Published by Secker & Warburg, 1955

Hardcover without dustjacket - shows age toning to pages and the spine is very lightly sunned (does not obscure titling) - otherwise a good sound copy. Please see pics.

For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utterly free of self-pity" (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland), A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

The anonymous author of this memoir was living in Berlin in April 1945 when Red Army soldiers marched into the city. What followed was an orgy of rape. In a series of unsentimental diary entries, the book's author - a German woman in her early thirties - describes the final days of the Third Reich, and the ordeal she suffered after Russian soldiers found her hiding place in a basement in east Berlin. One of Germany's leading literary editors, Jens Bisky, has identified the author as Marta Hillers - a German journalist who had studied at the Sorbonne, travelled extensively in Europe, and had written for German newspapers and magazines. According to Bisky, A Woman in Berlin was Marta Hillers's only major work. After the war, she circulated her diary among friends. One of them, German author Kurt Marek, recognised its value, and had it published in America. Hillers later married, moved to Switzerland, abandoned journalism, and disappeared. The chances are that the author was Marta Hillers, although that cannot be confirmed. Hillers died in June 2001, aged 90, and her executor refuses to comment.