A Diary. By Anonymous. Translated by Philip Boehm. ON April 20, , huddled in a basement air-raid shelter, a Berlin woman in her early 30's began keeping a diary. A few days earlier she and her neighbors had heard the first sounds of artillery as the Red Army approached.
To stiffen a futile resistance, Goebbels, shameless to the end, had been exploiting the Germans' historic fear of the barbarian hordes from the east with stories of mass rapes and other atrocities. For once his propaganda was true -- the atrocities were real -- but by now there were few left to resist, mainly boys and old men. Most of the two million Berliners still in the city were women and children, abandoned by the Nazi hierarchy no one had troubled about evacuation plans.
With the Russian troops determined to have their revenge for years of brutal war, Berlin was a human catastrophe about to happen. Scribbled in a notebook and on odd pieces of paper, it seems not to have been written with readers in mind, but as a kind of therapy, to get "all this confusion out of my head and heart," as the anonymous diarist puts it.
It is one of the most important documents to emerge from World War II. Publication came late, and reluctantly. The author, a journalist and editor before and after the war, needed to be persuaded to make her manuscript public, and it was not until that the book first came out, in an English translation. Anyone who has done research in the period has learned to treasure the rare copies of that edition. But in Germany this was the time of the great forgetting, and the book didn't appear there until , when a Swiss publisher finally brought out a German-language edition.
It was promptly denounced, or else ignored. It would be intellectually comforting simply to say it fell victim to the condition W. Sebald described: of a society so traumatized by guilt, and the opprobrium of the outside world, that it was unable to acknowledge its own suffering.
