Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a day-to-day record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. “With bald honesty and brutal lyricism” (Elle), the anonymous creator depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, in addition to their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger after which by the Russians. “Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly freed from self-pity” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are all the time subject–the mass rape suffered by all, irrespective of age or infirmity.
A Woman in Berlin stands as “one of the most crucial books for working out war and life” (A. S. Byatt, creator of Possession).