The courtyards echo the sound of the gunfire. For the first time I understand the phrase ‘thunder of cannon’, which until now has always sounded like a hollow cliché, such as ‘courage of a lion’ or ‘manly chest’. But thunder is an apt description.
Showers and storms outside. I stood in the doorway and watched some soldiers pass by our building, listlessly dragging their feet. Some were limping. Mute, each man to himself, they trudged along, out of step, towards the city. Stubbly chins and sunken cheeks, their backs weighed down with gear.
‘What’s going on?’ I shout. ‘Where are you headed?’
At first no one answers. Then someone mutters something I can’t make out. Then someone else mumbles something, but the words are dear enough: ‘Führer, command! And we will follow, even unto death.’
They all seem so miserable, so little like men any more. The only thing they inspire is pity, no hope or expectation. They already look defeated, captured. They stare past us blindly, impassively, as we stand on the kerb. They’re obviously not too concerned about us, us Volk or civilians or Berliners or whatever we are. Now we’re nothing but a burden. And I don’t sense they’re the least ashamed of how bedraggled they look, how ragged. They’re too tired to care, too apathetic. They’re all fought out. I can’t bear watching them any more.
The walls are marked with chalk, by now smeared and running, evidently directing the soldiers to specific assembly points. Two cardboard placards are tacked onto the maple tree across the street, announcements, neatly penned by hand, in blue and red letters, with the names ‘Hitler’ and ‘Goebbels’ on them. One warns against surrender and threatens hanging and shooting. The other, addressed ‘To the People of Berlin’, warns against seditious foreigners and calls on all men to fight. Nobody pays any attention. The handwriting looks pathetic and inconsequential, like something whispered.
Yes, we’ve been spoiled by technology. We can’t accept doing without loudspeakers or rotary presses. Handwritten placards and whispered proclamations just don’t carry the same weight. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. In the old days one man’s call to arms was enough to set off an uprising – a few hand-printed leaflets, ninety-five theses nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. But today we need more, we need bigger and better, wider repercussions, mass-produced by machines and multiplied exponentially. A woman reading the placards summed it up nicely: ‘Well, just look what those two have come to.’
In the basement, 10 p.m. After my evening soup I allowed myself a little rest in the bed upstairs before trotting back down. The full assembly had already gathered. There was less shelling today, and there has been no air raid yet, though this is the time they usually come. Nervous merriment. All sorts of stories making the rounds. Frau W. pipes up, ‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead’. The joke seems not very appropriate to her mourning crêpe. Next comes Fräulein Behn: ‘Let’s be honest for once. None of us is still a virgin, right?’ No one says anything; I wonder who among us might be. Probably the concierge’s younger daughter; she’s only sixteen and ever since her older sister went astray they keep her under close guard. If I’m any judge of young girls’ faces, then eighteen-year-old Stinchen with the Hamburg ‘s’ slumbering away over there is another. As for the girl who looks like a young man, I have my doubts. But she could be a special case.
We have a new woman in the basement: up to now she’s been going to the public bunker six blocks away, which is supposed to be secure. She lives by herself in her apartment, but I don’t know yet whether she’s abandoned, widowed or divorced. She has a patch of weeping eczema over her left cheek. She tells us, at first in a whisper but then out loud, that she’s secured her wedding ring to her pants. ‘If they get that far then the ring won’t matter much anyway.’ General laughter. Still, her weeping eczema might prove just the thing that saves her. Which is worth something these days.
MONDAY, 23 APRIL 1945, 9 A.M.
The night was amazingly quiet, with hardly any flak. We have a new resident, the husband of the woman who was bombed out of her home in Adlershof and who moved in here with her mother. He showed up very quietly, still in uniform; an hour later he was wearing civilian clothes. How could he get away with it? No one’s even noticed, or else they don’t care. Anyway no one’s saying anything. A hard-boiled soldier from the front, he still looks pretty strong. We’re happy to have him.
Deserting suddenly seems like a perfectly understandable thing to do – a good idea, in fact. I can’t help thinking of Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans standing their ground at Thermopylae, and falling in battle as their law demanded. We learned about them in school, we were taught to admire their heroism. And I’m sure that if you looked hard enough you could find three hundred German soldiers willing to do the same. But not three million. The larger the force and the more random its composition, the less chance of its members opting for textbook heroism. We women find it senseless to begin with; that’s just the way we are – reasonable, practical, opportunistic. We prefer our men alive.
Towards midnight I was so tired I almost fell off my chair (where am I supposed to come up with a bed?), so I staggered up the glass-strewn stairs and made my way to the first floor and the widow’s couch, where I slept until nearly 6 a.m. Afterwards I was surprised to learn there’d been a series of bombs. I slept right through it.
There were rolls at the baker’s, the last ones. My last ration cards for bread, too. No new cards in sight. No decrees and no news, either. Nothing. Not a soul cares about us any more. We’re suddenly mere individuals, no longer members of the tribe, the German Nation. Old ties are broken; friendships don’t extend further than three buildings away. There’s only the group of us, huddled in the cave, a clan, just like in prehistoric times. The horizon has shrunk to three hundred paces.
At the baker’s I heard the Russians were in Weissensee and Rangsdorf. How many times have I gone swimming at the lake at Rangsdorf? ‘The Russians in Rangsdorf…’ I say it out loud, just to try it out, but it doesn’t sound right. Today the eastern sky was burning red with the constant fires.
Back from getting coal, 1 p.m. Heading south I could feel I was literally marching towards the front. They’ve already closed off the S-Balm tunnel. The people standing outside said a soldier had been hanged at the other end, in his underwear, a sign with the word ‘traitor’ around his neck. His body was dangling so close to the ground you could spin him around by the legs. The person who said this had seen it himself he’d chased off the street kids who’d been amusing themselves.
Berliner Strasse looked desolate, half torn-up and barricaded off. Queues in front of the stores. Blank faces amid the flak. Trucks were rolling into town. Filthy figures in shabby bandages trudged alongside, their bodies sprayed with dirt, their faces empty. A baggage train of hay carts, grey-haired men on the boxes. Volkssturm units are posted at the barricade, in motley uniforms hastily pieced together. You see very young boys, baby faces peeping out beneath oversized steel helmets; it’s frightening to hear their high-pitched voices. They’re fifteen years old at the most, standing there looking so skinny and small in their billowing uniform tunics.
Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming. Where do you draw the line? When their voices break? Because that’s what really gets me the most, thinking about these little boys: their voices, so high, so bright. Up to now being a soldier meant being a man. And being a man means being able to father a child. Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness.