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The world felt little sympathy for any pain inflicted on a German people who had brought the world so much suffering. And Berlin women, who had lived through the humiliation, had no desire to recall it. Berlin men found it too painful to be reminded of their failure to protect their wives and daughters. Hiller’s writing was too graphic for easy digestion:
>Suddenly his finger is on my mouth, stinking of horse and tobacco. I open my eyes. A stranger’s hands expertly pulling apart my jaws. Eye to eye. Then with great deliberation he drops a gob of gathered spit into my mouth.
>I’m numb. Not with disgust, only cold. My spine is frozen: icy, dizzy shivers around the back of my head. I feel myself gliding and falling, down, down through the pillows and the floorboards. So that’s what it means to sink into the ground.
Hillers would die at age ninety in 2001, never knowing that that her book would be republished and become a best-seller in several languages, including German, in 2003. It would be made into a major German movie in 2008, becoming a favorite of feminists everywhere.
Perhaps nothing could better capture the German attitude of 1961 toward their occupiers than Hillers’s book and Berliners’ aversion to reading it. The East German relationship to their Soviet military occupiers, who still numbered 400,000 to 500,000 by 1961, was a mixture of pity and dread, complacency and amnesia. Most East Germans had grown resigned to their seemingly permanent cohabitation.
Among the minority who hadn’t, many were fleeing as refugees.
Fred Kempe is president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. His latest book, Berlin 1961, will be available May 10. This blog series originally published by Reuters.
