If there were a million good-quality comedy movies available to rent, I might never move outside of that genre of cinema. However, there isn't.
Often, movies that we rent that are critically-acclaimed, or worse yet, a documentary, will sit regretfully on a shelf until it cannot be ignored any longer and we cautiously slide it into its machine. This was true with A Woman in Berlin. It's a true story based on the brutal experience of thousands of German women raped by invading Red Army soldiers at the conclusion of World War Two. I grew up in a family environment witnessing brutality to my mother, and the last thing I want to watch is a movie that graphically re-enacts such violence. As an anti-stalinist socialist, I also did not want to sit through two hours of crude anti-communism.
Max Farberbrock, however, tells a difficult story that needs to be told without repelling its audience.
Most Americans grew up alongside war movies that by their sheer number implied that the majority of World War Two was fought in western Europe. The reality is different. Only 10% of the people killed in World War Two died on the western front. Some 12 million Germans and 27 million Russians died in the main theatre of the war - the eastern front. The final, horrific stage of this front was the Battle of Berlin, the backdrop to Max Farberbock's film.
The movie is based on the diary of Marter Hillers covering the 90-day period of the first Red Army troops entering Hitler's Berlin to the surrender of the Nazi regime. During the last offensive of the eastern front to capture Berlin, in that fateful two weeks 100,000 Russian sodiers and up to 400,000 German troops and civilians died. Fearing both the brutality of revenge and the humiliation of defeat, the top Nazi elite killed themselves. For the remaining Germans, overwhelmingly women, mostly mothers, suicide was not an option.
A Woman in Berlin gives a glimpse of a city populated by soldiers' wives being invaded by hundreds of thousands of angry men. It could be the premise of some messed up Hollywood horror screenplay. While portraying most of the Red Army soldiers as either predators or negligent in the raping, the violence is not simply portrayed as misogyny. The source of the rage of the Red Army soldiers is touched on: one soldier recites the number of days he's been at war and another forces a German family to listen to the details of how the Nazis had murdered all the children in his village. The movie deliberately avoids the issue of wether Hiller was originally part of the nazi regime, in part, possibly, not to make the Soviet brutality seem justified. No rage justifies the individual violence perpetrated on the tens of thousands of women of Berlin in 1945.
History, like life, is not simple and one-sided. Leon Trotsky wrote that history is like clay in the potter's hands. The history of wars, likewise, is written by the victorious. I am not sure how accurate a rendering of the original diaries that the movie is. Hillers diary, when published anonymously in West Germany in 1959, was met with anger by the German media establishment. The mass rapes and prostitution following World War Two was to be buried in the name of defending women's reputations, not so different to the present day burial of the daily reality of violence against women.
The release of the DVD ironically coincides with the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This story unveils the brutal birth of the stalinist regime in East Germany. It also does not omit the real hope that existed in 1945 with the defeat of Nazism and the lifting of its iron heel from Europe's neck.
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