A Woman in Berlin/Gone With The Wind

A Woman in Berlin Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Anonymous
compared to
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Probably a more unlikely comparison cannot be imagined, on first look, and granted it is only certain sections that are applicable in this arena. I wish we knew more of Anonymous, her background and what happened to her after that fateful and terrible eight weeks. We don't, and that is the end of that for now at least. But we do know some of what happened to Scarlett, and she reaped what she sowed to a great extent. Did she overcome her own short-sightedness regarding Rhett? We don't really know as Ms. Mitchell didn't write the sequel and the same applies to Anonymous. We don't know what happened to her after the rift with Gerd, her returned lover. In both cases the romantics among us can only hope that love won out.

"A Woman in Berlin" is a terrible story of the eight weeks surrounding the Fall of Berlin in 1945. This woman, an experienced journalist, recounts with clarity and a certain cold-bloodedness the Hell that was descending on Berlin. Waiting for an army to occupy.....that is one of the first points of comparison. So much that Anonymous recounts is exactly the same as Scarlett waiting for the Northern Army to descend on Atlanta in 1864. The cannons in the distance drawing closer and closer.

From "A Woman in Berlin"....
"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, toward the city. Stubbly chins and sunken cheeks, their backs weighed down with gear.......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 curb."

The starvation. At one point Anonymous says...
"My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food."

Reading the above reminded me so much of the Confederate soldiers leaving Atlanta just ahead of the Northern Army.....from old men to beardless young boys marching out to try to face the enemy one more time. Hopeless. But still they did it, and died for nothing. This is from GWTW just before Scarlett left Atlanta with Melanie.....

"I must think. But thoughts eluded her, darting in and out of her mind like frightened hummingbirds. As she stood hanging to the sill, a deafening explosion burst on her ears, louder than any cannon she had ever heard. The sky was rent with gigantic flame. Then other explosions. The earth shook and the glass in the panes above her head shivered and came down around her. The world became an inferno of noise and flame and trembling earth as one explosion followed another in ear-splitting succession."

Both women waiting for the enemy to descend. Scrabbling for the barest of essentials. Food. Water. Both enduring the terrors that an invading army of desperate men bring. Anonymous did endure repeated rape and the swift realization of the realities of her situation, choosing to find an officer to keep her and thus prevent the enlisted men from gang raping her. The character of Scarlett also left niceties behind when she went after Rhett to try to get him to marry her...she hated him at that point, but swallowed her pride, chose common sense and went after the richest man she knew to save her family and land.

So really in the end the stories are at their heart more alike than I even realized even though almost a century and an ocean apart. Two women surviving men's war, with their sanity (more or less) intact and able to face the world. The styles are of course vastly different, but the message the same.

What an interesting comparison.

I had no idea, before I read Uta Danella's masterpiece Stella Termogen, and then later talked with some Germans, how desperate a time the post-WWII period was for them. For many years, it was more-or-less taboo for Germans to talk about the Nazi period and its immediate aftermath. Ursula Hegi's book Breaking the Silence discusses this. Both American and German literature about that period, for understandable reasons, has generally stressed the evils of the Nazi period over the suffering of ordinary Germans at the close of the war. But the suffering was real, and it may be that the starvation and the abuse at the hands of U.S. and Russian soldiers was made more horrible by the spiritual suffering of people who realized (consciously or subconsciously) that they were implicated - sometimes by their own knowledge and participation, sometimes with only the most shadowy awareness that something was not right - in the crimes of the Nazi regime. But we are learning more, now, about that period, and I think gaining a fuller understanding of what everyone went through is useful and appropriate. Separating people into absolute categories of victims, rescuers and evil-doers is not terribly useful, I suspect, to developing an understanding of history that would help us avoid similar catastrophes in the future, because the vast majority of human beings are a blend of all of these things.

Gone With the Wind is out of style now because it gives such an accurate portrayal of Southern white attitudes toward slavery, slaves, and the post-war population of freed black people. I predict it will come back in style after another generation or two when race prejudice finally, really and truly becomes a thing of the past (surely we can hope for this!), simply because it is so accurate in depicting the Confederacy from one particular angle.

I've lived in the South for all of my life, and have known these people since birth, and yes much of "Gone With the Wind" is very accurate.

The point of my comparison was really to bring out that war and the aftermath of any war in any place at any time in history is a terrible and scarring experience even for....or maybe especially for the innocents.

But I especially love the survival of these particular women.

I should have said Southern white attitudes during the post-Civil-War period and, to a large extent, during the time Margaret Mitchell was writing. Things really have changed all over the country, thank goodness, even though more change is needed.

Gone With the Wind is one of the books I have reread most often. During my late teens and early twenties, I think I must have read it almost once a year. I guess I feel a little defensive about loving it so much, because I am also well aware of Scarlett's many flaws - as Mitchell herself was, and stressed throughout the novel. But should we feel sympathetic only to the truly innocent? How many people are totally and completely innocent in any country at war? Perhaps this was one of the points Mitchell wanted to make, that the less-than-completely-innocent deserve our sympathy, too.

Cateline,
I was very taken with your comparison. I've not read GWTW and am only familiar with the long lush movie version, but I suspect there was a considerable amount of horror, loss and desolation in Sherman's march to the sea that might be similar to events in Woman in Berlin, in addition to the personal situations of the two women.
For Anonymous in Berlin, there are many well-known words that might be used -- prostitute, whore, sympathiser, fraternizer -- which have their criminal overtones and were punished after the war, but I would strenuously desist. Writing from this distance in both time and place and never having been overrun by an enemy, (as well as being the wrong gender), I am probably the last one to have a valid opinion, but I found Anonymous to be in an unavoidable predicament from which she found a reasonable and defensible way out. She saw it as her only way and I would be the last to suggest that she should have had the personal fortitude to starve herself to death instead. So I definitely think that compassion has to extend beyond the purely innocent and I think she is an example. She was also definitely wise to have the story not published too soon, but only after her death, when it might receive a more balanced hearing.
I think that was an excellent and thought-provoking comparison, Cateline.

Thank you Karlus,
The film version was accurate as far as it went. It left out a great deal, well only a couple of marriages and little stuff like that. :D

I read your excellent review of "A Woman in Berlin" and agree fully that her returned boyfriend could not deal with what she'd done to survive, but I have to think that came partially with his own guilty feelings. Not that he should have felt guilty, he shouldn't have, but I'd lay odds he did.

Margaret,
I am another one that has re-re-reread GWTW, but not in, oh I guess 10 years or so now. I suppose attitudes have changed, but only beginning in this last generation. Not enough, but the pendulum will eventually balance out to a nice middle ground where no one race is bitter against the others. I hope I live to see that happen.

Cateline,
I think her boyfriend symbolizes exactly the issue laid bare in the book. Peacetime standards of morality were in square conflict with the most basic human instinct to fight for survival, and the book clearly shows the blurring of standards of behavior that occurred according to pragmatic needs. The residents of the apartment where she lived found her behavior to be perfectly acceptable as long as she brought in the food. But when she was between Russians, and not providing food for them, then she was not so welcome, so it wasn't only she who was adjusting her moral yardstick. Somehow, I think that is the clearest message of the book.

Which is very clearly brought out on p.179...

"This makes me think that the household is beginning to view me as a burden, one more mouth to feed, that they're counting each morsel I consume and begrudging me every single potato. Meanwhile Pauli is still happy to dip into my major's sugar..........I can't bring myself to be angry with the two of them. Not that I've had to, but it could well be that in their situation I wouldn't be too happy to share my food either. And there's no new major on the horizon."

Even when they show their hypocrisy, she can't bring herself to be angry with them. She has shared all of her food with them prior to this, and yet they make her uncomfortable. But unlike her returning lover, at least they never condemn her in any way.

Probably one either has to be in the situation at the time, or far enough removed from it as we are in time and space to appreciate it.

She sounds almost saintly, actually.

The author has a, oh how can I call it? She has a way of divorcing herself from the situation in order to deal with it.
Actually, you made me think of one more comparison. :)

"I'll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day." GWTW

Now we know that in that particular instance Scarlett was only thinking of Rhett. But if you think about it, that is the way she dealt with everything. Everyday she put one foot in front of the other and did what had to be done, whether picking cotton in the blazing sun, or marrying a man she could not stand to save her family (I mean Frank Kennedy), she managed.

