Scenes From an Occupation

Rarely in a World War II-era film are loyal German non-combatants on the receiving end of aggression to the degree they are in this potent work based on the diary of an anonymous Berliner and set during the Red Army’s occupation of her neighborhood in April 1945. Presented with gravitas and vivid theatricality, A Woman in Berlin is a love story bound up in countless atrocities. Outside Europe, it will draw a specialized set of filmgoers. In other words, while first-class cinema, the thought-provoking work is more appropriate for a history seminar than date night.

When first published in 1953, the diary of Anonyma A Woman in Berlin provoked shock and outrage, chronicling as it did a taboo episode in modern German history and one the Russians could hardly have wanted revealed. The movie version begins with the unnamed diarist (Nina Hoss), a worldly thirty-ish journalist, describing in voiceover how she believed in her country and its destiny, even if one senses she wasn’t an ardent Nazi. After a brief snippet from a pre-war cocktail party in which a collective hubris is evident, the movie takes place in the rubble-strewn strasse through which we see a battalion of Soviet soldiers making its way, meeting with scattered resistance from German troops. The Russians are coming and they’re not taking any prisoners.

During this early segment, writer/director Max Färberböck does a tremendous job of conveying the dusty chaos of urban warfare using excellent handheld photography (kudos to DP Benedict Neuenfels) and brilliant sound design. The thoroughfare’s civilian survivors—mostly women, along with a few children and elderly men—hide in a cellar but are soon discovered. Frustrated because they’re ordered not to push on to the Reichstag, the Russian soldiers occupy the neighborhood as the fighting continues elsewhere in the city. They immediately begin preying upon the women. In entries addressed to her soldier boyfriend Gerd, Anonyma describes the bedraggled Soviets as “overjoyed” —surprised that they’re alive let alone victorious. The pillaging carried out by the brutish yet generally convivial troops often entails the free flow of vodka, wine and schnapps.

At first, Anonyma and the other women resist. Soon they try to manage the situation and protect themselves by making arrangements with certain soldiers. Fluent in Russian, Anonyma decides to be even more proactive and visits the battalion commander, a handsome, brooding Major (Yevgeni Sidikhin) straight out of Eugene Onegin or a Chekhov play. Though there’s obviously a connection, he doesn’t respond to her unspoken invitation. As the ravaging continues apace (mostly off-camera), she handpicks a dashing officer, but when the Major starts turning up she finds herself temporarily juggling two alpha males. Although a great deal happens in the form of sub-plots involving the Russians and the vanquished Germans, the film becomes a peculiar love story, not without tinges of soapy melodrama. During the eight weeks until the Third Reich officially surrenders, the Major and Anonyma conduct their affair and the apartment she lives in with an elderly widow becomes a makeshift bordello and social club. There’s whorehouse humor as the various women compare notes about the Russians’ sexual skills and prowess; and the Major’s behavior becomes a source of tension amongst his soldiers, which puts his faithful Mongolian aide and a smitten female officer on their toes.

It’s impossible to address all the issues raised by A Women in Berlin. To post-war Germans, the fraternization, forced or not, was scandalous and shameful. From a more detached perspective, the episode is interpretable as a national reckoning—as payback for the cruel way German soldiers treated the Russian population during the war, not to mention for other Nazi crimes against humanity. In truth, it’s hard to sympathize with the German victims, even as the movie prompts that familiar self-examination vis-à-vis what you would do in order to survive in a time of such hardship. Ideology quickly becomes irrelevant, which is not to deny there’s plenty of jingoism and politics bubbling on the movie’s surface, best summarized as a collision between Fatherland fascism and Motherland communism.

Färberböck wends his way through this thicket without indulging in anything graphic or salacious, yet also without shying away from caricatures of the Russians as either leering or noble or without skirting the muted romantic dynamic within the story. There’s a hard-to-pinpoint flamboyancy: it’s not sentimental exactly, but the filmmaking does have a histrionic quality. How much of the film’s tone stems from the diaries and how much from the adaptation process is a complicated matter. Nevertheless, it prompts the question: is it possible and conscionable to romanticize mass rape? This leads to inquiries about the veracity and reliability of both author and director, about the psychology and nature of storytelling under such conditions as each in different ways confronted. The temptation to overdo the emotional pressures at work—to edge toward melodrama—must have existed for both diarist and filmmaker in order to make the narrative endurable in real life an on screen—more historically and artistically palatable.

The picture ends as it should, torn and full of contradictions. There are no answers. No sense can be made of what happened. The conflicted reactions of the individuals, the peoples, the filmmaker and the audience must stand. In that sense, A Woman in Berlin is a fascinating hybrid that speaks eloquently to the unspeakable nature of war and the difficulty of assigning culpability and standing in judgment.

Distributor: Strand
Cast: Nina Hoss, Yevgeni Sidikhin, Irm Hermann, Rüdiger Vogler, Ulrike Krumbiegel, Rolf Kanies, Jördis Triebel, Roman Gribkov, and Juliane Köhler
Director: Max Färberböck
Screenwriter: Max Färberböck and Catharina Schuchmann
Producer: Günter Rohrbach
Genre: War/Drama/Romance; German and Russian-language, with English subtitles
Rating: Unrated
Running time: 131 min
Release date: July 17 NY