A Woman in Berlin (2009)
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A devastating tale that captures the aftermath horror of WW2 at the fall of Berlin.
Directed by Max Färberböck & based on the anonymous memoir of the same name--first published in English in 1954, and was republished in 2003, when it became a best-seller--it follows one woman's harrowing survival in Berlin at the close of World War II. At the time, late spring and early summer of 1945, the Soviet Union Red Army has pushed well into the city, heading toward the Reichstag. Berlin is in shambles, its streets bombed out, bodies frequently lying about, and the remaining inhabitants--mostly women and older men--left to fend for themselves. They run from one squat to the next, hide in cellars when tanks come down the street, and, in general, try not to do anything to get killed. As one remarks to another when hiding, "if the Russians treat them the way the Nazi army treated the Russians during its push into Russia, there won't be a German left at the war's end." And in that same desperate time of survival, for the women, that is the Red Army's men, who rape them without any fear of their officers punishing them. As in, when two female friends see each other on the street one day, the question they exchange is, "How often?"
The story centers around Anonyma...a wife of a Nazi officer, she is a former journalist who speaks French and Russian, has lived in Paris and London, and confesses at the movie's opening that she believed in what the German army was fighting for. Anonyma played by the German actress Nina Hoss delivers a masterfully significant performance. A woman faced with the choice of being subjected to rape by whomever, whenever, or giving herself to a high-ranking officer who might protect her, she chooses the latter, latching onto a major who manages to complicate her life even more.
The film doesn't reach a comparatively satisfying conclusion, it's only because it's so precisely focused on this brief moment in time toward a war's end when there are no rules, personal survival is paramount, and nobody is innocent.
This is a film that, for a whole generation, is most definitely not just a movie.
Recommended to Alky, Fortunato, NE, Doc & V.
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