This is exactly what Anonymous did. She saw that the "common" soldiers rampages and gang rapes would kill her, so she took logical steps to avoid it. It also happened to put food on the table. She stayed with the widow (name escapes me) and Pauli as there was some safety in numbers, was polite to the Russian soldiers when being forced into backbreaking labor.

Both women that survived. I keep coming back to that. They did not simply take what was handed them, they turned things to their advantage.

I just happened to think of something unconnected, but actually shows in a way the line of reasoning at the time. Do you remember the old TV show "Hogan's Heros"? The Kommandant of the Stalag.....Klink had an almost Jack Benny(ish) manner of folding his arms and proclaiming that....'one had to be flexible in these things.'
As much as that was a comedy show...that one phrase was very telling of the times. One had to be "flexible" to survive.

Your analysis of GWTW is exactly right, Cateline. The final words of the novel, which you quoted above, really do crystallize Scarlett's approach to life. In times of crisis when all of one's moral and cultural training become obstacles to survival, one has to re-evaluate or die (some people do choose the latter route - Melanie didn't consciously choose death over life in the reconstructed South, but her death seems symbolic of her refusal to adapt). Scarlett never really integrated her new behavior intellectually - she just did whatever she could figure out to keep herself alive and, at least financially, thriving.

I'm very curious whether the writer of A Woman in Berlin developed a more philosophical perspective - the fact that she wrote about her experiences suggests she was reaching for something beyond mere survival and physical security. Another book to add to my reading list!

I hope that someday we may know just that about Anonymous. I can hardly stand not knowing. :) I got the impression that at the time of her writing, she was simply spewing, IOW, it was an escape hatch for the emotions she would not allow herself to feel.

However considering that she did not want it published during her lifetime, I have to think that for whatever reasons she could not get past the memories. So many possibilities.

It is a quick read and well worth aquiring, I know I will be rereading it.

The difficulties that the woman in Berlin suffered were much much more tragic and terrible than the suffering of the fictional Scarlett O'Hara whose biggest problem was hunger. Another difference which operates in the opposite way is that Germany recovered extremely rapidly due to the Marshall plan, and there were no illiterate, impoverished, landless freed slaves to be incorporated into society. Germany bounced back as an industrial giant, and the Nazis were allowed to reenter society quietly and continue to live well and achieve success. The South took a lot longer to recover, and the plantation culture based on slavery and cotton gave way to sharecropping, racial segregation and much poverty and bitterness. I personally felt a great deal of sympathy and compassion for the 'woman in Berlin' and very little for Scarlett O'Hara.

I've run into a great many people that have no or very little sympathy for the character of Scarlett.
She was a spoiled brat to begin with that is certain and came late, almost too late to any real maturity. But her progress to maturity was somewhat circumvented by soldiers running rampant through the countryside taking everything that was not nailed down and burning what little was left. Not to mention the Carpetbaggers that flocked to the South.

I would never, I repeat...never defend the system that the South ran at that time. The system was however not her fault, and she and many other innocents paid the price. If her character was not literally raped, thousands were in real life. Thousands starved to death and died miserably, and either survived somehow or didn't. In that all wars are alike.

That I like or dislike a character, fictional or otherwise does not color my sympathy for their plight and circumstances.

When I wrote the review above, I began by saying there were only certain points that were applicable. Women surviving war. One way or the other.

I'm not sure I would go so far as to say the system in the pre-Civil War South was not in any way Scarlett's fault. Of course, she was just a teenager when the war began, and even if she hadn't been, no one person could have changed the system. But if no one person can be faulted for this sort of pervasive societal wrong-doing, then how are societies ever to change? Scarlett did not work actively to change the system, and her acceptance of it was not entirely passive.

That said, I still felt enormous sympathy for her through most of the book (it flagged during the episode when she hired prison labor - something I think Margaret Mitchell intended). Not having read A Woman in Berlin yet, I can't comment on the extent to which she, similarly to Scarlett, might or might not have been part of the overall German acquiescence in the Nazi regime's anti-Semitism (many Germans did not know about the death camps, but they were certainly aware of the increased atmosphere of anti-Semitism).

The thing is, in one way or another, and in one degree or another, every society that has ever existed has been implicated in some type of wrong. I don't think it works to just write off whole societies and all the acquiescent individuals in them as rotten; it seems to me that understanding and compassion for the people who perpetuate such wrongs may be a necessary beginning before it's possible to make much headway at eliminating the wrongs.

