The 20th century has taught us, in numerous undeniable ways, what war is like up close. It has provided us with evidence of how all assumptions of humanity — or the foundation of society that makes life worth living — collapse during war. Violence, rape, humiliation — all manner of atrocities take place as if they constitute the norm, not the aberration. Life as we know it seems to fall deep down a hole to a dark and ugly place where anything can happen because everyone is dehumanized, victims and perpetrators, and all those in between.

But accounts of life in wartime do more than lay bare the horrors that happen all too easily during the time. They show up the various faultlines that must have already existed in ‘civilized society’ before it was afflicted by war. One anonymous account of what happens to the people of such ‘civilized societies’ serves not only as a chilling indictment of war, but also of all ‘civilized’ patriarchal societies.

In 2003, a diary entitled Eine Frau in Berlin about the closing days of World War II was published in Germany; the English translation was published in 2005. The diary begins with the inscription, “This chronicle was begun on the day when Berlin first saw the face of war.” The first entry is dated Friday, April 20, 1945, and the last entry is dated Friday, June 22, 1945 — a period of just over two months. Yet the mass rape of women by Russian troops, and the women’s manoeuvres for survival in the face of their general degradation, seem to go on for much longer. It must have seemed like a lifetime to the women. It also seems like that to the reader, such is the power of the diary’s account of rape, hunger and the range of indignities suffered by Berliners at the end of the war.

Actually, the diary was first published as early as 1954, in an incomplete English translation in the United States of America, and subsequently in 1959 in German. But it was received with an almost visceral disgust in Germany. This reception says a great deal — almost as much as the diary does. There was the power of the general unspoken law of silence on what had happened in Germany anyway. There was the complex legacy of guilt, shame and defensiveness to cope with which made silence the best possible coping mechanism. But there was also the urgency of the need to muffle women’s voices. In the diary, the author comments wryly about the German soldiers who had returned to Berlin on leave: “And they loved to tell their stories which always involved exploits that showed them in a good light.” In contrast, she says of the women who have just gone through (and are possibly still going through) their own war, “We on the other hand will have to keep politely mum; each one of us will have to act as if she in particular was spared. Otherwise no man is going to want to touch us any more.” Yet, the lonely experience of finding ways to survive leads the author to also say, “These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men — and the feelings of all the other women — are changing… We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. That has transformed us… Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.”

The irony is that the author is wrong. We get a sharp inkling of this at the end of the diary when she meets her fiancé, Gerd, again. When he hears her tell stories of the women’s experiences over the past several weeks, he responds, “You’ve all turned into a bunch of shameless bitches, every one of you in the building. Don’t you realize? …It’s horrible being around you. You’ve lost all sense of measure.” It’s only this loss of a “sense of measure” or the “besmirching of the honour of German women” that a good part of the German readership in 1954 saw. The author apparently refused to have another edition published in her lifetime. The book went out of print, sank without a trace in the well of collective silence dug in the aftermath of the war.

It was resurrected years later, when the German poet and essayist, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, republished the diary since the author — whom he insisted should remain anonymous — had been dead for two years. The book, both in the German original and in English translation, met with tremendous interest, even acclaim, for more than one reason. With its layers of minutely observed detail, the diary is a rich documentation of a city and its people in the grips of fear, hunger, loneliness, and most of all, the overwhelming need to survive. This is an account of war — not an actual battlefield, not the front, but war nevertheless. “A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaw. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.” The diarist describes everything, from the ersatz coffee to individual idiosyncrasies to gang rapes. And she does this in an unsentimental but vivid way so that there is no room for self-pity. Nor is there a note of falsehood, a coy phrase or a bombastic exclamation. The author stands witness to what happened, to what people did to each other, the arrangements women made to survive. And she does this with a kind of wry, shrewd humour. She does not try to gloss over the choices each woman makes, including herself. And since the diary keeps the human detail so firmly in focus, there are no attempts to score political points one way or the other.

Most of all, this memoir shows us what it is to be dehumanized. Even when the period of mass rape is past, and the occupying forces are “in control” of the city, the women remain with the sense that they have been stripped of their humanity: “To the rest of the world we’re nothing but rubble women and trash.” The resistance to the diary displayed by the author’s partner at the time, as well as the general reaction to its initial publication in post-war Germany, reinforces this — except that the dehumanizing then occurs through denial, through the collective silence imposed on the women.

For present-day readers, the diary resonates with powerful suggestions about the complicated relationships between civilians and the occupying force. We find ourselves superimposing, without difficulty, scenes of Afghanistan, Iran and Palestine onto the scenes of Berlin unfolding before us. The experience of women in occupied zones has not changed much between 1945 and today. And finally, there is a fundamental moral ambiguity that colours our reading of this diary today. It’s a question about the distance between the victim and the aggressor. We see, given the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the day-to-day degradations perpetrated on the people there, that yesterday’s victim can become today’s oppressor. Their masks can be switched, especially if there is selective use of memory and forgetting.