A Woman in Berlin, Book Review Essay Example

A woman in Berlin is a memoir by a German woman that is anonymous. The book covers the happenings between 20th April and 22nd June 1945.This was the period during the capture of Berlin and its occupation by the Red Army. The writer of the book describes the rapes by the Soviet soldiers which include her personal experience as a woman journalist and the pragmatic approach to survival by the women. The book A woman in Berlin does not only reveal a true heroine that is ready to join other enduring figures of the twentieth century but also gives voice to the war victims that are rarely heard.

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The author kept a record of the daily happenings during the period of the war. The woman who happened to be a journalist tells the story of the war from the perspective of one of the spoils of war. The woman is optimistic, insightful and funny and it is, for this reason, she is an inspiration to all men and women and gives hope towards humanity in a world that seems to be inhumane.

During this period the women are repeatedly raped, worked raped, and the men used them in whatever way they saw fit. In the book, the writer uses a monologue describing how dirty she felt and didn't want to touch anything and didn't know what the women would become. The author considered the men to be mere animals, savages and not people. The author could speak basic Russian, and due to her language skills, she saw it as her responsibility to prevent rape. She explains how she prevents to perpetrators from raping a neighbor with another Russian soldier and after the Russian soldier had left the two perpetrators ambushed and instead raped her. Rape had become too common to the extent that women exchanged their stories about it in a way that was once used for the news of the day.

During the early stages of the war of Yugoslav issues about mass rape of Bosnian and Croatian women by the Serb militias despite appearing in the British newspapers were termed as being propaganda. Some women had been raped several times despite the author having difficulty to collect accurate statistics regarding the issue. According to the author, the rape of the women of Croation and Bosnian was not a peculiar future of the conflict that was ongoing, but it was a condition of war. This was because there was no a sharp rise in cases of pregnancy considering that abortion was allowed up to 12 weeks and many women stopped menstruating during the heavy shelling.

According to the author, one of the casualties of war is how women view men besides the killing of the innocent. The defeat of the male sex by the women is among the many defeats at the end of the war. The author argues how she kept on noticing how the feelings of other women and also her feeling towards men kept on changing. The sexually repressive post-war period in Germany whereby the husbands reasserted their authority and mass rape experience had been submerged. This proved to the author how premature her optimism was. The experience that women had in the zones that were occupied had its own story whether in Iraq or Germany which was not the same as that of the occupied or conquering males. To assert some control of the situation they had to learn how to align themselves with some specific men to have some control over the situation. The only drive the author had was a determination to live since all the other feelings seemed to be dead. The author encouraged the women to help each other by speaking about the mass rape, express their pain and allow others to share their pain as well and also discuss what they have suffered to be in a position of overcoming the issue of mass rape collectively.

In conclusion, A Woman in Berlin is a book that the author uses to share a voice for the voiceless. The book is an Anonymous of an eight-week diary during the period of war when the Russians were invading Berlin. The Russian soldiers indiscriminately raped the women. The author describes her experience of horror as a journalist in the field of war that the mind prefers not to remember, the impact of rape on the self, the examination of the painful memories, and the struggle to survive in every way possible. The story of the author illustrates the horror that is brought by war to the lives of women when the war takes place near a home front and not on a traditional battlefield. The war survivors both the men and the women should acknowledge the fact that there is no return to the blissful ignorance of the error of prewar. The women tend to wonder what the men involved in a war did to the women in the village they had conquered when they return from their battlefields.