Here's another rather wild book comparison that addresses this issue: Ann Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Her vampire protagonists have consciences, but they still have to prey on living humans and drink their blood to maintain their own existence.

And those very ingredients are what makes a novel so wonderful. And manages to show us the other side of the coin, even if we don't agee with it.

Seeing the other side is the first step to peace.

So true, Cateline!

I wonder if there are other books about post-war conditions that could be compared with Gone With the Wind and A Woman in Berlin. It seems like most novels focus on war rather than its aftermath.

It might be that Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky could make a good comparison, showing people adjusting, or not, to the invader in their midst.

I'm not familiar with Suite Francaise or Irene Nemirovsky. Can you tell us a little more about the book?

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas. (Apr. 18)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
This extraordinary work of fiction about the German occupation of France is embedded in a real story as gripping and complex as the invented one. Composed in 1941-42 by an accomplished writer who had published several well-received novels, Suite Française, her last work, was written under the tremendous pressure of a constant danger that was to catch up with her and kill her before she had finished.
Irène Némirovsky was a Jewish, Russian immigrant from a wealthy family who had fled the Bolsheviks as a teenager. She spent her adult life in France, wrote in French but preserved the detachment and cool distance of the outsider. She and her husband were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where he was gassed upon arrival and she died in the infirmary at the age of 39. Her manuscript, in minuscule and barely readable handwriting, was preserved by her daughters, who, ignorant of the fact that these notebooks contained a full-fledged masterpiece, left it unread until 60 years later. Once published, with an appendix that illuminates the circumstances of its origin and the author's plan for its completion, it quickly became a bestseller in France. It is hard to imagine a reader who will not be wholly engrossed and moved by this book.

Némirovsky's plan consisted of five parts. She completed only the first two before she was murdered. Yet they are not fragmentary; they read like polished novellas. The first, "Storm in June," gives us a cross section of the population during the initial exodus from the capital, when a battle for Paris was expected and people fled helter-skelter south, so that the roads were clogged with refugees of all classes. Némirovsky shows how much caste and money continued to matter, how the nation was not united in the face of danger and a common enemy. In her account, the well-to-do continue to be especially egotistical and petty. And yet a deep, unsentimental sympathy pervades this panorama. Looking up to the sky at enemy planes overhead, the refugees who have to sleep on the street or in their cars "lacked both courage and hope. This was how animals waited to die. It was the way fish caught in a net watch the shadow of the fisherman moving back and forth above them." I can't think of a more chilling and concise image to convey the helplessness of civilians in an air raid.

Not being French herself but steeped in French culture may have made it easier for Némirovsky to achieve her penetrating insights with Flaubertian objectivity. She gives us startling, steely etched sketches of both collaboration and resistance among people motivated by personal loyalties and grievances that date from before the war.

The second part, "Dolce" (the title -- Italian for "sweet" -- derives from Némirovsky's plan to give the work a musical structure), covers the occupation by the Germans of a small village, from the so-called armistice in June 1940 to the Soviet Union's entry into the war a year later. One can forget that there was a period after the defeat of France when World War II could be seen simply as a war between Germany and Britain. The villagers yearn for peace, and many are indifferent as to who wins, England or Germany, as long as their own men come home. Némirovsky is superb in describing how fraternization comes about, including French girls and women giving in to the attractions of the handsome German occupants -- there are no other men around, most of the French men having been taken prisoner. But the unnatural situation also breeds fierce feelings of resentment and humiliation. Némirovsky embodies this conflict in the story of a woman who falls in love with a German officer and at the same time hides a villager wanted for the murder of another German -- a murder motivated partly by patriotic hatred and partly by marital jealousy.

One puzzling omission from the spectrum of conquered and cowering French society is the Jews -- the one group that was more endangered than any other, as Némirovsky knew only too well. Perhaps she wanted to save the fate of the Jews for the next part, which was to be entitled "Captivity." Even so, when one thinks of the threat the Jewish population endured even at this early stage of persecution, one feels the significant gap here.

