you can, try to get a copy of Helke Sander’s documentary “BeFreier und Befreite”. It was the first to tackle the subject of rape by Allied troops. Even though it’s a bit artsy, it features some really interesting (and sometimes harrowing) interviews.
Clarissa
P.S.: In Alice Schwarzer’s (the most prominent – and slightly fanatic – German feminist) magazine it was once stated that political correctness mostly profits leftist males. One can agree with that or not, but the point the article was making was that pc allows men to dismiss women’s concerns under the name of tolerance. Suppression of Muslim women or aggression against Muslim converts to Christianity? Let’s not interfere, it’s a cultural thing, and we are tolerant of other cultures. Rape of women by immigrants? Of course not, what a racist idea! And so on.
Thank you for both these replies. I see I have a lot more to read and to know. One reason we women flounder is that so much is suppressed. I feel I have learned a lot from your reply. I took it that Gebhardt had these statistics in order to rouse (justified) indignation and a determination to stop war-rape. That’s the key: the powerful are not determined to stop war-rape because they want men to go to war and fight ferociously. This they do for power and money and themselves the thrill of it (I’m thinking of the present US administration).
Have you written an article on Hillers? I’d love to read it — if you can send information I could try to get it out of an academic database I have access to.
I really appreciate replies like this.
I’ve published an abridged English translation of her biography on my blog, starting here: https://clarissaschnabel.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/the-life-and-times-of-marta-dietschy-hillers-introduction/
There are links at the end of each entry to guide you from one part of the series to the next.
There’s also some more material under the categories “Marta Dietschy-Hillers” and “English articles”.
An academic database would be great – I appreciate the offer! I can’t quote from my book on Wikipedia since they do not accept on demand publications as sources…
It’s not only the USA – we’ve seen a new wave of warmongering dictators and far-right nationalists spring up all over the place in recent years. Turkey is a hot topic here these days. And since you mentioned Gdansk, Poland is another candidate. A few years ago there were already reports of lectures by liberal professors being disrupted by die-hard young nationalists who, in their far-right thinking, equate liberalism with communism which equates with the hated Soviet Union. Polish nationalism has always been a bit over the top, but its recent development is really scary.
From a German friend to whom I showed the above conversation:
I’m not familiar with the book itself, though I have seen reviews. Her reviewers generally find the book laudable, but some contest her statistics since her actual figures are apparently largely based on assumptions and extrapolations, not surprising in an area where so many were shamed to silence.
Her general premise is not so new though: I remember one of my set books on post-Weimar Germany by a German historian mentioning the violence often perpetrated on women in particular in the various occupied zones after the war. In his ranking, it was still the Russian zone where it was more prevalent, though, followed by the French, the American and lastly the British zones, He was very fuzzy on specifics, though.
I got some from my German mother-in-law, however, who openly talked about the rapes that took place in and around her village during the French occupation of this part of the Black Forest, as I mentioned when we were discussing Anonyma. They were largely perpetrated by the Moroccan contingent the local French commandant had in his regiment and they were only checked when one of her best friends became involved with said commandant and apparently got him to stop the depredations in their own village at least. I got to know her friend, but she herself never mentioned this chapter of her life.
The shame that has often stopped Germans openly discussing these horrific events, however, is double-faceted: it’s not only the shame that rape victims in general have been frequently made to feel; Germans are often also hesitant to appear to be playing up their own roles as victims in order to deflect from the Nazis’ shameful and horrific behaviour. One of the main questions asked during a recent talkshow Gebhardt took part in was ‘Are Germans allowed to be victims, too?’
By the way, Gebhardt’s latest book is on the White Rose resistance movement, which we also talked about when discussing the Sophie Scholl film here.
My reply:
Thanks for this reply. You confirm that it was a free-for-all on women just as the war ended. The woman who commented has not commented again. Since she does not use her name I cannot tell if she has written anything on Hillers. There did not seem to be a biography. It seems that having written this truthful book, Hillers has been erased — or her book. I am glad to see not the issue and Gebhardt deserves much praise — two books not just one. Courageous and able lady.
Ellen
The statistics were most likely taken from Helke Sander’s documentary and book; at least, the ranking’s the same.
As for Marta Hillers’ biography (maybe our postings coincided?), see my reply above. And the name’s Clarissa Schnabel. 🙂
Our postings did indeed coincide and I did not see yours until now. I will read it sometime today. Thank you very much. I am intensely interested in the subject of rape, since it is not too much to say my whole existence has been colored, limited, and even crippled since a devastating incident happened to me in public when I was about 13 — I was deeply shamed in public, ridiculed and have never been the same since. I had gradually to learn to protect myself by retreating before the forces (people) who aggressed at me and jeered on that fatal afternoon on May 26, 1959. I even remember the time and fate. I wrote my dissertation on Clarissa, because it is a novel about rape.
It is so important books like Hillers and Gebhardt and now Sander’s be known and distributed.
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