Still, this is an incomparable book, in some ways sui generis. While diaries give us a day-to-day record, their very inclusiveness can lead to tedium; memoirs, on the other hand, written at a later date, search for highlights and illuminate the past from the vantage point of the present. In Némirovsky's Suite Française we have the perfect mixture: a gifted novelist's account of a foreign occupation, written while it was taking place, with history and imagination jointly evoking a bitter time, correcting and enriching our memory.

Reviewed by Ruth Kluger
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

What a story! It is so tragic that she was killed before she could finish the complete work she had planned.

Almigwin, do any interesting ideas come to you when you think of Suite Francaise in comparison with A Woman in Berlin and/or Gone With the Wind?

Suite Francaise and Woman in Berlin are both real, in the sense that they are based on the reality the authors experienced. However, in spite of the horror the 'woman in berlin' experienced, she survived.

Nemirovsky didn't. I find it difficult to think of these two books as literature, apart from politics and history, anti-fascism, anti-semitism and anti-communism. The tragedy of Nemirovsky's death, and the death of her husband, and his failed efforts to find her are tremendously upsetting.

I keep wondering about how fragile the thread was that caused her daughter to find this novel. It might have been lost entirely. And now, after all these years, they are translating her other novels. There is one coming out soon, about a jewish businessman which is supposed to be rather a caricature.

Additionally, she was a refugee from the Russian revolution. Her family were wealthy and had a very comfortable life in Russia which they had to give up when they escaped to Paris. I wonder about her feelings toward Judaism, since she converted to Catholicism. Did she convert to avoid Nazi persecution, or did she really believe in Catholicism? If so, it would be additionally ironic that she was killed for being a jew.

The Woman in Berlin bravely withstood the cruelty, deprivation and trauma she sufferred, and lived a long time after the war. Not so for Nemirovsky. Her daughters had to grow up without her, and her novels wer forgotten until now.

I just can't think of these books, and these women as literature. For me, it is political and tragic, but most tragic for Nemirovsky. The situation in Gone with the Wind is of course full of tragedy, the most being the ground full of the wounded that Scarlett was helping to care for. The story is invented, but the carnage truly occurred.

That war caused huge numbers of casualties, from illness almost as much or more than battle, and destroyed the southern economy.

The legacy of racism and black poverty is something we are still suffering for. I guess it all boils down to man's inhumanity to man, and the economic and political reasons for war that lie behind the tragedies.

I don't think this post could be classified as 'interesting ideas'. I just cried my eyes out over the books but not about Scarlett O'Hara.

almigwin,
I think you must be referring to David Golder, it is out and I have it in my TBR stack. Looks most interesting.

Part of the back cover....
"Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joyce, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder's security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to decide which to pursue: revenge or altruism?

Available for the first time since 1930, "David Golder" is a page-turningly chilling and brilliant portrait of the frenzied capitalism of the 1920s and a universal parable about the mirage of wealth."

Cateline: Thanks for the info about David Golder. When you get to it, be sure to let us know what you think of it. My tbr stack is too big to even think about getting it for a while. Miriam

Miriam, I do take your point about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. When we finish reading a novel and set it aside, no matter how emotionally affecting it may have been, we know the lives we have been reading about were never real in a literal sense. Irene Nemirovsky overcame many challenges to write her fiction, though, and I have to believe she wanted readers to find some kind of truth in her work that she might have been unable to convey through a factual account of her life or someone else's.

Oddly enough, I did cry over Gone With the Wind but don't usually cry over nonfiction, however tragic the lives and events described. People are very individual in the way they respond to books, but with a good novel I find myself emotionally drawn in to the story, almost as though I were living in the main character's skin. This kind of experience can be very powerful in helping me understand the challenges, suffering and/or growth of a person who may be quite different than I am - a really great novel helps me to be a more compassionate person, I think. I respond to nonfiction in a more intellectual way, because the requirement that the writer tell only what is definitely known tends to leave more emotional distance between the reader and the people being written about.

I do find your post #23 very interesting. Aren't ideas always most interesting and compelling when they relate to real events and experiences we feel strongly about? I don't know if anyone has written a biography of Nemirovksy, but it would undoubtedly be an extremely worthwhile companion to her novels.

There is a short bio of Nemirovsky by Jonathan Weiss. http://www.amazon.com/Irene-Nemirovsky-Her-Life-Works/dp/0804754810/ref=sr_1_4/1...
Haven't read it myself, so cannot recommend either way, but it does look interesting.